I recently posted about a report by Human Rights Watch, called the “White Flags” report, which accuses Israeli soldiers of deliberately killing 11 civilians waving white “surrender” flags.

I then posted a followup containing an interesting detail about how the author of the HRW report, Joe Stork, supported the Munich Massacre, has repeatedly called for the destruction of the State of Israel, and is a long-time supporter of Palestinian terror.

Now, another interesting detail somewhat relevant to this story came to my attention: here is some aerial footage taken of a Hamas terrorist lying in wait for Israeli soldiers and planting an IED (Improvised Explosive Device), then climbing into a house containing civilians. Later, the civilians, along with the Hamas terrorist, exit the house waiving a white flag, with the terrorist attempting to take cover under that very flag.

This is the kind of criminal warfare that Israel is dealing with on a daily basis.

I recently posted about a report by Human Rights Watch, called the “White Flags” report, which accuses Israeli soldiers of deliberately killing 11 civilians waving white “surrender” flags. In that post, I listed seven fundamental deficiencies and inconsistences that NGO Monitor found with HRW’s report and with their accompanying publicity campaign.

Now, Maariv is reporting that Joe Stork, who presented the White Flags report, is a veteran anti-Israel activist who supported the Munich massacre of Israeli athletes. He has repeatedly called for the destruction of the State of Israel and is a long-time supporter of Palestinian terror.

That should speak volumes about the “impartiality” of “human rights organizations” like HRW. The fact that someone so radical, so callous to the idea of human life—someone who supports the murder of innocent civilians— is affiliated in any way with a “human rights organization” is not just a travesty, but also makes complete fools and idiots out of anyone willing to pay them any attention or lend them any credibility.

NGO Monitor analyzes Human Rights Watch’s recent “White Flags” report, which accuses Israeli soldiers of deliberately killing 11 civilians waving white “surrender” flags. NGO Monitor points out seven fundamental deficiencies and inconsistences with HRW’s report and their accompanying publicity campaign:

• HRW had no presence in Gaza during the conflict.  Therefore, the organization’s Gaza ‘reports’, including “White Flag Deaths” are based entirely on unverifiable claims wrapped in a façade of research.
• The report’s co-author Joe Stork is a veteran anti-Israel political activist and the antithesis of a professional legal analyst. Before joining HRW, he was a leader of MERIP (Middle East Research and Information Project), whose publications have carried laudatory interviews with terrorist leaders and urged socialists to “comprehend the achievements” of the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre.
• HRW’s publication fails to investigate incidents in which “white flags”, ambulances and hospitals were used by Hamas to hide military activity. Instead, the entire report is designed to provide “evidence” of alleged Israeli war crimes (a term used 15 times).
• This publication relies on Palestinian ‘eyewitness’ testimony, such as the claims of Khalid Abd Rabbo. But Abd Rabbo’s testimony in other  reports is highly inconsistent, and fails to provide the information necessary for a serious analysis.
• Six of the seven alleged incidents are based on the unprovable ‘evidence’ from journalists or NGOs with highly biased agendas, including Breaking the Silence, Al Mezan and Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR).
• “White Flag Deaths”, like other HRW “research reports” goes out of its way to reject the well-documented utilization of human shields by Hamas. (In contrast, in an interview with the Jerusalem Post, Bill Van Esveld acknowledged this evidence. This glaring inconsistency further demonstrates the framework of HRW’s activities with respect to Israel.)
• The report cites medical and ballistic records as ‘evidence’ of alleged white flag incidents, but these claims provide no information on the circumstances of the injuries, and are irrelevant to HRW’s claims.

NGO Monitor’s President, Prof Gerald Steinberg said, “This is another HRW publication that substitutes speculation for serious research.  The text reflects HRW’s consistent pattern with regard to the Middle East, with condemnation of Israel as its starting point, particularly in relation to the Gaza conflict.  It is further evidence, if any were needed following the Saudi fundraising dinner that HRW is more interested in targeting Israel than in promoting universal human rights”.

AFP recently posted a story about a report filed by the anti-Israel group, Human Rights Watch, which interestingly enough, on the face of it, seems to stand for human rights as it condemns Hamas for firing rockets deliberately and indiscriminately at Israeli cities.

However, “on the face of it” is exactly that. Just the face of it. Underneath the surface, one can’t help but question a lot of the actual contents of the report, that which is glossed over by the AFP story. NGO monitor, though, took the time to put together a list of 6 fundamental questions regarding the contents of the report.

Here’s their analysis:

Jerusalem based research organization NGO Monitor has reviewed Human Rights Watch’s (HRW) report (“Rockets From Gaza”) on Hamas’ rocket fire on Israel’s civilian population.

While the report clearly finds Hamas guilty of war crimes and acknowledges “the psychological toll of years of rocket attacks” on Israelis, a number of questions need to be addressed:

1. Why did it take HRW 6 months to issue a report that covers no new ground and largely repeats the International Crisis Group’s report of April 2009? In the interval, HRW issued two publications condemning Israel. NGO Monitor’s detailed analysis of HRW’s report on Israel’s use of drones can be found here.
2. Why does HRW perpetuate the “balance” between terrorist groups and their targets?  (“Whether it is Hamas’ claims of the ‘right to resist occupation’ or Israel’s of the right ‘to combat terror’, the reasons for engaging in armed conflict do not permit a party to ignore its legal obligations in the way it conducts hostilities.”)
3. Why did HRW fail to condemn Hamas for extensive use of human shields?  What is the basis for the claim that Hamas “did not…force civilians to remain in areas in close proximity to rocket launching sites”?
4. Why is Israel absurdly blamed for Hamas’ rocket fire from populated areas?  According to HRW, Hamas “redeployed from more open and outlying regions – many of which were…controlled by Israeli ground forces…into densely populated urban areas”.  In other words, Israel’s operation against the rocket fire is blamed for the Hamas violations of the laws of war.  And numerous rocket attacks from these same urban areas – long before the IDF operation – is not mentioned.
5. Why is there no effort to uncover details of weapons smuggling into Gaza, and no mention of Iran? When HRW published speculative allegations on Israel’s use of drones and white phosphorous, they emphasized US military assistance.
6. Why does HRW continue to falsify the history in order to attack Israel? This report blames Israel for the end of the ceasefire — “These attacks virtually stopped…but resumed after Israeli forces killed six Palestinian fighters…on November 4, 2008”.  This version ignores the fact that Israel was responding to tunnels being completed and suggestions of another kidnapping attempt.

NGO Monitor’s President Prof Gerald Steinberg suggested some answers: “While containing no new information, this report might have had an impact if HRW published it six months ago. The fact that it is only now on their agenda exposes their biased priorities. The timing might indicate HRW’s effort to use this report to divert attention from the Saudi fundraising controversy, and as a fig leaf to cover the disproportionate focus on Israel.

On the substance, HRW failed to indict Hamas for turning the entire Gaza population into one massive human shield, and ‘researchers’ need to explain why they did not investigate the sources of the ‘smuggled’ rockets or to mention Iran. In contrast, when condemning Israel on a very thin factual foundation, HRW officials consistently criticize the American security relationship and arms transfers”.

Another thing that I find interesting (related to Question #3), is that the AFP report quotes HRW programme director Iain Levine as saying, “Hamas forces violated the laws of war both by firing rockets deliberately and indiscriminately at Israeli cities and by launching them from populated areas and endangering Gazan civilians.” However, as you can see from Question #3, the report states that Hamas “did not…force civilians to remain in areas in close proximity to rocket launching sites.”

I recently blogged about the trip Human Rights Watch took to Saudi Arabia to raise money for their crusade against Israel. I, of course, was only one of many writing and blogging about this and apparently the response got under the skin of HRW. So much so, in fact, that Middle East director Sarah Leah Whitson went so far as to call the criticism “racist” and that “we report on Israel. Its supporters fight back with lies and deception.”

Noah Pollak took the time to respond to Whitson’s offensively stupid comments in the Wall Street Journal:

The facts tell a different story. From 2006 to the present, Human Rights Watch’s reports on the Israeli-Arab conflict have been almost entirely devoted to condemning Israel, accusing it of human rights and international law violations, and demanding international investigations into its conduct. It has published some 87 criticisms of Israeli conduct against the Palestinians and Hezbollah, versus eight criticisms of Palestinian groups and four of Hezbollah for attacks on Israel. (It also published a small number of critiques of both Israel and Arab groups, and of intra-Palestinian fighting.)

It was during this period that more than 8,000 rockets and mortars were fired at Israeli civilians by Palestinian terrorist groups in Gaza. Human Rights Watch’s response? In November 2006 it said that the Palestinian Authority “should stop giving a wink and a nod to rocket attacks.” Two years later it urged the Hamas leadership “to speak out forcefully against such [rocket] attacks . . . and bring to justice those who are found to have participated in them.”

In response to the rocket war and Hamas’s violent takeover of Gaza in June 2007, Israel imposed a partial blockade of Gaza. Human Rights Watch then published some 28 statements and reports on the blockade, accusing Israel in highly charged language of an array of war crimes and human rights violations. One report headline declared that Israel was “choking Gaza.” Human Rights Watch has never recognized the difference between Hamas’s campaign of murder against Israeli civilians and Israel’s attempt to defend those civilians. The unwillingness to distinguish between aggression and self-defense blots out a fundamental moral fact—that Hamas’s refusal to stop its attacks makes it culpable for both Israeli and Palestinian casualties.

Meanwhile, Egypt has also maintained a blockade on Gaza, although it is not even under attack from Hamas. Human Rights Watch has never singled out Egypt for criticism over its participation in the blockade.

The organization regularly calls for arms embargoes against Israel and claims it commits war crimes for using drones, artillery and cluster bombs. Yet on Israel’s northern border sits Hezbollah, which is building an arsenal of rockets to terrorize and kill Israeli civilians, and has placed that arsenal in towns and villages in hopes that Lebanese civilians will be killed if Israel attempts to defend itself. The U.N. Security Council has passed resolutions demanding Hezbollah’s disarmament and the cessation of its arms smuggling. Yet while Human Rights Watch has criticized Israel’s weapons 15 times, it has criticized Hezbollah’s twice.

In the Middle East, Human Rights Watch does not actually function as a human-rights organization. If it did, it would draw attention to the plight of Palestinians in Arab countries. In Lebanon, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are warehoused in impoverished refugee camps and denied citizenship, civil rights, and even the right to work. This has received zero coverage from the organization.

In 2007, the Lebanese Army laid siege to the Nahr al-Bared Palestinian refugee camp for over three months, killing hundreds. Human Rights Watch produced two anemic press releases. At this very moment, Jordan is stripping its Palestinians of citizenship without the slightest protest from the organization. Unfortunately, Human Rights Watch seems only to care about Palestinians when they can be used to convince the world that the Jewish state is actually a criminal state.

David Bernstein writes in the Wall Street Journal about Human Rights Watch’s recent trip to Saudi Arabia. No, not to investigate or denounce human rights violations there, but rather to raise money to ratchet up their propaganda war against Israel. Yes, they were actually there, cap in hand, to beg the slave-owning, anti-Semitic, Christian-persecuting misogynists there for money to fight Israel’s “human rights violations”.

As Bernstein puts it:

There is something wrong when a human rights organization goes to one of the worst countries in the world for human rights to raise money to wage lawfare against Israel, and says not a word during the trip about the status of human rights in that country.

I wonder how many get-out-of-jail-free cards that buys the Saudis with HRW (and if those cards are honored also by Amnesty International… or should the Saudis buy similar credits separately with Amnesty International?).

UPDATE
Israel’s Prime Minister’s office had some choice words to say about this. “A human rights organization raising money in Saudi Arabia is like a women’s rights group asking the Taliban for a donation,” said Mark Regev, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s spokesman. ”If you can fundraise in Saudi Arabia, why not move on to Somalia, Libya and North Korea? For an organization that claims to offer moral direction, it appears that Human Rights Watch has seriously lost its moral compass.”

Steven Plaut, a professor, writer, and blogger living in Haifa recently posted on his blog the eye-catching headline: “L.A. Times runs a pro-settlement column!”.  Naturally, I had to check it out.

While the headline was technically accurate, what he must have missed was the fact that the L.A. Times also simultaneously ran not one, but two, anti-settlement columns at the same time!  And, not surprisingly, the one that got top billing was the blatantly anti-settlement one (the other anti-settlement column was disguised as a “guide to the settlements”, which was laden with anti-settlement spin).

L.A. Times Opinion, June 28, 2009

As you can see from the screenshot above of their web site today, the top billing goes to Sarah Leah Whitson, an apparent anti-Israel Jew working for Human Rights Watch.  The pro-settlement piece by Yisrael Medad, a Shiloh resident, is listed almost as an afterthought, along with another anti-settlement piece by Gershon Gorenberg, another apparent anti-Israel Jew, who deceptively disguises his anti-settlement spin piece as a “guide”.

In any case, I strongly encourage everyone to read “In Defense of ‘Settlements’”, by Yisrael Medad, as it’s a thoughtful and intelligent piece.

Arutz Sheva reports that Human Rights Watch, the group that usually takes aim at Israel based on any number of Palestinian-propagandist rumors, has finally decided to address a real human rights issue, namely, the kidnapping of Gilad Shalit by Hamas, who has been held prisoner with virtually no contact with the outside world for three years now.

HRW said that his treatment “may amount to torture” which—although a bit wishy-washy when compared with their usual unqualified condemnations of Israel—is at least a step in the right direction.

Now, the real question is whether or not they will follow up with this and beat this drum as persistently as they do when lambasting Israel. Judging by the three long years it took them to finally pick up this issue in the first place, let’s just say I’m not putting any bets on it.

And that’s also aside from the fact that they’re merely demanding for him to have the right to communicate with his family. They say, “Hamas authorities have no excuse for cutting off Shalit from his family and the outside world for three years.”  Notice that they say nothing of Hamas kidnapping him and holding him captive in the first place.

Apparently, according to this “human rights group”, it’s okay to kidnap someone and hold him for three years with no crime, no trial, nothing… but if they take away his phone call, then that’s crossing the line.