Selling Out to Soros

Gerald Steinberg
NGO Monitor
NY Post
13 September '10

In accepting a huge grant from George Soros, Human Rights Watch has spurned the public advice (and warning) offered nearly a year ago by its founder Robert Bernstein. Rather than grapple with the serious problems of credibility and bias, HRW Executive Director Kenneth Roth has cemented relations with Soros -- a partisan ideologue who also supports Moveon.org, a controversial advocacy group.

Bernstein severely criticized HRW in a New York Times oped. To "resurrect itself as a moral force in the Middle East and throughout the world," he warned, the organization must return "to its founding mission and the spirit of humility that animated it." In its earlier days, he noted, "to create clarity in human rights," HRW aimed to "draw a sharp line between the democratic and nondemocratic worlds."

Over the years, HRW lost its moral compass and substituted ideology and an Israel-obsessed agenda. Bernstein was trying to awaken the group's leaders to the decayed state of what was once a human-rights superpower.

Instead, Roth has opted to accept Soros' $100 million grant -- which should offset nicely the income lost from core donors who've walked away in the wake of a host of scandals. It won't, however, address the root problems.

In May 2009, HRW launched a fund-raising drive in Saudi Arabia, using its anti-Israel record to solicit funds from "prominent members of Saudi society." That September, HRW "senior military analyst" Marc Garlasco was "outed" as an avid collector of Nazi memorabilia -- a troubling hobby for the main author of a number of HRW reports that accused Israel of "war crimes" and other violations.

Add to this the recent work by NGO Monitor, the watchdog group that I lead, and others on the severe ideological biases at HRW's Middle East and North Africa (MENA) division. The systematic research in NGO Monitor's report and articles in The New Republic and the Sunday Times detail the severe ideological biases of MENA director Sarah Leah Whitson and deputy director Joe Stork.

(Read full article)

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