5 Things You Should Know About Human Rights Watch’s Report on Israel

cancel2 2022

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As usual, Moonsh'ite attempts to peddle his biased BDS bullshit as factual and objective, it is nothing of the sort


Human Rights Watch released a report Tuesday castigating Israel. The hatchet job is only the latest chapter in an anti-Israel campaign by the once reputable watchdog group, which five years ago tapped a longtime anti-Israel activist as its director in that region.

HRW frequently levels baseless accusations against Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East, while victims of authoritarian regimes in Iran, Syria, and Yemen consistently get a pass.

Here are five things you should know about Human Rights Watch and its outrageous report.


  1. Flawed Report
The 217-page report with 867 footnotes gives the appearance of a weighty and well documented discourse. But its arguments are baseless and sometimes border on antisemitism.

It points to Israel’s Law of Return—the assurance offered to Jews around the world that they will always find a haven and a home in Israel—as an example of Israel’s discrimination, ignoring the fact that similar laws exist in numerous democracies around the world and implicitly challenging Israel’s identity as a Jewish state.

The report also accuses the Israeli government of human rights abuses in the West Bank and Gaza, but fails to note Hamas’s stated intention to wipe Israel off the map or Israel’s need to defend itself against a constant barrage of terrorist attacks from next door. In fact, the words “Palestinian terrorism” do not appear a single time in the entire document.


  1. The Man Behind the Report
The report’s primary author is Omar Shakir, HRW’s Israel/Palestine director, who signed a pledge in 2015 to “honor the BDS call.” The founder and leader of the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement has stated openly that his movement aims to see Israel dismantled as a Jewish state and BDS activists have achieved notoriety around the world for attacking Jews and Jewish institutions.

Israel expelled Shakir for violating a 2017 law that bars BDS supporters from entering the country. At the time, then-Strategic Affairs Minister Gilad Erdan said Shakir “reveals the true face of boycott activists… even when they present a false pose of ‘human rights activists.’”

An analysis of Shakir’s Twitter activity by the watchdog group NGO Monitor between June 2018 and February 2019 showed 970 tweets on issues relating to the Arab-Israeli conflict. Of those 970 tweets, 18 condemned alleged Israeli attacks on Palestinians, but not one condemned terrorist attacks against Israel.

Exclusive AJC eBook – Behind the Boycott: The History of the Hateful Campaign Against Israel


  1. Faces of HRW
The animus toward Israel and disregard for antisemitism extends to the organization’s highest levels. In 2004, Executive Director Ken Roth declined an invitation from former Israeli Minister Natan Sharansky to participate in the Global Forum on Antisemitism, dismissing deepening concerns about antisemitism in Europe by writing that “we tend to focus on violence… For [antisemitism] to be a human rights violation one would need to see governments in Europe either embracing antisemitism [or] condoning antisemitic violence.”

Two years later, Roth criticized Israel’s conduct in the Second Lebanon War with an antisemitic slur of his own. “An eye for an eye – or, more accurately in this case, twenty eyes for an eye – may have been the morality of some more primitive moment. But it is not the morality of international humanitarian law,” he wrote in July 2006.

“To suggest that Judaism is a "primitive" religion incompatible with contemporary morality is to engage in supersessionism, the de-legitimization of Judaism, the basis of much anti-Semitism,” The New York Sun wrote in an editorial at the time.

In 2009, HRW bizarrely defended its senior military analyst Marc Garlasco following revelations that he was an avid collector of Nazi memorabilia and had even authored a book about Nazi-era medals. According to The Guardian, Garlasco once commented that a leather SS jacket made “my blood go cold it is so COOL!”

Eventually, HRW stopped defending Garlasco. He was suspended and HRW announced an investigation into the matter. Shortly thereafter he resigned from the agency. But none of the vehemently anti-Israel reports he produced, including about the alleged use of white phosphorus munitions in Gaza, have been removed from circulation or recalled for review.

Khulood Badawi, currently HRW’s “Israel and East Jerusalem Consultant,” lost her job with the UN Office for Coordinated and Humanitarian Affairs after tweeting a photo of a Palestinian girl who, Badawi said, “had been killed by the IDF during the 2012 shelling of Gaza.” In fact, the photo—tweeted under the caption “Long live Palestine”—had been taken six years earlier and had nothing to do with Israel. HRW hired her after her record of anti-Israel propaganda was already widely known.


  1. Hostility and Hypocrisy
Hostility and hypocrisy are HRW’s hallmarks when it comes to Israel. While HRW keeps tabs on human rights abuses in 100 countries around the world, Roth focuses much of his social media vitriol on Israel.

The former federal prosecutor shares false news articles with unverified sources, refers to Israel’s actions in Gaza as “war crimes” and “indiscriminate,” and denies that Hamas uses its own citizens as human shields. He also insults those who speak out against the rise of global antisemitism.
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As Israeli military shoots and kills Palestinians at Gaza border protest https://t.co/gVkwii2rMg here's @HRW's response: pic.twitter.com/k4NqFEC7ZS
— Kenneth Roth (@KenRoth) March 30, 2018
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Human Rights Watch disregards repeated rockets fired from Gaza by Hamas and flare-ups of aggression from Hezbollah on the Israel-Lebanon border. Both proxies of Iran have openly declared their intentions to wipe Israel off the map and murder Jews. This incitement to genocide is a violation of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. But you won’t hear that from HRW.


  1. Failing Their Founder
Even HRW’s founder, before his death, was appalled by what he saw happening to his beloved organization. Robert Bernstein, chairman of Human Rights Watch from 1978 to 1998, lamented that HRW had drifted from its mission of monitoring closed societies and authoritarian regimes. He questioned the misguided rationale that led HRW to disproportionately target the only democracy in the Middle East rather than regimes that repress, imprison, and kill their own citizens.

“Human Rights Watch has lost critical perspective on a conflict in which Israel has been repeatedly attacked by Hamas and Hezbollah, organizations that go after Israeli citizens and use their own people as human shields,” he wrote. “Only by returning to its founding mission and the spirit of humility that animated it can Human Rights Watch resurrect itself as a moral force in the Middle East and throughout the world.”

https://www.ajc.org/news/5-things-you-should-know-about-human-rights-watchs-report-on-israel
 
NGO Monitor calls out Moonshi'ite's bullshit as well!! Yet the duplicitous, deceitful, deceptive dickhead thinks we are all naive and ignorant.

As Executive Director of Human Rights Watch (HRW) since 1993, Ken Roth has transformed HRW into a platform for targeting Israel. Under his leadership, HRW claimed expertise in international law, the laws of armed conflict (LOAC), and responses to terrorism. On this basis, disproportionate efforts to isolate the Jewish state through false allegations of “war crimes” and “collective punishment” were central to HRW’s agenda.

Political Activity

Roth and many of his staffers have lobbied for boycotts of, divestment from, and sanctions against Israeli institutions and businesses and companies doing business in Israel (BDS) for two decades, including active participation in the 2001 NGO Forum where this strategy was first adopted and support for the earliest church divestment campaigns.

Roth and HRW are among the core advocates for the UN HRC database (“BDS blacklist”) of private companies. The blacklist selectively targets Israel apart from all other countries, is aimed at economically damaging companies that are owned by Jews or do business with Israel, and is ultimately meant to harm the Jewish state. In March 2019, Roth tweeted, “Israel’s expanding settlements underscore why the UN database of businesses facilitating them must be published. Each delay further entrenches corporate involvement in these systematic rights abuses.”

In November 2018, following Airbnb’s initial announcement that is would remove Jewish listings from the West Bank, which was the result of a two-year long coordinated and well-financed BDS campaign targeting Airbnb (and Booking.com), Roth tweeted, “It’s not anti-Semitism for @Airbnb to want nothing more to do with filling ‘the pockets of a handful of vacation profiteers on stolen land, trading in stolen goods’–the Israeli settlements.”

Since March 30, 2018, Hamas and other Palestinian terror groups have organized violent confrontations along Gaza’s border with Israel under the label of the “March of Return.” Roth accused Israel of a “bloodbath,” and expressed his dismay that there has been “nary a scratch on the Israeli side.”

In November 2017, Roth expressed support for US legislation to sanction Israel by restricting military aid, using false allegations of abusing Palestinian children. According to Roth, “US has enormous leverage to press Israel to stop its discriminatory abuse of Palestinian children. It should use it.”

In September 2014, Roth blamed Israel for causing the attacks on Jews in Germany and the rise of antisemitism in Europe.

During the 2014 Gaza war, Roth promoted a highly propagandistic advertisement allegedly published by the fringe International Jewish AntiZionist Network in The New York Times and The Guardian equating “Nazi genocide” with “the massacre of Palestinians in Gaza.”
Roth retweeted another post which included the tagline “‘Never again’ must mean NEVER AGAIN FOR ANYONE!”

In a response to criticism of HRW’s false allegations during the 2006 Lebanon war, Roth used a classic antisemitic Biblical reference to attack Israel: “An eye for an eye – or, more accurately in this case, twenty eyes for an eye – may have been the morality of some more primitive moment. But it is not the morality of international humanitarian law…” The New York Sun decried this statement as “a slur on the Jewish religion itself that is breathtaking in its ignorance…To suggest that Judaism is a ‘primitive’ religion incompatible with contemporary morality is to engage in supersessionism, the de-legitimization of Judaism, the basis of much antisemitism.”


https://www.ngo-monitor.org/fact-sheet-ken-roth/
 
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Nah ... just your damned facts get in the way ... try to quit factualizing ... and maybe you can get 'mooned' again

To reiterate, HRW is deeply anti-Semitic. So much so that their latest report was written by a Palestinian belonging to BDS. Of course Moonshi'ite will never tell you that.
 
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