Prominent supporters of Israel back removing MEK from terror list
Some prominent supporters of Israel, including Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz, former Canadian Justice Minister Irwin Cotler and Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel, have called for
removing Iranian opposition group Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK) from the list of designated terror groups.
On the record, the people involved insist there is no Israel element to what they say is a humanitarian endeavor to remove the movement’s followers from danger.
“I don’t see any Israel issue at all,” Dershowitz told JTA in an interview, instead casting it in terms of Hillel’s dictum, “If I am only for myself, who am I?”
Off the record, however, figures close to the campaign use another ancient Middle Eastern dictum to describe the involvement of pro-Israel groups: “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”
A source close to the effort to bring pro-Israel voices into the initiative cited reports that Israel has allied with the MEK, which reportedly maintains agents in Iran and in the past has published details of Iran’s nuclear weapons program.
The organized pro-Israel community, however, has been reluctant to sign on. One official at a pro-Israel group said pushing to de-list MEK without a full review could undercut efforts to keep groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah on the list.
“They're listed as a terrorist group, and until the U.S. government says otherwise, we’re not going to deal with them,” said the official, whose group otherwise counsels a tough posture against the Iranian regime.
The MEK, an Iranian exile group that some accuse of being a cult, has maintained a presence in Iraq since 1986, when Saddam Hussein welcomed it as a useful thorn in the side of his deadly enemy. From its border encampment, Camp Ashraf, it conducted operations against the theocracy in Iran. The MEK claims to have ended military activities in 2001.
Subsequent to the 2003 U.S.-led invasion that removed Saddam, Camp Ashraf disarmed as a condition of maintaining its presence in the country.
Read the whole thing. Supporters of delisting the MEK include John Bolton, Rudolph Giuliani, former Attorney General Michael Mukasey and many others.
Labels: Alan Dershowitz, Elie Wiesel, Iranian nuclear threat, Irwin Cotler, MEK
Robert Bernstein's new baby
Some of you may recall that a few months ago
Robert Bernstein attacked Human Rights Watch - an organization that he founded - for going off course in the Middle East.
A lot of people thought that was the end of Bernstein and that he'd never be heard from again. But at 88, Bernstein has the energy of a much younger man. He's starting a
new human rights organization that will do it his way.
In late February, Bernstein launched Advancing Human Rights, a new organization meant to act as a corrective, one that hopes to return human rights to what Bernstein thinks are its forgotten fundamental principles. Among its board members are Yelena Bonner, the Soviet dissident and wife of Andrei Sakharov, and Irwin Cotler, the former Canadian minister of justice.
Natan Sharansky, the onetime jailed refusenik and human rights activist who is now chairman of the Jewish Agency for Israel, is an old friend of Bernstein’s. When Bernstein was head of Random House, he published Sharansky’s memoir, “Fear No Evil.” And the two share the assessment that human rights organizations have gone astray.
“It’s not every day when someone at the age of 88 realizes that the child he brought up has betrayed him, and decides to raise a new child,” Sharansky said.
The stated mandate of the new group is broader than Bernstein’s initial complaint, though it stems from it. AHR will be focused on the struggles of dissidents in closed, autocratic societies, like those in the Middle East and China. Bernstein wants the group to more closely promote those rights enshrined in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights — specifically women’s rights and free speech — as opposed to the Geneva Convention and the other laws of warfare, which he thinks should be outside the purview of a human rights organization.
But underneath this new mandate, the clear motivating factor for Bernstein’s new initiative is his concern for Israel. It rises to the surface as soon as he is asked about the point of starting yet another human rights organization: Israel, as a democratic, open society, should not be under constant investigation by human rights groups, he said. The country and the way it wages war need to be better explained and defended.
Read the whole thing. Note that in this post, I don't have to talk about human rights in scare quotes.
Labels: human rights, Irwin Cotler, Natan Sharansky, Robert Bernstein, Yelena Bonner
Some prominent supporters of Israel, including Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz, former Canadian Justice Minister Irwin Cotler and Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel, have called for removing Iranian opposition group Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK) from the list of designated terror groups. 
