Right of Reply: Ideological Dead-enders Defend HRW

Gerald Steinberg
JPost
03 August 09

Helsinki Watch (now Human Rights Watch) was established in New York by Robert Bernstein in 1978, primarily to lead the struggle on behalf of prisoners of conscience caught behind the Iron Curtain, including Soviet Jews like Anatoly (now Natan) Sharansky. Bernstein and his colleagues were liberal Democrats, and this was a bold move in this environment. One can easily imagine the attacks in speeches and columns (this was long before the Internet and blogosphere) from unreformed Stalinists on the far left condemning Bernstein's ideological treachery, and labeling Helsinki Watch as a Nixonian anticommunist tool.

But the world has changed, and HRW officials and their die-hard supporters are today's ideological dinosaurs. When the Cold War ended, HRW and its London-based twin - Amnesty International - adjusted their agendas to maintain influence and donations. They redefined themselves by claiming expertise they do not have on international law in armed conflicts, and their obsessive condemnations of Israel endeared them to the UN, while keeping HRW in the headlines. They were embraced by the anti-Zionist post-colonialists who maintain the flame and adrenalin in the Left-Right battles that raged during the Cold War.

These primitive Manichean ideologues have now come to the defense of HRW, after the NGO's leaders have been exposed for using biased and inaccurate "research reports" slamming Israel to solicit funds in Saudi Arabia. Now, as in the Cold War days, the main strategy is to ignore the substance and defame opponents, real or artificial.

DANIEL LEVY launched his attack on HRW's critics in the widely-read Huffington Post blog, and Larry Derfner joined the fray in The Jerusalem Post (July 23). Levy's opening assault sought to discredit "the former right-wing Israeli government minister, Natan Sharansky (also an ex-Prisoner of Zion, president George W. Bush's favorite author and occupation apologist)."

The pejorative language used by Levy declares that critics of HRW are on the wrong side of the ideological fence; nothing else matters. In this ideological parallel universe, facts are irrelevant. Erasing the reluctant confessions of Ken Roth and other HRW officials caught courting a member of the Shura Council (the Saudi religious police), among others, Levy screams: "It was not a fund-raising event. HRW was certainly not fund-raising from the Saudi government... That HRW does not take government money is something that is already well-known." Apparently HRW's leaders had forgotten this.

Related: HRW in Cover-up Mode, From Gulag Liberators to Saudi Retainers

Levy and Derfner also endorse HRW's dire efforts to discredit the facts and analysis published by NGO Monitor, which broke the story of the HRW-Saudi dinner, based on an article in the Riyadh-based Arab News. Levy condemns what he calls the "narrow and misguided right-wing Israel advocacy agenda" led by "Gerald Steinberg's odiously named "NGO Monitor." (To please Levy, we would have been NGO Watch, but the domain name was already taken.)
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