Surprise: NGO's fabricated accusations against Israel during Second Lebanon War
It's been five years since the Second Lebanon War. In fact, five years ago this past weekend, was the Qana incident, which is one of those discussed in the article to which I am about to point you. It's also where the picture at left took place.Five years is long enough that Professors Avi Bell and Gerald Steinberg have been able to research the claims made by 'human rights' NGO's (principally 'Human Rights Watch' and Amnesty) during the Second Lebanon War. Unsurprisingly, many of the accusations against Israel by those NGO's were fabricated and baseless.
We are now completing a multi-year study of all the HRW and Amnesty allegations regarding the 2006 Lebanon war, and the results so far are shocking. In our systematic and detailed research, supported by the Israel Science Foundation, we found major contradictions as well as numerous unsupported charges, double standards and false or invented “evidence.”Read the whole thing.
In some reports, such as on incidents in the Shiite towns of Srifa and Qana - Hezbollah strongholds from which numerous rocket attacks were launched - the NGOs published wildly inconsistent civilian casualty claims within a few days of each other. Errors were overwhelmingly in one direction; almost without fail, errors consisted of exaggerated Lebanese casualties or unfounded accusations against Israel.
In many incidents, HRW and Amnesty reports initially relied both on Lebanese witnesses and the personal observations of its own “researchers” to deny any Hezbollah military presence in the area of an Israeli strike, while later publications acknowledged that Hezbollah had been present, meaning the witnesses had lied and the NGO researchers were incompetent. Regarding Srifa, even after reducing the number of reported Lebanese casualties from “at least 42” to 26 to 19 before finally settling on 22, HRW found itself forced by critics and the evidence to eventually acknowledge that most of the “civilian” casualties it had “documented” were, in fact, Hezbollah combatants.
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Indeed, in all of the incidents, the lack of reliable sources of information for the HRW and Amnesty accusations against Israel stands out. In each case, it is clear that when HRW and Amnesty issued their initial condemnations of Israel, usually within a few hours of the incident, the organizations had little or no information about the central issues of military necessity and the nature of casualties. And later reports with altered condemnations were based more on conjecture than substantive research.
The most blatant example was the incident in Qana, where Israel responded to heavy Hezbollah rocket attacks with an air raid. One of the buildings was hit and collapsed, causing a number of deaths and injuries. Within hours, HRW blasted a press release in which Executive Director Ken Roth claimed that the "Israeli military is treating southern Lebanon as a free-fire zone, relating to the strike on Qana, killing at least 54 civilians, more than half of them children." HRW then launched a campaign charging Israel with war crimes, with nine separate “reports” and op-eds, as well as press conferences.
HRW’s campaign was echoed in media headlines, creating intense international pressure, and leading Prime Minister Olmert to declare a “48-hour suspension of aerial activity pending an investigation...” A unilateral halt in military action due to unverified NGO allegations was unprecedented, allowed Hezbollah forces to regroup, prolonging the war, and probably costing many lives.
Yet, as our research reveals, HRW had no credible evidence for its claims. Roth, HRW researcher Lucy Mair (who had written propaganda for Electronic Intifada before joining HRW) and others far from the battleground, had inflated civilian casualty claims and erased the Hezbollah attacks that constituted the real war crimes as well as legal justification for Israeli actions. To create the façade of “fact finding”, the initial HRW statement referred to “researchers” in Lebanon, but they provided no names or means to verify HRW’s claims. Later reports either provided no sources or attributed allegations to “witnesses” who could well have been Hezbollah allies or operatives. The allegations that Israel had criminally and deliberately bombed Lebanese civilians were unsourced and false.
As the contradictions emerged, HRW’s Mair admitted that the Lebanese Red Cross had reported 28 dead, including Hezbollah “martyrs,” but HRW chose to continue its false accusations against Israel.
Labels: Amnesty International, human rights NGO's, Human Rights Watch, Second Lebanon War
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 12:30 PM
2 Comments:
The truth, facts and reality will not be heard at the UN or reported in the general media. Once a lie is let loose, it cannot be put back into its cage. The enemies of Israel know this approach all too well (see blood libel, holocaust denial, etc.).
HaShaliach, I saw a rabbi once give a sermon to some kids where he took a tube of toothpaste and squeezed it out onto a plate. Then he told them to imagine that the toothpaste was gossip and lies. Then he handed to tube to one of the kids near him and said, "Now, take back the lies; undo the gossip." And of course, as you say, the lies of the internationals (and others) have their effects and cannot be undone or retracted... especially with the internet now. Even is these people issue a correction (which they rarely do), the damage was done way back at the first instant.
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