"Human Rights Watch" is not biased in favor of Israel. Quite the opposite. They pay far more attention to comparatively (if not absolutely) small Israeli human rights violations, than they pay to worse activities among the Palestinians or the Arabs in general, or violations from others outside the area.
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Bernstein (Robert!) Denounces Human Rights Watch:
David Bernstein • October 20, 2009 5:33 am
Robert Bernstein (no relation), the founder of Human Rights Watch, has issued a stinging condemnation of the organization he led from 1978 to 1998. Here’s a taste:
I must do something that I never anticipated: I must publicly join the group’s critics….
When I stepped aside in 1998, Human Rights Watch was active in 70 countries, most of them closed societies. Now the organization, with increasing frequency, casts aside its important distinction between open and closed societies.
Nowhere is this more evident than in its work in the Middle East. The region is populated by authoritarian regimes with appalling human rights records. Yet in recent years Human Rights Watch has written far more condemnations of Israel for violations of international law than of any other country in the region….
Meanwhile, the Arab and Iranian regimes rule over some 350 million people, and most remain brutal, closed and autocratic, permitting little or no internal dissent. The plight of their citizens who would most benefit from the kind of attention a large and well-financed international human rights organization can provide is being ignored as Human Rights Watch’s Middle East division prepares report after report on Israel.
Human Rights Watch has lost critical perspective on a conflict in which Israel has been repeatedly attacked by Hamas and Hezbollah, organizations that go after Israeli citizens and use their own people as human shields….
Leaders of Human Rights Watch know that Hamas and Hezbollah chose to wage war from densely populated areas, deliberately transforming neighborhoods into battlefields. They know that more and better arms are flowing into both Gaza and Lebanon and are poised to strike again. And they know that this militancy continues to deprive Palestinians of any chance for the peaceful and productive life they deserve. Yet Israel, the repeated victim of aggression, faces the brunt of Human Rights Watch’s criticism.
At what point does the MSM stop treating HRW as a neutral source on human rights in the Middle East, and start treating it like the left-wing, anti-Israel, anti-Western organization it has openly become? And at what point do HRW’s liberal, human-rights oriented American donors become tired to enabling this? Maybe the growing dismay of long-time HRW supporters like Bernstein explains why Middle East Director Sarah Leah Whitson decided to expand HRW’s donor base to Saudi elites? Better to take money from Saudi princes than to worry about how your growing loss of credibility among even your natural supporters will affect your fundraising.
Comments are open, but HRW sock puppets are not welcome.
UPDATE: I wonder how long certain liberal bloggers who have been reflexive defenders of HRW without bothering to seriously investigate the bill of particulars against it (e.g.) can continue to repeat things like “the idea that HRW is some kind of Israel-bashing organization is nonsense” now that the founder and former longtime director has said just that.
volokh.com
Robert Bernstein's Courage
Editorial of The New York Sun | October 21, 2009
The real service that the founding chairman of Human Rights Watch, Robert Bernstein, provided with his article in the New York Times deploring the turn that the organization he founded has taken against Israel came less with speaking out on that topic – his views had been widely known among those who follow these matters even before they were publicly expressed – than with smoking out the views of the organization’s leaders by eliciting from them a public response. That response came in the form of a letter to the editor in today’s Times from the organization’s current chairwoman, Jane Olson, and a past chairman, Jonathan Fanton, which included the stunning sentence, “After careful consideration, we and other members of our board stressed that democracies, too, commit serious abuses, with the United States’ ‘war on terrorism’ and Israel’s conduct in Gaza just the latest examples.”
This is a departure from Human Rights Watch’s stated policy that it does not take sides or make judgments about whether particular wars are right or wrong, the organization’s claim that it merely calls on both sides to observe international law in conducting wars. The sentence in the letter seems to be a claim not merely that there were some abuses committed as part of the war on terrorism – Abu Ghraib, for example, or waterboarding – but that the entire “war on terrorism” in and of itself was a “serious abuse.”
One wonders what, exactly, Human Rights Watch’s suggested response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 would have been. Actually, one doesn’t have to wonder: the organization issued a statement with a plea that “the United States should remain committed to a criminal justice approach --investigation, arrest, trial and punishment, with all the guarantees of a fair trial that are central to any system of respect for human rights -- rather than executions or targeting noncombatants. Just as the ‘war’ on drugs or the mafia does not obviate basic criminal justice guarantees, so the war on the organization responsible for the September 11 attacks should not bypass the human-rights protection against assassination.”
Osama bin Laden, by this view, deserves not to be killed but instead to be read his Miranda rights like some shoplifter or mob bookie. By this view, too, not just a few incidents, but all of “Israel’s conduct in Gaza” – including, one wonders, its unilateral withdrawal of settlers therefrom? – deserve blanket condemnation. Actually, one doesn’t have to wonder about Gaza, either — even before Israel withdrew, Human Rights Watch issued a statement in October 2004 falsely claiming, “The Israeli government’s plan to remove troops and Jewish settlements from the Gaza Strip would not end Israel’s occupation of the territory. As an occupying power, Israel will retain responsibility for the welfare of Gaza’s civilian population.”
Here at the New York Sun we are familiar with this pattern of eliciting, with criticism of Human Rights Watch, even more illuminating responses. Our favorite example was back in 2006, when the organization’s executive director, Kenneth Roth, responded to criticism of his group’s Israel coverage by sending us a letter accusing Judaism and its Bible of being examples of “primitive” morality. Messrs. Roth, Olson, and Fanton are posing as neutral human rights advocates, but what they really are is just another “peace” group with a left-wing agenda. Mr. Bernstein has done a great service – one of many in a long and distinguished career – by helping to expose that fact and given a real example of personal courage.
nysun.com
Which doesn't mean that they are necessarily wrong. Just because they are biased against Israel, doesn't mean Israel is a collection of living saints. But it does pull the rug out from under your implication that they would be biased the other way.
Leaving aside bias and dealing directly the issue, certainly some Israelis, including Israelis in the military, have deliberately targeted Palestinian civilians. But it isn't the norm. The reality is rather that the Israeli military exposes themselves to increased casualties by making an unusually high effort to minimize civilian casualties. Even if they cared nothing for Palestinian lives (and in many cases that isn't an accurate assessment) it its in their interest to do so, since Palestinian civilian deaths (or unfortunately even combatant, and combat support deaths that the Palestinians present as civilian) are bad PR for Israel. If they just wanted to kill Palestinians and didn't care about containing civilians deaths than Palestinians by the hundreds of thousands would be dead in short order, and the only reason it would reach millions is that the Palestinians would flee.
In short if the Israelis where as a matter of routine policy targeting civilian Palestinians, than the Palestinians would be gone. |
