Dear Mr Hasan,

Apparently the text you refer to was written by Richard Silverstein & not by Richard Goldstein, but that is not very important.

I would also like to add that Mr Goldstone, whom I admire a lot, has a very famous "colleague": the great philosopher Spinoza; he too was excommunicated by his coreligionists in the XVIIth century.
This goes to prove that many self-appointed religious guardians , whatever the religion, are a catastrophe for the people around them, particularly when they hide deeply reactionary political views under the guise of "religion".

Mr Goldstone was very courageous because in his report he dared call a spade a spade, & point out to the war crimes committed by the gvt & army of Israel in Gaza last year.

Today Israel does not even recognize that they are occupying Palestinian territories, they talk of "disputed" territories,instead of "occupied" territories.The Palestinian state is becoming an archipelago of small islands that will soon turn into open-sky prison camps like Gaza itself, or else the Israeli settlers will practice (for the second time) the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians to rob them of their last bits of land.

Goldstone was totally right, alas, & I'm not surprised to see the most reactionary representatives of any given jewish community act that way.

French jews as represented by the CRIF would have done exactly the same , considering the uproar wih which they received the Goldstone report. Being a progressive jew seems more & more difficult today & I do admire Mr Silverstein for the text he has written, which goes against the grain of a majority of his coreligionists.