HRW Founder Bernstein Starts Advancing Human Rights (AHR)

Tamar Sternthal
CAMERA/Snapshots
03 March '11

http://blog.camera.org/archives/2011/03/hrw_founder_bernstein_starts_a.html

advancing human rights

Robert Bernstein, the founder and former chairman of Human Rights Watch who publicly renounced his ties with the organization due to distorted and disproportionate focus on free and open Israel at the expense of the rest of the Middle East -- mostly unfree -- has just launched a new human rights organization, Advancing Human Rights.

Why the need for a new organization? Bernstein, 88, explains:

Some human rights organizations, like Human Rights Watch, do not condemn incitement to genocide, Arab hate speech being spewed daily in Gaza, particularly, and Saudi textbooks being taught to young children calling Jews “monkeys and pigs.” Hate speech is the precursor to genocide. I understand giving hate speech a lot of latitude in an open society where it is sure to be criticized - but in a closed society it goes unanswered and encouraged by the government, governments that control all the media.

If I’ve misinterpreted the positions of these human rights organizations, I’m happy to be corrected.

Human Rights Watch believes it is its job to protect civilians on both sides in a war. This is where we really disagree. In the Israel-Palestine conflict they cannot protect either side for reasons Colonel Kemp will address. Worse, their methodology which is to analyze a war after it is over is flawed and in my view its staff has little knowledge of the realities of asymmetric war and makes accusations of war crimes where others would understand the sad collateral damage of war. In the Israel-Palestine war, it seems to me, the Israelis are usually the party accused. Hamas, I believe, is fighting a war of attrition, and doesn’t subscribe to the Geneva conventions . . .

We will focus on women’s rights and free speech. These two rights – the spearhead of most totalitarian repression – are so important because where they are absent, achieving the other very important human rights is practically impossible. We will, of course, go into closed societies. The very idea of human rights organizations spending some of their small resources to be another voice in an open society with what we see happening all over the world in closed societies is almost ludicrous. Now that these closed societies are exploding, they will need every ounce of the human rights community’s attention so that we don’t have another Iran.

Meanwhile, HRW is embroiled in yet another controversy: Sarah Leah Whitson's 2009 praise for Muammar Qaddafi’s son Seif Islam as a leading reformer.

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Exposing the human rights facade

The people and institutions that claim to uphold human rights and democracy are in fact nullifying these core moral principles.

Gerald Steinberg
Op-Ed/JPost
24 November '10

At 87, Robert Bernstein, founder of Human Rights Watch, began his second life. Thirty- three years after he founded Helsinki Watch in 1976, which evolved into HRW and became one of the most influential human rights organizations in the world, he disowned his earlier creation. In October 2009, in an explosive column published in The New York Times, Bernstein denounced HRW and its leaders for distorting and exploiting human rights to attack democracies, and for playing a central role in turning Israel into a “pariah state.”

Now, Bernstein has gone further in working to reverse the moral failures of HRW and the wider network of highly politicized groups that use the façade of human rights to attack moral principles. Delivering the Goldstein Lecture on Human Rights at the University of Nebraska at Omaha [published in full on page 13 of today’s Jerusalem Post], he contrasted Israel’s democratic values with their notable absence in the Arab regimes and Iran. But most of HRW’s humanrights accusations are directed at Israel. Bernstein demonstrated that these “human rights organizations, including the one I founded,” as well Amnesty International, the Carter Center and other groups, are leading the political war against Israel by working closely with corrupt UN frameworks.

(Read full Op-Ed)

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“Human Rights in the Middle East”

Robert L. Bernstein
UN Watch
10 November '10

You may wonder why a man just shy of his 88th birthday would get up at 5 in the morning to fly to Omaha to give a speech. Frankly, since accepting this kind offer, I’ve wondered myself. Here’s why. Having devoted much of my life to trying to make the Universal Declaration of Human Rights come alive in many places in the world, I have become alarmed at how some human rights organizations, including the one I founded, are reporting on human rights in the Middle East.

In reading about the discussions and actions of students on American campuses, I learned, of course, that the Israel-Palestine issues were very polarized, sometimes hostile, and that a lot of the hostility was by students angered over Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians and the endless process of trying to establish a second state.

I know we all believe in free speech. We believe in equality for women. We believe in tolerance of each other’s religious beliefs and in an open campus. When I go back to New York, tomorrow night, I will be attending the 150th anniversary of Bard College, a college very involved in the Middle East, as it has a combined degree program with Al-Quds, the Palestinian university in Ramallah. Here is what Leon Botstein, Bard’s President, says about education: “Education is a safeguard against the disappearance of liberty, but only if it invites rigorous inquiry, scrutiny, and the open discussion of issues.”

Believing in all these values and the others of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, what is taking place on American campuses puzzles me. It seems to me that the State of Israel has all the values we just outlined. It is surrounded by 22 Arab states occupying 99-1/2% of the land in the Middle East and these states do not share these values. Israel, which occupies less than ½ of 1%, does share these values.

(Read full address)

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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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What 'really excites them' is Israel

Petra Marquardt-Bigman
The Warped Mirror/JPost
09 May '10

In late April, The New Republic (TNR) published a widely-quoted report that investigated accusations of blatant anti-Israel bias in the work of Human Rights Watch (HRW). A month earlier, The Sunday Times featured a similar article, to which HRW apparently responded by demanding a number of clarifications and corrections that in turn were challenged in the comment section by a researcher from NGO Monitor.

In terms of their substance, both reports contain too many interesting findings to summarize adequately here. However, one point that can perhaps serve to illustrate the overall picture that emerges from them is the fact that both reports include statements that openly acknowledge HRW's bias against Israel. The TNR article quotes a board member of HRW admitting: "I think we tend to go where there's action and where we're going to get reaction [...] We seek the limelight - that's part of what we do. And so, Israel's sort of like low-hanging fruit."

The Sunday Times article quotes an anonymous human rights expert working for an organization in Washington, who argues that one consideration in deciding what issues to focus on is "how it's going to be used politically in Washington"; according to this person, there is also the question of whom HRW considers as "a bad guy that they are interested in highlighting", and finally, he offers the observation: "Let's face it, the thing that really excites them is Israel."

Both quotes point to the enormous role publicity plays for HRW - in other words, HRW relies on the media to amplify its message, and the organization knows all too well what sells in the media. In this context, it is fascinating to read a recently published paper entitled "A media eclipse: Israel-Palestine and the world's forgotten conflicts".

The author, Noah Bernstein, can certainly not be accused of showing any bias in favor of Israel; instead, it is clear that he is motivated by a passionate and idealistic concern for human rights. His well-researched article starts out by starkly contrasting the media coverage of two simultaneous conflicts:

(Read full article)

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Human Rights Watch versus human rights

Based on recent revelations, there were systematic violations in the organization, especially regarding Israel.


Gerald Steinberg
Op-Ed/Jpost
09 May '10

New York-based Human Rights Watch – once the “gold standard” of moral watchdogs – is playing a leading role in demonizing Israel through false allegations of war crimes. HRW supported the UN report condemning Israel on Jenin (2002) and the attack on the separation barrier as a violation of international law (2004), charged Israel with “deliberate” and “indiscriminate” attacks on civilians in Lebanon (2006) and issued a flood of such allegations about Gaza (2009).

HRW also claimed credit for Judge Richard Goldstone’s one-sided UN “inquiry” on the Gaza fighting. Goldstone is a close confidant of HRW’s executive director Kenneth Roth, and was a member of HRW’s board.

But HRW has been shattered following revelations of systematic factual, moral and ethical violations, particularly with respect to Israel. Marc Garlasco, HRW’s “senior military analyst,” who wrote many of the accusations about Gaza, including the white phosphorous libel, was fired. This followed discovery of his obsessive collection of Nazi war memorabilia, but the deeper issues relate to the credibility of his military analyses. (The investigation HRW promised six months ago never happened, and instead, it imposed a gag order on Garlasco.) Garlasco is a symptom, and after NGO Monitor’s systematic revelations of HRW hypocrisy, founder Robert Bernstein denounced his own organization for helping undermine the principles of human rights. Articles by Jonathan Foreman in the Sunday Times and Benjamin Birnbaum in The New Republic have further exposed the mythology.

BASED ON interviews with HRW board members, employees and others, Birnbaum documented systematic bias and factual distortions. Sarah Leah Whitson (who led a bizarre fund-raising trip to Saudi Arabia, invoking the specter of the “pro-Israel” lobby) was brought in by Roth to head the Middle East and North Africa division. Whitson is an admirer of Norman Finkelstein, who, as Birnbaum notes, is a “Hizbullah supporter who has likened Israel to Nazi Germany” and accuses Jews of exploiting the Holocaust. In an e-mail, Whitson wrote of her “tremendous respect and admiration for him, because... making Israeli abuses the focus of one’s life work is a thankless but courageous task...”

(Read full story)

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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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The Sound of Silence

Noah Pollak
Contentions/Commentary
28 April '10

Normally, when Human Rights Watch is criticized, the group retaliates with harsh and aggressive attacks on its accusers. Ken Roth, the head of HRW, is famous for this. When it was disclosed last summer that HRW went to Saudi Arabia to raise money for its “fights with pro-Israel groups,” Roth told Jeffrey Goldberg that Israel’s “supporters fight back with lies and deception.” When HRW’s founder, Bob Bernstein, criticized the group in a New York Times op-ed, HRW fired back by egregiously misrepresenting Bernstein’s argument and then denouncing it in classic straw-man fashion.

A couple of days ago, a long investigative piece was published in the New Republic, which contained the most damaging revelations yet about the group’s hostility to Israel, the sloppiness of its work, and the opinions of some of the crackpots who work in its offices. I was expecting Roth and his goon squad to go nuclear, as they normally do, with wild accusations of lies and right-wing smears. Strangely, nothing of the sort has happened. HRW’s defense comes in the form of a short, passionless statement of support by a board member who seems to be the go-to person for defenses of HRW’s treatment of Israel, and who incredibly insists that HRW is “actually good for Israel.”

There is no attempt to refute the carefully documented facts contained in Birnbaum’s TNR piece; there is no smear campaign against the author; there are no fervent letters to the editor insisting on HRW’s invincible moral authority.

(Read full post)

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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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Obsession and Scandals: HRW in 2009

NGO Monitor
January 05, 2010

Summary:
Human Rights Watch publications on “Israel and the OPT” comprised 28 percent of its total Mideast output in 2009. Israel received more attention than Iran, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Syria, and other chronic human rights abusers.[1]

HRW allocated a disproportionate amount of resources to promoting the UN “fact-finding” mission of former board member Richard Goldstone, including statements in support of UN resolutions that condemned Israel. The 34 pro-Goldstone publications out-numbered documents on all the countries in the Middle East, except Israel and Iran.

Scandals included a fundraising trip to Saudi Arabia, which used HRW’s anti-Israel bias and the specter of the pro-Israel lobby to solicit funds from “prominent members of Saudi society.”

The revelation that Marc Garlasco, “senior military analyst,” is an avid collector of Nazi memorabilia casts serious doubt on HRW’s credibility and demands a close reexamination of his work for the organization.

In a New York Times op-ed, HRW founder Robert Bernstein strongly criticized the organization for its anti-Israel bias and for ignoring severe human rights violations in closed societies.

HRW has taken no action to implement Bernstein’s call to “resurrect itself as a moral force in the Middle East,” or the call from NGO Monitor’s International Advisory Board (including Elie Wiesel and Alan Dershowitz) to “institute a full independent review and reform in the organization.”

In every instance of scandal and criticism, HRW officials (Roth, Levine, Whitson, etc.) responded with ad hominem attacks and ignored the substance.

(Read full report)
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Israel-bashers hold a double standard on rights abuses

ONE OF the simplest ways to influence public opinion is to present a common enemy. Today, the favourite bogeyman in international affairs is the state of Israel

Ronald S. Lauder
The Irish Times
07 December 09

Israel-bashing is growing in popularity in many areas. At international sporting events, Israeli athletes are sometimes avoided, sometimes prevented from taking part by immigration officials, and sometimes not even invited. British, Canadian and South African trade unions have been calling for boycotts of Israeli goods. Universities and trade unions campaign for a boycott of Israeli scholars and businesses, and for international sanctions.

The founder of Human Rights Watch, Robert Bernstein, recently exposed this hypocrisy when he criticised his own organisation for treating Israel like a pariah state.

The height of cynicism is the attempt by many Islamic countries to delegitimise Israel, to deny it the right to exist. Such propaganda has been ongoing for years and is characterised by both expediency and hatred. This battle is increasingly fought by the governments of these countries in international forums, in particular the United Nations. By levelling false, sometimes slanderous, accusations against Israel and its democratically elected government, they try to undermine its legitimacy.

The UN, it seems, reserves most of its ire for the most liberal, free and progressive country in the Middle East. A country that guarantees and upholds religious freedom and offers all of its citizens, including its Arab minority, the same civil rights, is pilloried by those who blatantly disregard the values of the UN Charter and the Declaration of Human Rights.

In an interview with this newspaper last week, UN human rights commissioner Navi Pillay from South Africa referred to “propaganda which portrayed the [UN Human Rights] council as biased and a venue for bashing Israel”. Propaganda? Not really. The human rights council in Geneva, dominated by vanguards in human rights such as Libya, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, is almost obsessed with Israel’s alleged misconduct. Yet it overlooks, or downplays, crimes committed by Hamas and other terrorist groups. The council’s one-sided resolution on the Goldstone report speaks volumes.

In 2006, then UN secretary general Kofi Annan criticised the human rights council for “disproportionate focus on violations by Israel”, while neglecting other areas with “graver” crises. Things haven’t exactly improved since then – quite the contrary. In fact, at the general assembly in New York, no other Middle Eastern country is denounced in speeches and resolutions as often as Israel.

On most UN bodies, an inbuilt majority of non-democratic countries gives the Israel-bashers a free rein. Sometimes they are even backed by democratic countries. It was sad to see that Ireland was one of five European governments that supported the Goldstone report recently.

Israel-bashing enjoys widespread support in western media, as well as in universities, NGOs, trade unions and international organisations. Yet these critics often turn a blind eye to the realities in the Middle East.

(Read full article)
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Judge Goldstone: I Participated in a Farce

Noah Pollak
Contentions/Commentary
16 November 09

Richard Goldstone seems to use interviews to chip away at the legitimacy of his own work. He told the Forward that nothing he uncovered in Gaza is credible enough to be admissible in court. And now he has admitted this to Haaretz:

Many Israelis are right to feel that the United Nations and its member bodies such as the Human Rights Council and the General Assembly have devoted inordinate and disproportionate attention to scrutinizing and criticizing Israel. This has come at the price of ignoring violations of human rights in other countries, some of them members of those very same bodies. The time has come for the investigation of all violations of international human rights law and international law whenever they are committed, in any state.

A few thoughts: First, this is almost exactly what Bob Bernstein argued in his New York Times op-ed about Human Rights Watch — for which he was accused by HRW, on whose board Goldstone sat, of claiming that no scrutiny whatsoever should be applied to Israel. Will HRW now distort Goldstone and level the same charge? Not a chance.

Second, this statement would seem to validate Shimon Peres’s critique that Goldstone is a “small man, devoid of any sense of justice, a technocrat with no real understanding of jurisprudence” who was “on a one-sided mission to hurt Israel.” Goldstone has admitted that the lawfare campaign against Israel, of which he has become the de facto leader, is a perversion of justice: disproportionately and selectively applied. It is the equivalent of a police force that pursues the arrest of Jews, and scarcely anyone else, for violations. Such a police force is inherently illegitimate. Yet Goldstone chose to become the chief of that police force, and now denounces the fact of its — his — own iniquity. What psychodrama. What a small man.

Third, there is one person perfectly situated to rise to the challenge of even-handedness and proportionality that the good judge has placed before the world: his name is Richard Goldstone. He has earned his bona fides as a harsh and tendentious critic of Israel. Because of this, he has immense credibility at the UN and among “human-rights” activists worldwide. When will his campaign of inquisition against other democracies begin? Someone should ask him.

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Analyzing Human Rights Watch’s Defensive Response to Robert Bernstein

NGO Monitor
04 November 09

Human Rights Watch founder Robert Bernstein’s highly critical op-ed in the New York Times (Rights Watchdog, Lost in the Mideast, October 19, 2009; see also Robert Bernstein’s rebuttal to HRW's response) led to a defensive campaign by Human Rights Watch (HRW) officials and supporters. Many of the press releases, opinion pieces, letters to the editor, and media interviews (14 to date, as listed in Appendix 1) use identical language and format, repeating claims made by executive director Ken Roth in Ha’aretz.

As shown below, the three main themes repeated by HRW’s defenders are: balance, methodology, and “open” and “closed” societies. These responses are misleading and do not address Bernstein’s most serious claims, including HRW’s role in “turn[ing] Israel into a pariah state” and its loss of “critical perspective” on Iran’s support for Hamas and Hezbollah.

1) “They say we disproportionately focus on Israel, and neglect other countries in the Middle East... Israel is a small fraction of what we do.” [1]

This response from HRW greatly distorts Bernstein’s statement that “in recent years Human Rights Watch has written far more condemnations of Israel for violations of international law than of any other country in the region.” Bernstein specifically discusses Israel within the context of the Middle East, where even HRW’s misleading response admits a disproportionate focus.

HRW claims that “Israel accounts for about 15 percent of our published output on the region.” [2]

Assuming this were correct, it would mean that HRW’s Middle East division, which covers 17 countries, focuses significantly more than the proportionate level of resources (6 percent) on Israel.

But the data show that this claim of 15 percent is highly misleading. In 2009 (through November 2), HRW has published 284 documents on the Middle East and North Africa. 88 (31 percent) of these documents have dealt with Israel, the Palestinian Authority, and Gaza. In comparison, only 39 documents focus on Iran. Of the 88 documents on Israel, the Palestinian Authority, and Gaza, 5 are full-length reports, versus only 3 on Saudi Arabia, 2 on the United Arab Emirates, and 1 each for seven other countries. ( HRW had completed and planned to publish yet another report, on “wanton destruction” by Israel in Gaza, in parallel to the Goldstone report. But the publication was shelved following the growing criticism. This is a tacit admission that the level of resources targeting Israel is excessive and unjustified.)

(Read full report)

When too much of Ken Roth is enough: Bernstein answers Ma’ariv’s questions

Richard Landes
The Augean Stables
30 October 09

As posted here, Bob Bernstein, the original founder of HRW, came out with serious criticism of Ken Roth in the op-ed pages of the NYT. That led to something of a sandstorm, with everyone from Helena (Hullo can you see Florida from here?) Cobban to Roth himself throwing the sand in our eyes. (I haven’t gotten to fisking Roth yet, but it’s ripe for fertilizer.) Now, Ma’ariv asks Bernstein why he did what he did, and he answers. (HT for English version to Gerald Steinberg)

Here are the questions sent to Bernstein by Ma’ariv and below are his answers, in full:

1- Why did you write this op-ed at the TN Times last week? what was the ’straw that broke the camel back’ from your point of view?

Actually it has been brewing for a long time. I had been trying to do a long piece because many of my views about human rights in the Middle East are different from those being expressed by Human Rights Watch. The Goldstone Report made me feel I should get something out, so I wrote the NY Times op-ed piece.

2- What was your vision when you founded Human Right Watch and does the organization follow your vision in the recent years?

My vision, I should say our vision because it was supported by a wonderful board – was to go into closed societies and try and help people in those societies who wanted free speech. I was a book publisher so that was an especially important principle to me and it’s a key part of the Declaration of Human Rights. But, of course, other basic human rights are also vitally important. – freedom of religion, equal rights for women, to name just two. When governments of closed societies asked us what we were doing about our own country we would explain that the United States had many faults but because we were an open society we had many organizations and other ways to try and bring change. But after a while we decided we would do some work in the United States but try to not replicate what was being done by others.

I also believe there can be times to do some work in open societies but, now focus is on the Middle East. I think Israel is a country where most people believe in human rights. But at this time many Israelis, and I share their view, do not believe that HRW in the issues it chooses, its tone, and even its interpretations of law are not helping to bring Arabs and Israelis together.

I had a lot to learn when I began feeling uncomfortable with HRW positions on Israel-Palestine issues in 2005 and certainly still do have a lot to learn, but almost from the beginning HRW has cast me as pro-Israel. I think that is the easiest thing to do – say someone is pro-Israel or pro-Palestinian. I like to think I am pro-human rights. Now that I have stated publicly, very sadly incidentally, that I am in disagreement with HRW, this will play out and others can decide if my views make sense.

3- You told me the you are amazed by the reaction, from general people and mostly from people inside the HRW. Can you explain? (you said, ‘they think they are God’ - off the record)

I was amazed and encouraged by the reaction to my op-ed. Because so many of the positive comments have come, not from those considered hard liners but from people who think a lot about human rights, I have been particularly encouraged.

4- What do you think about the last Goldstone report? Is it part of the big problem you were talking about with me? and if so, why does he, and other human rights organizations, focus mostly on Israel?

I think the Goldstone Report is deeply flawed. I was surprised Judge Goldstone, who I know and admired, took the job. He had to head a commission created by the United Nations Human Rights Council, which I think any fair-minded person would say had to clean up itself before it dared to criticize anything.

When I read Judge Goldstone’s op-ed in the September 17 issue of the NY Times and he said “While Israel has begun investigating into alleged violations they are unlikely to be serious and objective” I felt he was just “judging” too much.

5- What do you think should be Israel respond to Goldstone report as well as to some of the HRW reports?

I can’t tell Israel what to do. I do not think any country would want to put up with a war of attrition, which can explode into real war any time. However I certainly don’t know the best way to stop it. I fault HRW for not taking a position on the war. The fact that Hamas-Hezbollah and Iran have declared it is their intention to try and wipe out Israel and all Jews seems to me, to be incitement to genocide, especially when it is backed by rocket attacks.

Related: Rights Watchdog, Lost in the Mideast

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Human Rights Watch’s Non-Rebuttal Rebuttal

Noah Pollak
Contentions/Commentary
21 October 09

In case you missed it, yesterday something very important happened: Bob Bernstein, the founder and for 20 years the chair of Human Rights Watch, published an op-ed in the New York Times criticizing the organization for its obsessive attacks on Israel. He wrote that HRW is “helping those who wish to turn Israel into a pariah state.”

HRW was quick to offer a response — and it is a pathetically weak and deceptive one. A quick fisking:

Human Rights Watch does not believe that the human rights records of “closed” societies are the only ones deserving scrutiny.

A classic red-herring argument. Nowhere did Bernstein argue that open societies should not be subject to scrutiny. What he said is that the amount of attention HRW pays to Israel is wildly out of proportion to Israel’s violations, especially when Israel is compared with the Middle East’s dozens of dictatorships. Misrepresenting the plain meaning of Bernstein’s argument allows HRW to rebut an accusation that he never made. The press release continues:

Human Rights Watch does not devote more time and energy to Israel than to other countries in the region, or in the world. We’ve produced more than 1,700 reports, letters, news releases, and other commentaries on the Middle East and North Africa since January 2000, and the vast majority of these were about countries other than Israel.

Another red herring — this one with some clever weasel phrasing. Bernstein never said that HRW “devotes more time and energy to Israel than to other countries in the region.” He wrote that “Human Rights Watch has written far more condemnations of Israel for violations of international law than of any other country in the region.” The obvious difference is that Bernstein was comparing the number of reports on Israel to the number of reports on any other individual country in the Middle East. HRW presents Bernstein as claiming that HRW writes more reports on Israel than on all the countries in the Middle East combined. Obviously, HRW cannot contest the accuracy of Bernstein’s statement, so it dishonestly responds to a charge he never made.

It is not the case that Human Rights Watch had “no access to the battlefield” after the Israeli operation in Gaza in January 2009. Although the Israeli government denied us access, our researchers entered Gaza via the border with Egypt and conducted extensive interviews.

Human Rights Watch is apparently incapable of dealing with criticism on its own terms. Bernstein did not argue that HRW had no access to the battlefield after the war was over, as HRW claims he said. What Bernstein in fact said was that HRW was not present on the battlefield during the war, therefore limiting its ability to know what happened and to make war-crimes judgments.

The dishonesty and manipulativeness of HRW’s response to Bernstein is but a small manifestation of the organization’s larger problems: its inability to engage honestly with the arguments of its detractors, and the related problem of the unreliability of the group’s reporting on the Middle East.

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