Posted by David Bernstein:
Daniel Levy's Defense of Human Rights Watch:
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2009_07_19-2009_07_25.shtml#1248146595
You can read it here. Levy writes:
The apparent trigger for this assault on a group that represents
the global gold standard in human rights monitoring, analysis, and
advocacy, was a visit by HRW's Middle East-North Africa director,
Sarah Lee Whitson, to the Saudi kingdom. I happened to find myself
on a panel at The Century Foundation discussing the Middle East
with Whitson just days before this storm broke -- I went back and
watched tapes of that panel discussion. To accuse Whitson of being
soft on the Saudis or somehow singling out Israel for criticism is
quite astonishing as I'm sure you'll agree if you take ten minutes
to listen to her presentation -- of that, more in a moment.
Okay, so I listened. If you have any illusions about HRW's neutrality
re Israel and its neighbors, you should to.
Whitson had a fifteen-minute presentation. She spends approximately
three minutes and thirty-five seconds describing Israel's alleged
violations of international law and human rights. Her presentation of
the relevant facts and relevant international law is tendentious in
the extreme. She accuses Israel of apartheid. She consistently refers
to the wars in Lebanon and Gaza as "Israel's wars," even though,
obviously, they were fought against foes that were launching
cross-border attacks against Israel's civilian population and which
declare themselves to be at war with Israel. She accuses Israel of war
crimes, including "indiscriminate" bombing of South Lebanon, which,
given the law civilian casualty in the second Lebanon War--even
Hezbollah puts the total in the high hundreds, while Israel says low
hundreds out of a population of hundreds of thousands--from a nation
with one of the most powerful air forces in the world, is absurd.
And after Whitson's several minute-long exhaustive survey of Israel's
alleged sins, she spends approximately twelve seconds on Hamas and
Hezbollah, and this is the total of what she said: "of course there
are also violations of international humanitarian law by the armed
groups that are fighting Israel, namely Hamas and Hezbollah, but of
course there are armed groups that have been in conflict with them
[sorry this isn't coherent--ed.]. And that's something Human Rights
Watch has documented." That's it. After the exhaustive list of
Israel's alleged crimes, no mention of suicide murders, indiscriminate
(really indiscriminate) lobbing of missiles by both Hezbollah and
Hamas into Israel, or the kidnapping and murder of Israeli soldiers.
No mention of Hamas's reign of terror against Christian Palestinians,
Hezbollah's threat to democracy in Lebanon, no mention of Islamic
Jihad at all, no mentions of the Syrian and Iranian state sponsorship
of terrorism, and so forth and so on.
She then spends several more minutes criticizing U.S. aid to Israel,
Egypt, and Jordan, with additional specific criticisms of Israel
thrown in, and suggests the U.S. should be nicer to Hamas and less
supportive of Fatah.
And note that this was a speech to an American audience. God knows
what she said in Saudi Arabia. And God knows what she thinks
privately, as opposed to what she reveals publicly. Somehow Levy
hasn't persuaded me that this speech shows that Whitson doesn't single
out Israel for criticism.
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