Human Rights Watch in 2009...

Here's the summary and overview...you can read the rest....

Summary

* Human Rights Watch publications on “Israel and the OPT” comprised 28 percent of its total Mideast output in 2009. Israel received more attention than Iran, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Syria, and other chronic human rights abusers.

* HRW allocated a disproportionate amount of resources to promoting the UN “fact-finding” mission of former board member Richard Goldstone, including statements in support of UN resolutions that condemned Israel. The 34 pro-Goldstone publications out-numbered documents on all the countries in the Middle East, except Israel and Iran.

* Scandals included a fundraising trip to Saudi Arabia, which used HRW’s anti-Israel bias and the specter of the pro-Israel lobby to solicit funds from “prominent members of Saudi society.”

* The revelation that Marc Garlasco, “senior military analyst,” is an avid collector of Nazi memorabilia casts serious doubt on HRW’s credibility and demands a close reexamination of his work for the organization.

* In a New York Times op-ed, HRW founder Robert Bernstein strongly criticized the organization for its anti-Israel bias and for ignoring severe human rights violations in closed societies.

* HRW has taken no action to implement Bernstein’s call to “resurrect itself as a moral force in the Middle East,” or the call from NGO Monitor’s International Advisory Board (including Elie Wiesel and Alan Dershowitz) to “institute a full independent review and reform in the organization.”

* In every instance of scandal and criticism, HRW officials (Roth, Levine, Whitson, etc.) responded with ad hominem attacks and ignored the substance.

Overview

In July 2009, Sarah Leah Whitson, director of the Human Rights Watch Middle East North Africa(MENA) division, explained HRW’s conception of the Middle East:
“In terms of the major human rights concerns in the Middle East I would break them down into two categories … . On the one hand, there’s the general absence of the most basic human rights throughout the Arab world and Iran. And on the other hand … are the ongoing Israeli occupation of the [Palestinian] territories ... as well as Israel’s wars in the region… . There’s a vastly discriminatory system of laws and policies in place that create a system of apartheid under any legal definition.” (emphasis added)

Beyond the ideological distortion inherent in Whitson’s words, an analysis of HRW’s activities in 2009 reflects, as it has in the past, disproportionate attention to the Arab-Israeli conflict: close to 30 percent of HRW publications in the MENA division concerned “Israel and the Occupied Territories.”

In addition to the disproportionate focus on Israel, HRW devoted significant resources to attacking critics and minimizing controversies within the organization, including:

* its disproportionate allocation of resources on the Gaza war;

* its promotion of former HRW board member Richard Goldstone in his UN “fact-finding” mission, including an inordinate number of statements in support of the Goldstone Report and UN resolutions that condemned Israel;

* a fundraising trip to Saudi Arabia led by “senior members” of the organization, including Whitson;

* the revelation that HRW “senior military analyst” Marc Garlasco, who wrote numerous reports on Israel, is an obsessive collector of Nazi memorabilia;

* exposure of the ideological biases of Whitson and MENA Deputy Director Joe Stork;

* a New York Times op-ed by HRW founder Robert Bernstein criticizing the organization for its anti-Israel bias and for ignoring severe human rights violations in closed societies.