Wednesday, December 06, 2023
From Ian:
Gerald M. Steinberg: Bias and Betrayal
Gerald M. Steinberg: Bias and Betrayal
Human Rights Watch (HRW) is routinely described as one of the world’s most powerful non-governmental organisations (NGOs), but it is tainted by a biased political agenda and troubling questions about the ethics of its fundraising. The salience of these problems has only increased in the wake of a high-visibility campaign following the October 7th Hamas massacre, during which 1,200 Israelis were brutally murdered and 240 more were taken hostage.Gadi Taub: Why Israel Is Target #1 of the Global Left
In response to the October 7th atrocities, HRW officials rushed to condemn Israel’s military campaign with repeated accusations of war crimes, apartheid, collective punishment, and similar terms. For a senior employee, who had worked at HRW for 13 years, this response crossed a moral red line, and she circulated a bitter email, confirming the pervasive bias and lack of credibility that have previously been detailed by the organisation’s critics (including this author). In parallel, the publication of a leaked document appeared to show that HRW received $3.75 million from Qatar in 2018, a conflict of interest that casts further doubt on the organisation’s commitment to its stated mission.
These developments raise a number of important questions: How did this organisation, established to promote the principles of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, become a world leader in political propaganda, apparently willing to accept donations from some of the world’s most oppressive and brutal regimes? How did an initial emphasis on detailed and verifiable research reports on global human-rights issues degenerate into narrow political advocacy tracts?
A Changed Mission
In order to understand HRW’s transformation, we should begin with its founding in 1978. The NGO was established by Robert Bernstein, the CEO of a major publishing company, after he returned from a trip to the Soviet Union where he met with prominent dissidents. Three years earlier, Washington and Moscow had signed the Helsinki Accords, which included a commitment to “respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms,” and Bernstein’s new NGO (initially called Helsinki Watch) began by documenting compliance from Moscow. It quickly grew into an influential watchdog, and its reports and other activities brought international pressure to bear first on the Kremlin, and then on dictatorial regimes worldwide as its remit and operations expanded. Unlike other NGOs such as Amnesty International, which relied on claims by activists, HRW produced detailed academic-style research reports based on verifiable information.
Bernstein served as the organisation’s chair until 1998, when he retired from active involvement. Five years earlier, executive director Aryeh Neier had left and Ken Roth was appointed to take his place—a position he would hold until 2022. Following the collapse of the USSR and the end of the Cold War, Roth began to pursue a very different agenda, anchored in an anti-Western, anti-American, and postcolonial ideology that was and remains popular on university campuses. This simplistic perspective divides the world—subjectively and a priori—into opposing groups: aggressor states that are presumptively guilty of aggression and war crimes, and victims who cannot be held accountable for even the most egregious acts of brutality and terror. Under the pretext of promoting human rights, Israel went from being a parliamentary democracy to a neocolonialist oppressor, while Palestinian terrorists—including Hamas—became decolonial activists exercising their legitimate “right of resistance” by murdering hundreds of Israeli citizens.
This ideological shift was only amplified by indications that Roth harbored personal animus toward Zionism, regardless of Israel’s borders or policies, and he repeatedly attacked its use of military power in self-defense. Roth frequently refers to his father’s experience as a child in Nazi Germany (until 1938) to justify these obsessive condemnations, and makes frequent use of his social-media accounts to attack Israel. At times, he even employs a distorted text from the Jewish Bible in an effort to provide his hostility with some Jewish authenticity. In a 2006 letter to the New York Sun, Roth described Israel’s response to a lethal Hezbollah attack as “an eye for an eye” and “the morality of some more primitive moment.” In response, the Sun ran an editorial calling this “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 anti-Semitism.”
Antisemitism has evolved through a breathtaking dialectical leap: It is now conveyed through the lingo of human rights. This is how a host of liberals and progressives—many of them Jews—have been seduced into supporting NGOs that claim to promote human rights, but are in fact promoting a racist view of the Jewish people. They do so by singling out the Jews as the one people not partaking in the universal right to self-determination, and Israel alone among the nations as the one state which has no right to exist. Singling out the Jews for special hostile treatment is, of course, the very definition of antisemitism.Brendan O'Neill: Why Ivy League universities are so blasé about genocide
How has this old-new antisemitism become a legitimate, even respectable position once again? And how did the idea of human rights, which purports to serve as a universal standard, get distorted so badly as to yield an argument for the targeting and exclusion of Jews?
One part of the answer is that academia and the media have created an Industry of Lies, as the title of Israeli leftist journalist Ben-Dror Yemini’s book accurately called it. By using gross double standards, this industry portrays Israel as a uniquely monstrous violator of human rights. The world’s actual egregious violators of human rights—such as China, North Korea, Cuba, Iran, and most of Israel’s neighbors—don’t receive a fraction of the moralizing attention that Israel gets.
But that is not the whole story. Another part of the answer lies in the way the human rights agenda has been channeled globally into undermining national democracies in general. This trend usually presents itself as a critique of nationalism, understood by the global left as proto-fascism permanently poised to break into actual fascism at any moment. The argument is admittedly catchy: If nationalism is particularistic and exclusive, then human rights, which are universal, are the answer. Catchy, that is, only if you conceive of nationalism as a “negation of others,” as opposed to the particular manifestation of a universal right to national self-determination.
What is more troubling is that behind the declared critique of nationalism lies the undeclared attack on democracy. Because to “transcend” nationalism is to “transcend” the nation-state. When those nation-states are democracies, that means “transcending” democracy too. It means undermining the one effective framework by which citizens exercise political control over their common fate. Imposing a universal regime of human rights from above, through international institutions, is therefore a direct attack on the right to elect the government under which one lives—a right which is the single most effective check against tyranny, and therefore the linchpin of liberty and all other human and civil rights.
Both parts of the answer—the demonization of Israel and the attack on democracy—were clearly manifest in the Durban conference of 2001, beginning with its Orwellian title: World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance. The conference turned into a festival of blood libels against the Jewish nation-state—in the name of tolerance, of course. But it also exhibited the rising trend of using the idea of human rights to undermine democracy.
John Fonte was the first to point out, a year after the conference, that the new transnational globalist agenda was utilizing the United Nations and the conference to undermine the principle of government by the consent of the governed. Forty-seven American human rights activists, Fonte noted, sent a petition to the UN’s high commissioner for human rights, under the title “A Call to Action to the United Nations.” The petition demanded that the U.N. impose on the U.S. an agenda that the U.S. government rejected. Fonte went on to write a landmark book, Sovereignty or Submission: Will Americans Rule Themselves or Be Ruled by Others?, detailing the many ways in which new globalist elites are bypassing democratic sovereignty in pursuit of policies that the citizens of democratic nation-states have not consented to.
The case of Israel is most instructive because the general trend of anti-democratic liberalism acquires special poignancy in the one instance where a nation-state’s very right to exist is being questioned. The effort to undermine the Jewish nation-state does not therefore need to camouflage itself. It can be explicit about both its aim and its means: the destruction of Israel in the name of human rights.
Yet it seems clear to me that our shuffling, nervous Ivy League heads have very little in common with yesteryear’s valiant warriors for the liberty to speak. Witness their entirely administrative attitude to the question of genocide-speak. These doyennes of the Byzantine bureaucracy of the 21st-century campus seem obsessed with ‘the rules’. The only way they can understand the profound question of whether genocide advocacy is permissible speech is by referring to their universities’ carefully drawn speech codes. They avoid the immense moral challenge thrown up by a question like ‘Should genocide advocacy enjoy freedom?’ in preference for citing the rulebook. Where liberals of the past thought in deep moral terms, this lot thinks only technically. They end up defending the right to call for genocide for the wrong reasons – not because, in Aryeh Neier’s view, we must defend freedom even for speech we hate, but because they’ve memorised that dusty document in HR’s top drawer that sets out exactly when words become ‘violence’.Why the young are falling for Hamas propaganda
Worse, there’s the double standards. To many observers of yesterday’s hearing, it will have felt nothing short of horrifying that the representatives of campuses overrun by petty and insane forms of censorship should be so chilled about the most racist speech imaginable. What the layman knows of the Anglo-American campus in 2023 is that you can be mobbed and reprimanded and disinvited for the slightest transgressions against correct-think. That students, often with the blessing of administrators, have constructed ‘safe spaces’ in which to hide from the horror of a disagreeable idea. That trigger warnings have been whacked on works of literature to shield students from scary storylines and adult themes. And yet now we see Ivy League presidents essentially saying: ‘Yeah, it’s okay to call for the murder of all Jews.’
Jews, clearly, are not covered by the new moral order in the academy. They do not enjoy the same security from offence that is offered to other identity groups. All of us have the right to a ‘safe space’, ‘a refuge’, where we might feel ‘insulated from pressures, insults and impositions’, says the Penn website. Not Jews, though? They might have to run the gamut of genocidal hate? A ‘sense of belonging’ is ‘critical for students’, says MIT, which is why we ‘strive to create an environment that is welcoming’. But not for Jewish students? They might have to suck up hearing people call for the gassing of their race? Harvard promises to be a ‘safe environment’ for everyone regardless of their ‘race and ethnicity, gender, LGBTQ+ [status]’, etc. And yet Jewish students might hypothetically have to listen to some Goebbels fanboy with blue hair and a Palestinian scarf praying for Jewish extermination? Make it make sense.
Clearly, the safe-space system that now pertains on campuses does not extend to Jews. No safe space for you. No sense of belonging. No shield from triggering. Let’s be clear: Jews are second-class citizens in the modern academy. Where racist regimes of old forbade Jews from entering certain professions or marrying gentiles, the new woke regime denies them access to the new moral conventions – good and ill – of campus life. This is identity politics in action, in all its wickedness and bigotry. This new hyper-racial regime brutally organises people according to their ‘oppression’ or ‘privilege’, offering safety to the former while exposing the latter to ridicule, judgement and, we now know, open calls for their mass slaughter. So where some students are protected from the microaggression of being asked ‘Where are you from?’, Jewish students can be exposed to people calling for Jews to be killed. Thus anti-Semitism is re-institutionalised, under the cover of woke.
What should Jewish students do about their blatantly racist exclusion from campus convention? I agree with Batya Ungar-Sargon: instead of fighting for inclusion in the safe space, they should fight against the safe space. Instead of agitating for their fragility to be respected alongside that of other minority groups, they should revolt against the entire cult of fragility. The hypocrisy, illiberalism and outright racism of the new campus ideologies of ‘safety’ and ‘inclusion’ have been starkly exposed in the aftermath of 7 October, and such a poisonous moral order deserves dismantling, not expansion. It was the academy’s turn against reason and enlightenment that landed us in the horrendous situation where students are not allowed to say a man is not a woman but they can call for every Jew on Earth to be murdered – only with the restoration of reason and enlightenment might sense finally return.
Throughout the Anglo-American world, many young people seem to have thrown in their lot with Hamas. Indeed, a recent poll carried out by More in Common shows that 24 per cent of 18- to 24-year-olds would characterise Hamas as freedom fighters.
That nearly a quarter of Zoomers have chosen to see Hamas, a vicious Islamist terror group, as liberatory heroes is all too telling. It suggests that millions of young people throughout the West identify with a movement that is unambiguously hostile to their society and way of life. Many of those who regard Hamas as freedom fighters are also likely to give more credence to Hamas propaganda than to mainstream news sources. As a result, over 30 per cent of Zoomers now believe the atrocities committed by Hamas on 7 October are a fiction invented by Israel or the West.
There is considerable evidence that even before 7 October young people tended to be more supportive of Palestine than of Israel. After 7 October, Zoomers stood out for being the generation most likely to support anti-Israel protests. These sentiments are particularly prevalent among university students where the caricature of Israel as a ‘settler colony’ holds sway.
So what is it about Gen Z that has encouraged so many of that cohort to sympathise with or even support Hamas? And why are so many young people excusing the atrocities Hamas committed on 7 October or even denying they ever happened?
Many commentators have found a familiar scapegoat. They are blaming Gen Z’s pro-Hamas views on social media, noting the role played by influencers on TikTok and Instagram, or pointing to the huge amounts of pro-Hamas videos and propaganda on these platforms. They also claim that young people are afraid of saying the ‘wrong’ thing about the conflict, in case it leads to being singled out by the vocal pro-Hamas mob.
Social media’s role is no doubt significant. Unlike older members of society, who still get most of their news from mainstream outlets, the younger generation relies on social media to inform themselves about current events. They are thus much more likely to encounter sceptical takes on mainstream reporting. But it’s important not to overstate social media’s influence. A TikTok influencer does not have magical powers that can automatically make young people perceive an atrocity as a blow for freedom.
To understand properly why many young people are so uncritically anti-Israel, we need to look instead at the influence of identity politics. Make no mistake: identitarianism suffuses Gen Z’s worldview. It dominates Anglo-American popular culture. And it has become institutionalised in schools and universities.
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