Human Rights Watch: Their Master’s Voice

Benjamin Kerstein
The New Ledger
04 May '10

Having just returned from being locked for almost an hour in Tel Aviv’s Dizengoff Center mall while a surprisingly large robot fired three 12-gauge shotgun shells into a suspicious package, which was then disposed of by a man in a Kevlar body suit, I was not, I confess, in a mood to indulge those who make light of Israel’s security concerns. Shortly after, my feelings were compounded by reading Benjamin Birnbaum’s excellent piece in The New Republic on the non-governmental organization Human Rights Watch and its treatment of Israel. It is doubtful that a better, or more important, piece of classic muckraking journalism will be published in the coming months.

The piece takes as its impetus the recent controversy between the organization’s staffers and some of its board members, in particular, its founder Robert Bernstein, who recently published a New York Times op-ed denouncing the organization’s attitude toward Israel. Its real value, however, is its exposure of the personalities behind the organization; the faces behind the impersonal reports and press releases that constitute the public face of HRW.

Perhaps the most fascinating and disturbing of these is Sarah Leah Whitson, who runs the section charged with assessing Israel’s human rights record, along with that of other countries in the Middle East and North Africa. As far as one can tell, Whitson does not seem to posses any expert credentials in the field of human rights or the laws of war; her bio at the HRW website states only that she received degrees at Berkeley and Harvard Law School, with no indication of her particular field of study. What is certain is that she is a former corporate lawyer and professional activist who has apparently been a lifelong partisan of the Arab cause. Shockingly, and despite her sensitive position, which one imagines would require at least the pretense of impartiality, Whitson seems to make no secret of her sympathies. “As I stepped into her office,” Birnbaum writes, “I noticed that a poster for Paradise Now, a movie that attempts to humanize Palestinian suicide bombers, hangs on her door and that two photos of bereaved Gazans hang on her wall.” Birnbaum them questions her about specific accusations of bias on the part of HRW.

“For people who apply for jobs to be the researcher in Israel-Palestine, it’s probably going to be someone who’s done work on Israel-Palestine with a human rights background,” she explained. “And guess what? People who do work with a human rights background on Israel-Palestine tend to find that there are a lot of Israeli abuses. And they tend to become human rights activists on the issue.”

(Read full article)

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Minority Report

Human Rights Watch fights a civil war over Israel.


Benjamin Birnbaum
The New Republic
27 April '10

(If you have been following Human Rights Watch over a period of time, this is a must read. Y.)

On October 19 of last year, the op-ed page of The New York Times contained a bombshell: a piece by Robert Bernstein, the founder and former chairman of Human Rights Watch (HRW), attacking his own organization. HRW, Bernstein wrote, was “helping those who wish to turn Israel into a pariah state.” The allegation was certainly not new: HRW had been under assault for years by American Jews and other supporters of Israel, who argued that it was biased against the Jewish state. And these attacks had intensified in recent months, with a number of unflattering revelations about the organization. In July, HRW found itself under fire when a Wall Street Journal op-ed noted that the organization had solicited donations in Saudi Arabia by trumpeting the criticism it faces from “pro-Israel pressure groups.” In August, the blogosphere leapt on one of the organization’s top Middle East officials for having once been part of a team that edited a radical anti-Israel journal. And, in September, HRW suspended one of the primary contributors to its reports on the wars in Gaza and Lebanon after his private hobby—collecting Nazi memorabilia—became public.

Still, to most readers of the Times last October, even those who closely followed debates over Israel, Bernstein’s piece would have seemed odd: It isn’t every day that the founder of a group turns so publicly on his own creation. What few people outside HRW knew, however, was that Bernstein’s op-ed was the culmination of a long struggle inside the organization that had turned increasingly acrimonious over the years. The debate revolved around a single question: Was the world’s most respected human rights group being fair to Israel? Bob Bernstein wasn’t the only person at Human Rights Watch who thought the answer was no.

(Read full article)

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Signs of Change at Human Rights Watch

Frayda Leibtag
OpEdNews.com
18 February '10

Changes at Human Rights Watch regarding the Arab-Israeli conflict are a good beginning, but the organization must do more to restore its reputation as a moral leader.

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Human Rights Watch (HRW) made many media headlines this year -- but not for its human rights work. Revelations regarding an HRW fundraising trip in Saudi Arabia and HRW senior military analyst Marc Garlasco's obsessive collection of Nazi memorabilia caused many to question the moral standing of HRW. Although HRW officials publicly rebuff any accusations of wrongdoing, recent events at HRW suggest that the organization is heeding calls for reform.


During HRW's 2010 World Report press conference in Tel Aviv, Program Director Iain Levine focused on Israel's potential as a moral advocate on the issue of banning "blood diamonds" mined under abusive conditions in Zimbabwe. He also noted Israel's "positive movement" toward investigating Gaza war operations, especially as compared to Hamas' lack of initiative. While Levine repeated allegations about the "increasingly disastrous blockade of Gaza" and IDF misuse of white phosphorous, he also mentioned Hamas rocket attacks against Israeli civilians, brutal internal repression by Hamas under the cover of war, and the endemic lack of accountability for torture in the Palestinian Authority.

Soon after the press conference, HRW announced that James F. Hoge Jr. will replace Jane Olson as the chair of HRW's board. Hoge's many landmark essays as the longtime editor of Foreign Affairs include "Tiananmen Papers," about the Chinese leadership's decision to crush the 1989 protests. Could the appointment of Hoge signify a shift in HRW's obsessive attention on the Middle East? Perhaps, under Hoge, HRW will devote more of its resources to substantively addressing severe human rights abuses in China and other countries with chronic human rights issues.

(Read full article)
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HRW's Iron Cross Up

Media Backspin/Honest Reporting
13 September 09

Human Rights Watch's Garlasco situation is taking a turn towards the absurd. Now,Harry's Place exposes what appears to be HRW sock puppetry on blogs critical of their colleague:

I would like to know if staffers at Human Rights Watch created a fake ‘activist’ with a Middle Eastern sounding name to forward its statements, to support arguments made by HRW officials, and to smear critics. I can’t tell you any more than this: but I think that someone at Human Rights Watch ought to investigate.

Were Human Rights Watch to be found to have engaged in such immoral and unethical behaviour, it would call into question their suitability as a monitor of global human rights abuses. The type of sockpuppetry that I suspect may have taken place at Human Rights Watch amounts to the propagation of a fiction.

Not everyone associated with HRW is amused with Garlasco's Nazi memorabilia collection, which Garlasco defends. Collecting World War 2 medals and uniforms isn't illegal, but Helena Cobban is notanbly rankled. The journalist, who is associated with HRW, writes:

But to have him doing work on human rights in the daytime, while carrying on with this intensively pursued hobby in the evening? That is bizarre, and disturbing.

Even more so when you realize that a lot of the work he has done has involved dealing with Israeli officials and citizens, and analyzing the IDF's operations . . . .

Now, as y'all no doubt know, I'm on the Middle East advisory committee of Human Rights Watch. And I've been very disturbed indeed by the attacks the young, aggressively rightwing Israeli organization NGO Monitor has launched against the work HRW has done on the IDF's combat behavior.

But right now, I'm looking at this page on NGO Monitor's website, and agreeing with much of what they have there on this topic.

At the CST blog, Mark Gardner best articulates why Garlasco's hobby remains problematic for HRW:

But, if Garlasco wants to immunise his daughter (and all our children) from Nazism, then fetishising Nazi medals for public consumption is a stupid way of going about it. You do not fight Nazism by helping to promote the marketplace for Nazi medals and trinkets and accoutrements. You do not fight Nazism by presenting its soldiers as brave, handsome, fresh faced youths – and you most certainly do not fight Nazism by normalising the wearing of Nazi-themed sweatshirts as Marc Garlasco does in this picture:

Does he wear this sweatshirt in front of his daughters? Does he wish more people would walk about wearing such items? Does he – or his HRW colleagues – think that it is appropriate for a man with his role to do so? Does he wear it when he meets Israeli Army officials?

Worst of all, however, is not Garlasco’s behaviour in all of this. Worst of all, is the reaction of Human Rights Watch. None of the concerns that I have outlined above seem to matter to HRW. Their defence is all embracing, and their condemnation of his critics lacks the remotest empathy with why Jews, or any other people, might express concern at Garlasco’s behaviour in view of his role as one their leading (anti) Israel experts.

Instead of engaging with the issues, HRW resort to the public equivalent of giving Jews the finger.

Read Gardner's
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The Latest Human Rights Watch Bombshell

Noah Pollak

Contentions/Commentary

08 September 09

I’m a believer in the truth of O’Sullivan’s First Law, formulated some years ago by the former editor of National Review, John O’Sullivan:

All organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing. I cite as supporting evidence the ACLU, the Ford Foundation, and the Episcopal Church. The reason is, of course, that people who staff such bodies tend to be the sort who don’t like private profit, business, making money, the current organization of society, and, by extension, the Western world.

The law holds true for human-rights organizations as well, many of which over time have become staffed and led by people far more impassioned about condemning democratic societies than repressive or despotic ones. Human Rights Watch has earned the attention it has been receiving lately because it is the leader in this trend. And nowhere in the organization is O’Sullivan’s Law more apparent than in HRW’s Middle East staffers. They are fetishists, people who have an obsession with a certain country (Israel) and with a certain cause (condemning Western militaries). How many reports has HRW issued about Operation Cast Lead, Israel’s successful three-week offensive to neutralize Hamas’s rocket war against Israeli civilians? I’ve lost count, although I have heard that HRW’s forthcoming report—perhaps the fourth or fifth on Cast Lead—will document a few instances in which Palestinian homes were vandalized by IDF soldiers. Graffiti spray-painted on a wall during a war is a pressing human-rights issue in the Middle East? Is vandalism even a human-rights issue? Only if you’re an Israel-obsessive.

So we get to Marc Garlasco, HRW’s “senior military analyst” and a frequent critic of Israel. Garlasco, as disclosed by Omri at Mere Rhetoric, has an interesting avocation: he writes about and collects Nazi paraphernalia. He has contributed almost 8,000 posts to a Nazi web forum called Wehrmacht Awards under the handle “Flak88,” with his collection of swastikas and Nazi medals all lovingly photographed and posted online. Garlasco’s Nazi hobby is actually quite ambitious: he wrote a 400-page book on Nazi military awards, and his car’s license plate is personalized—it reads “Flak88.”

A Nazi-memorabilia hobby sure is a strange one for a professional human-rights activist to have. Are there any senior staffers at PETA who moonlight as collectors of fur coats and leg-hold traps? Garlasco must know how odd this looks because he maintains aphotography website that contains pictures of many diverse things—but no tip-off that one of his favorite photography subjects is . . . Nazi medals.

The more we learn about Human Rights Watch, the more the mask slips. There is Sarah Leah Whitson, the intifada-era activist for Palestine and apologist for terrorism; Joe Stork, the radical leftist and anti-Zionist; and now Garlasco, the Nazi-memorabilia collector.
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