Human Rights Watch Cozies Up to Saudis
At what point does a human rights watchdog group forfeit its claim to impartiality and moral integrity?
Perhaps when one of its executives uses her organization’s rap sheet against Israel as an incentive for scaring up funds from hirelings of a repressive Arab regime.
As disclosed by David Bernstein in the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday, Sarah Leah Whitson, the director of Human Rights Watch’s Middle East and North Africa Division, went to Saudi Arabia last May with the following sweetener for her audience of would-be donors: Didn’t they know that her outfit routinely did battle with “pro-Israel pressure groups in the U.S., the European Union and the United Nations”? (Exactly what such groups exist in the European Union and United Nations, Whitson apparently failed to elaborate.)
According to Bernstein, Whitson did not take the opportunity to criticize her host country’s own abominable human rights record, except to call attention to the plight of its domestic workers. His source for this accusation was “someone who claimed to have worked for HRW,” who further informed Bernstein that there’s virtually no cross-current within the organization between research and policy on the one side and fundraising efforts on the other — a claim belied slightly by the fact that Whitson, according to her bio page at the HRW website, has written numerous articles on Lebanon, Egypt, and Israel, all in her capacity as an HRW representative.
Indeed, her prose is usually more sober than her overseas table talk. See, for instance, this rebuttal she published to an article in Counterpunch — an ultra-left newsletter that questions the “official” story of how the Twin Towers fell and has never met a supposed perfidy of the Jewish state it didn’t take at face value — which argued that Hezbollah did not willfully target Israeli civilians with its Katyusha rockets. Not that Whitson is immune from using fashionable leftist cant even when she combats her leftist critics; she has referred to Hezbollah as the “Islamic Resistance” while defending HRW’s record on objectively reporting war crimes in the 2006 Israeli assault on Lebanon.
Ken Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, at first denied Bernstein’s account in an angry dispatch to the Journal, in which he claimed that the delegation he was part of in Riyadh “did indeed spend much of the time in serious discussion about Saudi violations, including its troubled justice system and the lack of women’s rights, as well as our work in the region, including Israel.” Moreover, Roth said, “What’s really at the heart of Mr. Bernstein’s gripe is his misconception that efforts to raise support among Saudis are unseemly because, well, if they live in a totalitarian country, they must be bad people too.”
Roth’s letter, however, raised two interesting questions. First, why was Israel even brought up in this setting, and was it in such a context as Bernstein alleged — namely, to show that HRW is on the same anti-Zionist page as its Saudi interlocutors? Second, who were those interlocutors, exactly — were they all rich private citizens or functionaries of the regime?
Into this dispute came The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, whose blog has become an invaluable compendium of interviews with embarrassed public figures. In a prologue to his email exchange with Roth, Goldberg noted that Whitson, if the charges against her were true, was swimming in especially fetid waters because the term “pro-Israel lobby” refers on the Arabian Peninsula not to AIPAC or evangelical Zionists who endorse the U.S.-Israeli special relationship, but rather to a sinister conspiracy of Jews who look, as Goldberg put it, to “dominate the world politically, culturally and economically.”
This is Mearsheimer-Walt territory, without the pretense of scholarly endeavor.
One has to be hyper vigilant when seeing the words ‘human rights’ and ‘peace activists’ attached to any organization.
It is not hyperbole to suggest that people involved in these organizations are for the most part serial violators of universal human rights.
It is not for nothing that ALL the UN rights forums, HRW and their attendant octopus organizations are mostly silent in the face of the genocide in Darfur, yet become apoplectic about Israel taking defensive measures against terrorists.
Now, forgive me for pointing out the obvious, but the fact that the Muslims in Darfur are Black and NOT Arab is the main reason why the slaughter is ignored. Their paradigm of thinking is that only Arabs need to be protected, otherwise the PA narrative will lose its essence, and their immoral blindness and silence as Arab Muslims wage war across the globe will be exposed.
In fact, to further expose their immoral obtuseness when it comes to universal human rights, ignoring Chinese slaughter of Tibetans is par for their course.
In a nutshell, their cause is a shell game, as they trot to the most repressive nations to beg for support, all the while turning a blind eye to the actual torture waged by their gracious hosts to their own citizens.
Ken Roth, Norman Finkelstein, Jerry Ben Ami–no shortage of kapos in the Jewish community.
The fact that these Jewish Uncle Toms are welcome in Saudi Arabia is no surprise. What rankles is that they’re welcome in the White House.
Given HRC’s defense of its fundraising practices is that money comes only from private sources, it is amazing that Roth said of the Shura Council “…not sure whether you’d consider them government or not.” You would think they would want to draw a bright line for their fundraising and would be understanding of their critics.
Obama’s deep and active commitment to ending racial apartheid in the 1980′s is now used as cover for his refusal to oppose gender apartheid: it is all of a piece.
Muslims must enjoy themselves no end when Christian groups and many so-called international organizations come
to them, cup in hand, begging for money. Western money, to be more precise, that has been channeled back from oil exports to U.S. and Europe. Most Western countries are true ‘dhimmi apprentices’, unable or unwilling to go after alternate sources of energy, including oil, to replace imports from areas under Islamic control.
What stuns me, is how few comments there are about this… Anti-Semitism is palpable in Europe, firey hot in the Middle East and becoming mundane in the U.S. Where is the anger or concern? More people are commenting on “Tenure in Academia” than this openly anti-Semitic organization having a respected voice in this country.
WHERE’S THE OUTRAGE??????
If I were a Jew in the U.S., I’d start to worry….
Saudi has over a million Christians (Filipino, Kerala Indians, Africans) and they have no church. Even worshiping in a house church can get them deported…their failure to give this basic human rights to their contract workers is an open secret, but try finding an article about it in the MSM…
What stuns me, is how few comments there are about this… Anti-Semitism is palpable in Europe, firey hot in the Middle East and becoming mundane in the U.S. Where is the anger or concern? More people are commenting on “Tenure in Academia” than this openly anti-Semitic organization having a respected voice in this country.
WHERE’S THE OUTRAGE??????
If I were a Jew in the U.S., I’d start to worry….
Many many years ago, we had neighbors, the Finkelsteins, who warned us incessantly of the day when Jew-hatred would become the rule in America and Europe. The warnings of the Finkelsteins have been borne out.
But Jews in America are so busy trying to forget they are Jews that they don’t want to know about Jew-hatred there or in Europe. For most of them, their “liberal social values” and their being victims of the Holocaust are all that remain of the Torah, Tana”kh, Talmud and Holy Zohar. Such people will disappear. G-d will allow them to escape their destiny, and they will be written out of the Tribe. I didn’t want my wife or sons to be among them. So,
Blessings from the Mountains of Samaria
ISRAEL
Human Rights Watch is not the only pack of liars amongst the “human rights” cabal. the Israeli organization b’tzélem has for years been alleging that the IDF committed “war-crimes” in attacking a Gaza Hamas military outpost, lying through its teeth, saying that innocent civilians were killed. Even though Hamas itself said that those killed were engaged in military activity, B’tzélem kept lying – until recently, when it quietly changed its tune.