Soccer Dad

When human rights organizations go bad

Currently the United Nation's is holding an investigation into whether Israel committed war crimes during its 22 day war against Hamas for attacking Israeli civilians with thousands of rockets.

So it should come as little surprise that in recent weeks both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have issued reports charging Israel with war crimes, or at least with criminal negligence. The claims of both self-promoting organizations made the news. Of course, they're hoping to affect the UN's report and tilt the scales even further against Israel. And their work is reported uncritically. (In contrast, Col. Richard Kemp's defense of Israel got precious little press coverage.) It's important to remember that news is often made by those who promote their agenda the best regardless of their merits.

But NGO Monitor blasts the methodology of both groups:

On June 30, 2009, Human Rights Watch (HRW) released another pseudo-research report on a very narrow aspect of the Gaza fighting (January 2009), alleging that the IDF fired missiles from drones and illegally "failed to take all feasible precautions to verify that [the] targets were combatants." As with its March 2009 report claiming white phosphorous use, this report, which lists only six incidents, clearly lacks credibility, is based on unverifiable "evidence" and "eyewitnesses," and continues a well-established pattern of false claims and a biased agenda. Among other problems, the basic assumption that the weapons (Spike missiles) referred to by HRW were fired by drones is entirely speculative, since, as military experts note, Spikes "can be fired by helicopters, infantry units and naval craft." Similarly, allegations of civilian deaths and claims regarding the military context rest on Palestinian statements and ideology. Marc Garlasco, the main author and HRW's "military expert," has a history of making such pseudo-technical allegations that lack evidence and simply repeat Palestinian claims, as in the 2006 "Gaza Beach" incident, and regarding IDF actions in the 2006 Lebanon War.

Similarly, Amnesty International published a report entitled Operation 'Cast Lead': 22 Days of Death and Destruction (July 2, 2009), charging Israel with "war crimes" during the conflict. As in the case of the HRW pseudo-report, the prejudicial and tenuous 127-page publication ignores considerable evidence that Hamas used human shields, minimizes Palestinian violations of international law, and promotes boycotts and "lawfare" against Israel. The only mention of kidnapped soldier Gilad Shalit was in a footnote, underlining Amnesty's double standards in the application of human rights norms. (NGO Monitor is in the process of preparing detailed analyses of HRW's and Amnesty's claims.)

Both of these investigations fall far short of the requirements stipulated in the "Lund-London Guidelines" for "human rights fact-finding visits and reports."

HRW in particular is on shaky ground as David Bernstein points out (via memeorandum) that it has solicited funds from wealthy Saudis in order to condemn Israel.

Finally, some would defend HRW by pointing it that it has criticized Saudi Arabia's human rights record rather severely in the past. The point of my post, though, is not that HRW is pro-Saudi, but that it is maniacally anti-Israel. The most recent manifestation is that its officers see nothing unseemly about raising funds among the elite of one of the most totalitarian nations on earth, with a pitch about how the money is needed to fight "pro-Israel forces," without the felt need to discuss any of the Saudis' manifold human rights violations, and without apparent concern that becoming dependent on funds emanating from a brutal dictatorship leaves you vulnerable to that brutal dictatorship later cutting off the flow of funds, if you don't "behave."

Now Herbert Keinon reports that the Israeli government is pushing back against both phony human rights organizations, especially HRW.