Israel Matzav

Human Rights Watch's can of worms

In Wednesday morning's Maariv, Ben Dror Yemini, who, as you may recall, broke the Joe Stork story, attacks the 'can of worms' (link in Hebrew) that Tuesday's Marc Garlasco stories exposed about Human Rights Watch. The original Google translation is here - because I translate professionally, I have done a little editing to clean it up.

Human Rights Watch's can of worms discovered

The most important international protector of human rights is being revealed as a dangerous body. The organization is hiding militarists on the right alongside radicals on the left.

If it were one case, one could argue it was a coincidence. Even two are not proof. But the more about that is disclosed about Human Rights Watch (HRW), the most important international body to protect human rights, the more that it seems that something really stinks there. No, that's not a delicate word, and certainly not diplomatic one. But it is doubtful that there is a better word to describe the can of worms that is gradually being dug up there.

The head of the Middle East and Africa Division - the division responsible for all of the impressive publications against Israel - is Sarah Leah Whitson, who served on the Advisory Board to the Arab American Committee before she came to HRW, and is also a supporter of the [Arab] boycott against Israel. Her assistant is Joe Stork, who was exposed in Maariv as a radical anti-Zionist activist, who opposed any recognition of Israel, and who was a member of an advocacy group that published a notice of support, or at least understanding, for the massacre of [Israeli] athletes in Munich [the 1972 massacre at the Munich Olympics. CiJ].

The NGO MONITOR organization, headed by Professor Gerald Steinberg, has just published a detailed report on HRW that also exposes the systematic bias, the deception, and other figures in the organization, like Lucy Meyer, Reed Brody, Darryl Lee and Nadia Barhoum, whose common feature is radical anti-Israel activism.

They fill positions of "objective judges." Their credibility, as it turns out, is about equivalent to the credibility of al-Qaeda reports on the Zionist movement. The big problem is that their reports garner serious coverage in respected media around the world and in Israel.

There are no sane people there

Now Marc Garlasco, who is HRW's senior military analyst, and who was the linchpin of past poisonous reports against Israel, joins the party. For example, Garlasco is the man who determined that an Israeli shell caused the deaths of an entire Palestinian family in Beit Lahiya, on the Gaza beach, in June 2006, and who made various other charges related to the Second Lebanon War and to Operation Cast Lead. Garlasco has made so many mistakes that they cannot be counted. But he is against Israel. And that is permitted.

It is not clear yet whether Garlasco himself is a Nazi. Those claims deserve close scrutiny, but it seems possible to make do with what we already know. We're talking about a Nazi memorabilia collector. This is not an innocent collection. In many cases, the collectors are expounders of a clear ideology; there are no sane people there.

Garlasco also headed the U.S. military unit that was responsible for targeted assassinations. He was also responsible for the hunt for Saddam Hussein. So how did the targeted assassinations man became a senior member of HRW? How is it that the militarist on the right hides in the den of the radical left? Is it possible that the man whose hobby is Nazi memorabilia also dabbles in a movement whose ideology is the closest thing to the Nazi movement?

The answer lies in what generally binds the extreme left and the extreme right in the wider world: hatred of Jews [Note: The original term here was sinat Yisrael, which Google translated as hatred of Israel, but the term is generally used by Hebrew speakers to mean hatred of Jews. CiJ]. What is clearer is that HRW is being disclosed as a dangerous group, which needs a serious shakeup. Human rights in the world deserve much better protectors than a terrorist-lover like Stork or collectors of Nazi memorabilia, like Garlasco.

Ouch.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 9:13 AM