Jihadi Rights Watch
The Times has a piece on what happens when a human rights organization goes bad. Human Rights Watch has been a relentless critic of Israel and the United States.
Some conflict zones get much more coverage than others. For instance, HRW has published five heavily publicised reports on Israel and the Palestinian territories since the January 2009 war.In 20 years they have published only four reports on the conflict in Indian-controlled Kashmir, for example, even though the conflict has taken at least 80,000 lives in these two decades, and torture and extrajudicial murder have taken place on a vast scale. Perhaps even more tellingly, HRW has not published any report on the postelection violence and repression in Iran more than six months after the event.
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“They are thinking about how it’s going to be used politically in Washington. And it’s not a priority for them because Iran is just not a bad guy that they are interested in highlighting. Their hearts are not in it. Let’s face it, the thing that really excites them is Israel.”
This led to the criticism of the organization by the groups founder, Robert Bernstein, in the New York Times.
“Nowhere is this (bias) more evident than its work in the Middle East,” he wrote. “The region is populated by authoritarian regimes with appalling human-rights records. Yet in recent years Human Rights Watch has written far more condemnations of Israel… than of any other country in the region.”
The article in The Times also mentions Amnesty International’s alliance with the Cageprisoners – a program run by Taliban spokesman Moazzam Begg – and Human Rights Watch’s fund raising campaign in Saudi Arabia. I suppose freedom of religion and the equality of the sexes aren’t human rights worth watching by the group – at least when petrodollars are at stake and Jews still walk the earth.
UPDATE 4/29/2010:
The New Republic has a feature article on the same subject.
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