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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CSM: Why Don’t Those Demented Jews Shut Up Already About the Holocaust

Jonathan Tobin
Contentions
18 August 09

In the United States there’s an unwritten but valid rule that applies to debates about topical issues: the first person to cry “Nazi” is usually the one who loses. In discussions about Israel, the same thing ought to apply but doesn’t always, as leftist critics routinely throw the epithet around to describe any action of Israel’s they don’t like, such as routine measures of self-defense against active terror organizations. The point is, anyone who can’t speak about the Jewish state without invoking a comparison between it and the Nazis is an anti-Semite whose real goal is to delegitimize the Jews by smearing them with the tag of their greatest foe.

A variant of this ploy is sometimes heard not from anti-Semites but from Jews who are similarly put off by Israeli actions, if not the political culture of the country itself. For them, it’s not that the Jews are Nazis but that they are so obsessed with what the Nazis did to them that they do bad things to others as well as to themselves. Seen from this point of view, Holocaust remembrance and the invocation of the spectacle of Jewish powerlessness in the face of malevolent evil has become an evil in and of itself, in that it feeds Jewish paranoia.

This is the view of certain leftist authors, such as Tom Segev, who made it famous in his lamentable book The Seventh Million. Though his work has been widely discredited as both history and sociology, writers seeking to discredit Israeli policy trot out Segev’s ill-conceived pop-psychology theory every once in a while. It’s a technique that attempts to combine condescension with a touch of sympathy for the poor grief-deluded Jews.

The latest example comes from one Bill Glucroft, a self-styled digital journalist who wrote in the Christian Science Monitor today that the Holocaust is casting a shadow over Israel’s choices and “undermining its security” because paranoia about threats prevents Jews from simply ending the conflict with the Palestinians by “giving them a home.” This happens, he says, because “invoking the Holocaust is the way Israeli policymakers evade the difficult decision making needed to shift the status quo; nothing else matters, and anything is justified, when everything is about surviving annihilation—a rationale that serves especially well in delaying the creation of a Palestinian state.”

The main problem with this analysis is that Israel has been trying to hand the Palestinians a state on a silver platter for nearly 16 years, ever since the failed Oslo process began. Ehud Barak offered one to Yasser Arafat at Camp David in July 2000. Ehud Olmert tried to give it to Mahmoud Abbas last year. Though most Israelis have justified concerns about their security, given that only a few years ago the Palestinians launched a terror offensive designed to break them with random suicide bombings in restaurants, malls, and streets, the vast majority, including the prime minister of Israel, have long since agreed to the notion of a Palestinian state.

It’s the Palestinians who view any deal that recognizes the legitimacy of a Jewish state as anathema and keep turning down peace whenever the opportunity arises. Far from Israel “holding a key to a home for the Palestinians,” it’s the Palestinians themselves who need to rethink the notion that their national identity is linked to the destruction of Israel rather than to the building of a homeland.

Contrary to amateur psychologists like Glucroft, the vast majority of Israelis understand that they are not living in the Warsaw Ghetto. But they also understand that they are locked in a conflict with an adversary that views Israeli concessions as invitations for more terrorism (such as the withdrawal from Gaza in 2005). Most rightfully understand that the only condition under which Jews can live with such dangerous neighbors is a position of strength, but that doesn’t make them Holocaust head cases. It just means that, unlike Glucroft and others whose ideology blinds them to Palestinian realities, Israelis understand that they are living in 2009 and not in a mythical future where hostility to Zionism has ended.

Telling the Jews to shut up already about the Holocaust in order to falsify the present situation is a unique form of dishonesty. Such writers would do better to try convincing their Palestinian clients that their own paranoia and Jew-hatred ought to be junked if peace is to have a chance.
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