Israel Matzav

Anatomy of a blood libel

On Thursday, I discussed a Human Rights Watch report that accuses Israel of killing eleven 'Palestinians' who were holding white flags in seven different incidents over the course of Operation Cast Lead. For good measure, most of those killed were allegedly children. Later in the day, I posted a video released by the IDF, which shows a Hamas terrorist hiding among white-flag-wielding 'Palestinians.' With aerial surveillance, Israel was able to identify and arrest this particular terrorist.

Some of you may be wondering how Human Rights Watch is able to consistently produce such one-sided reports while maintaining an air of impartiality. Noah Pollak explains.

And who wrote the report? A charming fellow named Joe Stork, who is HRW’s deputy director for its Middle East programs, which in practice means the deputy director of HRW’s campaign to criminalize the Jewish state. HRW would like to create the impression that Stork is part forensic specialist, part human-rights expert. But he is neither. He is among the harshest of anti-Israel partisans. Here is some information on Stork’s pre-HRW activities from a JCPA report:

[HRW executive director Kenneth] Roth, in turn, brought in Joe Stork, who served for many years as editor of the Middle East Report, which had (and still has) a very explicit political agenda strongly biased against Israeli (and U.S.) policies. Stork was a core member of the Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP), described by B’nai B’rith as “a propaganda mill of the Far Left,” which openly called for Israel’s destruction. MERIP Reports carried laudatory interviews with terrorist leaders and other activists distributed literature (including PLO buttons, posters, and flags), and MERIP’s anti-Israeli assault reflected the standard Marxist anti-imperialist analysis.

Stork wrote repeatedly on “the origins of the State of Israel and its war with the people of the Middle East.” After the murder of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics in Munich, MERIP issued a flyer stating: “Munich and similar actions cannot create or substitute for a mass revolutionary movement, but we should comprehend the achievement of the Munich action. . . . It has provided an important boost in morale among Palestinians in the camps.”

That HRW would hire someone with Stork’s résumé as a reporter on Israel tells you everything you need to know about HRW’s mission.

Some of you may recall that in the first post linked above, I questioned why a forensic pathologist would examine a survivor. That's all part of the same game of throwing around impressive sounding words that have no basis in fact.

Read the whole thing.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 1:19 PM