Albie Sachs is one of South Africa's heroes, a former judge of the Constitutional Court and a victim of a terror attack by agents of the old regime.

He recently made a speech about the Goldstone Affair to the Cape Town Press Club in which he said:

"Today I notice self-defences of the same kind in relation to the figure of the so-called self-despising Jew. Any Jewish person who speaks critically of Israel in any way is automatically castigated as having internalised anti-Semitism and incorporated it into his or her system as a form of self-hatred. To escape that accusation Jews are required en masse to display automatic allegiance and suppress any individual consciences they may have. A good argument is seen as one which serves as a plausible weapon to protect a given certainty, rather than as a mechanism of investigation to arrive at truth. And the irony is that what is most put at risk is the sustainability of the inflexible convictions, because they end up being self-referential and unbuttressed either by external testing or by internal self-examination.

These are words not just relevant to the politics of South African Jewry, but many other contexts. The full text is attached.