Goldstone's Retreat, Terrorist Chickens & Unintentional Intentionality

by Rick Congress

Bringing gladness to the hearts of Zionist ethnic cleansers and anti-Arab racists everywhere, Judge Goldstone made a public statements tacking back some of the report that he issued for the UN on the Israeli assault on Gaza December,2008/January,2009.

It seems that since Israel refused to cooperate with his investigation, there was no evidence of a valid Israeli self-investigation, leading Goldstone in his report to conclude that Israel didn't set up a credible means to determine if the IDF had committed any war crimes.

But Judge Goldstone now has declared that AFTER his report was made public Israel had indeed held a credible investigation into whether or not the IDF had a policy of intentionally targeting civilians in its attack on Gaza.

MY BAD! SORRY! says Goldstone. How silly of me to overlook the credible self-investigation Israel conducted about targeting civilians in Gaza, merely because such an investigation didn't exist at the time I was looking into the issue. But now such a self-questioning report has been issued by Israel. What's timing between friends? Why quibble over details?

Of course there is the issue of the truthfulness of Israel's "credible self-examination." But why question that? Judge Goldstone, it seems, has reached his personal limit of question asking.

Taking a line from Rodney King, he says, "Can't we all just get along?" "We" meaning the official gate keepers of Jewish/Zionist respectability and Judge Goldstone, the outcast pariah. He's been beaten down by an orgy of vilification and slander and can't take it anymore. He wants back into the club.

The part of the report Judge Goldstone retracted dealt with the question of intentionally targeting civilians. "Intentionality is a sticky ethical/philosophical conundrum these days. But more on this a bit later.

We have to address the vital strategic matter of terrorist chickens. One of the seemingly bizarre acts of the IDF in Gaza was the killing of 31,000 chickens. These chickens were being raised commercially for eggs and food. Such businesses along with others, a cement factory, fishing boats,etc. and civil facilities such as power plants, public schools and water purification plants were destroyed by the IDF. These sorts of acts (targeting civilian infrastructure) are known to be violations of the Geneva Convention, UN resolutions, and are rightfully condemned world-wide. Condemned as what? As punishing the civilian population -- collectively, and intentionally.

One line of reasoning in Israel's defense would be that these chickens provide nutrition for Gazans, and that the more Gazan children have to eat, the more likely they are to survive and grow up to become if not actual terrorists then "demographic terrorists," who by their very existence and tendency to reproduce, threaten the future of the Jewish state by staying alive in sufficient numbers to give credibility to the idea that Palestinians actually exist (another terrorist threat to Israel's existence) and might need a place to live, besides Jordan or Lebanon.

So now we can classify these actions of the IDF as combating terrorism, not of targeting civilian infrastructure.

Now. What is intention? Here we have a citation from the do-it-yourself repository of knowledge, and plagerism goldmine of college students with term papers due, Wikipedia:

"The term intentionality was introduced by Jeremy Bentham as a principle of utility in his doctrine of consciousness for the purpose of distinguishing acts that are intentional and acts that are not.[1] The term was later used by Edmund Husserl in his doctrine that consciousness is always intentional... It has been defined as "aboutness", and according to the Oxford English Dictionary it is "the distinguishing property of mental phenomena of being necessarily directed upon an object, whether real or imaginary..."

The IDF is a sensitive, phenomenologically questing sort of organization...very concerned with "aboutness" and the "I" and "Thouness" of things. The Israeli army is the unintentional intender and to the inattentive intendee they say, "Fuck Thou."

Clear anything up? If not, don't worry. Israel's intention in regard to Gaza was to generally bomb, shell, rocket, and spray with bullets the entire area. If anyone intentionally or unintentionally got in the way, c'est la vie.