Israel, settlement activity and the hypocrisy of Sarah Leah Whitson of @HRW - by Eugene Kontorovich

The acceptance of settlement activity by supporters of sanctions on Israel suggest they know that the international law they claim to enforce against the Jewish state is not international law at all.

Elder of Ziyon..
14 January '20..

Since this is behind The Wall Street Journal's paywall, here is the entire article:

Hypocritical attacks on Israel are common, but Sarah Leah Whitson takes them to a new level. As Middle East and North Africa director of Human Rights Watch, she is one of the sharpest critics of the Jewish state’s presence in the West Bank, promoting boycotts and international prosecution for the supposed crimes of occupation and settlement. Yet elsewhere Ms. Whitson strongly supports settlements in occupied territories—suggesting that she and her colleagues don’t take their own legal claims against Israel seriously.

The settlements Ms. Whitson supports are in Nagorno-Karabakh, an area that was within the borders of post-Soviet Azerbaijan until 1994, when Armenia occupied the region after a protracted war. Since then, the Armenian leadership in Yerevan has actively encouraged the movement of settlers into the area. Many Armenians regard Karabakh as their historic homeland. But the United Nations, international courts and the U.S. all consider it occupied Azeri territory.

Ms. Whitson, who is from an Armenian family, served as master of ceremonies at a 2018 fundraiser for the Armenian National Committee of America, a pro-settler charity that views Karabakh as an “integral part of the Armenian homeland.” Even as Ms. Whitson led Human Rights Watch’s campaign to boycott Israeli economic activity in the West Bank, she took to Twitter to promote Armenian wines, including from the occupied territories.

(Continue to Full Post)

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work. 

.

Sarah Leah Whitson’s Jewish Problem Surfaces Again at Human Rights Watch - by NGO Monitor

...If anything, HRW’s logic implies that Palestinians should not be granted permanent residency, meaning they should not be entitled to the benefits (and obligations) that come with that status. It is hard to see, though, how that would contribute to human rights or stability in Jerusalem.

NGO Monitor..
13 August '17..
Link: http://www.ngo-monitor.org/sarah-leah-whitsons-jewish-problem-appears-human-rights-watch/

Human Rights Watch (HRW)’s long news release (“Israel: Jerusalem Palestinians Stripped of Status,” August 8, 2017) consists of a compilation of “testimonies” Palestinian residents of east Jerusalem, who are permanent residents of Israel but not citizens.

In the release, and as has been her practice for 15 years, Sarah Leah Whitson, Director of HRW’s Middle East and North Africa Division, attacks Israel with a stream of false claims and demonization. According to Whitson, “Israel claims to treat Jerusalem as a unified city, but the reality is effectively one set of rules for Jews and another for Palestinians” (emphasis added).

The attempt to portray the situation as Jew versus Palestinian is wrong and reflects an on-going attempt by Whitson to manufacture claims of discrimination. The issue has nothing to do with religion or ethnicity. Rather, the key distinction is whether the individual is an Israeli citizen or not. As detailed in HRW’s own report, Palestinians from East Jerusalem are not citizens of Israel. Israeli citizens who live in the eastern part of the city (roughly considered to be based on the 1949-1967 cease fire lines following the Jordanian occupation), whether they are Jewish or Arab (or otherwise), have the same rights as all Israeli citizens. And notably absent from the HRW report is the basic fact that Palestinians in east Jerusalem have the option to apply for citizenship (thousands have been granted such status), but most choose not to for political reasons.

In addition, permanent residents of East Jerusalem are granted many of the same benefits as citizens including national insurance, health care, and free movement throughout Israel, etc. As in all Western countries, however, and contrary to HRW’s claims, the maintenance of residency status is not without requirements. It is also important to note that Palestinians who are permanent residents also have the right to field candidates and vote in Jerusalem’s municipal elections. (Many choose not to.) Many of the “discriminatory” policies falsely alleged by Whitson and HRW actually result from the failure of Palestinians to exercise their right to vote and elect municipal leaders who will implement their desired policy outcomes.

Human Rights Watch - The immoral agenda continues

Gerald M. Steinberg..
Times of Israel..
31 January '13..

In London today (January 31), Kenneth Roth, the powerful head of Human Rights Watch (HRW), will be holding a press conference and giving interviews to promote his organization’s 2012 annual report. As in the past, Roth will paint a bleak picture of human rights around the world and castigate governments – particularly Western democracies – for not acting to prevent violations. But Roth is not likely to look inward, at himself and HRW, to consider their central contributions to turning human rights into a political farce.

The activities of HRW in 2012 epitomized the ongoing crisis and moral failure of the human rights network. Founded in 1978 by Robert Bernstein, with the goal of naming and shaming closed dictatorial regimes around the world, this organization lost its moral compass many years ago through biased ideological agendas and consistent lack of professionalism. Under the ongoing leadership of Kenneth Roth, these failings led Bernstein to condemn his own organization in the New York Times in 2009.

Roth has shown a consistent obsession regarding Israel and the right of the Jewish people to sovereign equality, including numerous articles and Twitter posts. In a recent piece ostensibly about eight countries other than Israel (“Barack Obama: Dump These 8 Unsavory Allies), Roth began with a lengthy attack against American support for Israel, including terms like “Jim Crow-like separate-and-unequal treatment of Palestinians.” In his Twitter account, Roth frequently invokes the Durban strategy of demonization, recalling the infamous antisemtic 2001 NGO Forum in which Roth and HRW played central roles.

In contrast, Roth cannot bring himself or his organization to condemn the torrent of genocidal threats emanating from the leadership of the Islamic Republic of Iran, reflecting HRW’s complete moral bankruptcy. In rebuke, HRW founder Robert Bernstein, Prof. Irwin Cotler, and Stuart Robinowitz published “Inciting Genocide Is a Crime,” in which they pointedly noted, “Silence is not a moral option when states threaten genocide—especially when they are on the verge of acquiring nuclear weapons and boast that they can bring about a holocaust in a matter of minutes.”

Sarah Leah Whitson pushes the race button

Fresnozionism.org
17 April '11


Sarah Leah Whitson, the Human Rights Watch official who raised funds for her organization by blasting Israel in uber-racist, slavery-tolerating Saudi Arabia, has made one of the most odious analogies possible. She writes,

Israeli President Shimon Peres visited Washington earlier this month, hot on the heels of an announcement that Israeli authorities had approved yet more housing units for Jewish settlers in the West Bank. In a week when the U.S. paused to recall the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, President Peres might have considered King’s message — an end to segregation — and why such a system of racial inequality remains in place in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.


Back in 1968, when Dr. King was murdered, the debate about discrimination was live and real. Most governments have long since stopped trying to justify separating people based on race or national origin, whether for ostensible security concerns, like the U.S. internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, or plain old bigotry, like the Jim Crow laws of the American south.


Yet in the areas of the Occupied Palestinian Territories where Israel has moved almost half a million Jewish “settlers,” not only do Israeli laws and policies strictly segregate Jews from Palestinians, they deliberately deprive Palestinians of the most basic needs, in many cases forcing them out of their communities.

If Whitson is suggesting that the ‘Palestinian cause’ is anything like the civil rights movement in America — clearly she is — she is living in an alternate universe.

Civil rights workers did not fire antitank missiles at school buses, nor did they slit the throats of babies and children. American blacks did not blow themselves up at holiday celebrations, and Mexican and Canadian ones did not launch rockets into American towns and cities.

In fact, try as I might, the only way that Dr. M. L. King and Ismail Haniyya are alike is that they both say they are struggling for their people’s rights. Of course, Dr. King actually was, whereas Haniyya is a racist, genocidal antisemite who wants to wipe out the Jews in Israel and take their country. King indeed represented an oppressed racial minority that was discriminated against in law and custom, while Haniyya is supported by the considerable resources of the Arab world and Iran in his murderous cause. If the analogy makes sense at all, Jewish Israelis are the ones discriminated against in the Middle East and in the broader international community.

But Whitson isn’t interested in reality — as she wasn’t interested in the very real human rights abuses in Saudi Arabia — she is interested in pushing buttons.

So she claims that Israel maintains a system of ‘racial inequality’, when the concept of race has nothing to do with relations between Jews and Arabs, who are genetically closer to each other than to non-Jewish Europeans. Of course she doesn’t have to use the word ‘race’, she could claim that there was a system of cultural or linguistic discrimination. But that wouldn’t push the button.

Whitson refers numerous times to the ‘Occupied Palestinian Territories’. What are these territories? They are part of the lands that were set aside by the League of Nations for a “Jewish National Home” after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in WWI. Various Arab states were also created at the same time, but this was the only area specifically designated for Jewish settlement. These territories were never ‘Palestinian’, and they were only ‘Arab’ insofar as they were illegally occupied by Jordan and Egypt for 19 years. They are not ‘occupied’, since there was no sovereign authority there since the end of the Mandate — they are at most ‘disputed’, and an argument can be made that if any party ought to control them, it’s Israel, the representative of the Jewish people.

Sarah Leah Whitson And Human Rights Watch Pay Their Respects To Hamas

Daled Amos
28 July '10

Sarah Leah Whitson continues to work hard to improve the image of Human Rights Watch within the Arab world. Remember last year in May?

Human Rights Watch is gaining more recognition and support in Saudi Arabia and the Arab world. During their recent visit to the Kingdom, senior members of the organization were given a welcoming dinner in Riyadh hosted by prominent businessman and intellectual Emad bin Jameel Al-Hejailan.

Other prominent members of Saudi society, human rights activists and dignitaries were invited to the dinner held to honor the guests.

In an introductory speech at the dinner, Al-Hejailan said the credo of human rights is rising in the Kingdom. He commended Human Rights Watch (HRW) for its work on Gaza and the Middle East as a whole.

HRW presented a documentary and spoke on the report they compiled on Israel violating human rights and international law during its war on Gaza earlier this year.
Apparently improving HRW's image in Saudi Arabia was contingent on talking about all of the reports it had published about Israel. Which of course is understandable: after all, Whitson was in Saudi Arabia to get funding--and appearances of propriety be damned.

I discussed Whitson's claims and those of Human Rights Watch head Ken Roth about the trip here. Needless to say, the stunt was an embarrassment, exposing as it did the lack of neutrality and objectivity that one assumes such NGO's have.

But that didn't stop Whitson from paying a friendly visit to Hamas:

(Read full post)

If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.
.

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)

If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.
.

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)

If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.
.

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)

If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.
.

Double-Standards Watch

Noah Pollak
Contentions/Commentary
19 March '10

For a few months, a “human rights activist” named Mohammad Othman was held by Israel in something called administrative detention, which allows suspects to be held for a short period of time without a trial, but with judicial oversight. Othman’s detention earned this rebuke from Human Rights Watch, titled with a stern demand: “End Arbitrary Detention.” Of course, many nations, both democratic and undemocratic, practice administrative detention. And why the presumption that it was “arbitrary”? Never mind. The statement reads:

Israeli authorities have detained Othman without charge for more than two months on what appear to be politically motivated grounds. … Othman has no criminal record and, to the knowledge of Human Rights Watch, has never advocated or participated in violence. …

“The only reasonable conclusion is that Othman is being punished for his peaceful advocacy,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. [Emphasis added to weasel-phrasing]

Is that really the only reasonable conclusion? I would actually characterize this as a fantasy conclusion, or at least one of many possible conclusions. If the Shin Bet or IDF were interested in punishing people for “peaceful advocacy” in Israel and the West Bank, there would be tens of thousands of activists in detention. But there aren’t.

(Read full post)
.

You Know What’s a Human-Rights Violation?

Noah Pollak
Contentions/Commentary
08 February '10

Criticizing anti-Zionist NGOs, that’s what. In what is apparently not a parody, Human Rights Watch has issued a press release about the New Israel Fund controversy, apparently in the belief that making the association between the two groups explicit will help the NIF:

(New York, February 7, 2010) – The growing harshness of attacks by Israeli government officials on nongovernmental organizations poses a real threat to civil society in Israel, Human Rights Watch said today.

The most recent attacks center on the New Israel Fund (NIF). …

“What we’re seeing in Israel is a greater official intolerance of dissent,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. … “A clear pattern of official efforts to suppress voices critical of government policy is emerging.”

Note that HRW has done zero investigation into the clear pattern of official efforts to murder democracy activists by the Iranian regime. However, a thoroughly democratic debate in Israel about NGOs sends the group into hysterics about “threats to civil society.”

Aren’t there some actual dissenters in the Middle East who are actually being attacked who Human Rights Watch could pay attention to?
.

HRW Tries to Make Things Better…

David Hazony
Contentions/Commentary
21 October 09

(And again!)

Human Rights Watch really ought to lay low for a while. Over the past few months, the once-admired watchdog admitted to fundraising in Saudi Arabia as an anti-Israel organization and discovered that one of the writers of its anti-Israel reports is a big fan of Nazi memorabilia. Yesterday, the organization’s founder, Robert Bernstein, published a blistering op-ed in the New York Times accusing the organization of abandoning its mission and becoming obsessed with attacking Israel. (See Noah Pollak’s analysis of HRW’s rebuttal here.)

So what does HRW do? It tries to prove its even-handedness. It has announced that, in its opinion, Hamas — the universally reviled terror organization that has never found an anti-civilian tactic too crude to embrace, the jihadist group that made suicide bombing a form of martyrdom, that lobbed thousands of rockets at Israeli civilian centers and brought on the entire 2009 military operation in Gaza — that this Hamas ought to conduct a “credible investigation” into accusations that it, too, committed war crimes. In a letter penned by the organization’s Middle East and North Africa division head, Sarah Leah Whitson, HRW applauds Hamas’s recent acceptance of the Goldstone Report. ”In the past, Hamas tried to justify the unjustifiable by defending unlawful rocket attacks,” Whitson said. “Having now promised to follow the Goldstone Report’s recommendations, Hamas has no excuse for not carrying out serious war crimes investigations.”

Like it did before? Hamas has, of course, promised it will do so right away, and we’re all very glad to hear it. But of greater interest is what such a letter says about HRW. I remember that great scene in The Treasure of Sierra Madre when Walter Huston, the older prospector, yells at his younger and less stalwart fellows, “You’re so dumb, there’s nothing to compare you with!” It’s one of my favorite movie lines because it captures the fact that sometimes something is so outrageous that the mind gropes in vain for an effective metaphor. Asking Hamas, a recognized terrorist group, to conduct an investigation into its war crimes is like, like … what? Is it like asking a Mob family to investigate charges of racketeering in its ranks? Or like asking a congenital liar to go to confession? How about asking a convicted mass murderer to investigate reports about his violent tendencies? Around the free world, people are imprisoned just for membership in Hamas. What could such a letter mean?

Maybe we should let Human Rights Watch just keep opening its mouth.

.

NGO Monitor report: Experts or Ideologues?

A Systematic Analysis of HRW's Focus on Israel

On September 8, 2009, NGO Monitor released a research report – Experts or Ideologues? A Systematic Analysis of Human Rights Watch’s Focus on Israel – examining HRW’s publications and campaigns related to Israel from 2001 to 2009.

This report is the most detailed analysis of HRW that has been published to date, revealing a consistent pattern of double standards, inconsistencies, and exploitation of human rights to attack Israel.

The report consists of three sections:
1) An examination of key HRW staff members – their professional backgrounds, research expertise, and ideological bias concerning Israel, including:

• Ken Roth
• Sarah Leah Whitson
• Joe Stork
• Marc Garlasco
• Reed Brody

2) Five detailed HRW case studies which show:

• Consistent bias
• False and contradictory claims
• Reliance on irrelevant “evidence”
• Speculation disguised as fact
• Inappropriate methodologies (“eyewitness testimony,” NGO and media reports, and “weapons assessments” that are neither credible nor verifiable).

3) A broader quantitative analysis of HRW publications from 2001 to 2009, showing greatly disproportionate emphasis on Israel in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) Division, double standards in the use of terminology such as “war crimes,” “collective punishment,” etc., and in highly distorted uses of international legal terminology.

PDF of the full report

Executive summary [PDF]

Click here for further analysis of Human Rights Watch and excerpts of the report
.