America's leading human rights organisation has accused Israel and its supporters of an "organised campaign" of false allegations and misinformation, including "extremely personal attacks" on its staff, in an attempt to discredit the group over its reports of war crimes in Gaza. Iain Levine, HRW's programme director, said that while the organisation had long attracted criticism, in recent months there had been significant attempts to intimidate and discredit it. "I really hesitate to use words like conspiracy, but there is a feeling that there is an organised campaign, and we're seeing from different places what would appear to be co-ordinated attacks ... from some of the language and arguments used it would seem as if there has been discussion," he said."We are having to spend a lot of time repudiating the lies, the falsehoods, the misinformation."Isn't it a shame that HRW has to spend time defending its positions rather than being believed uncritically? All together now....Awwww! Although I was tragically not mentioned by name, I am an integral part of the nefarious anti-NGO conspiracy. After all, I was the one who noticed Marc Garlasco's interesting hobby of collecting Nazi memorabilia, information that I shared with other bloggers in an illegal secret Zionist underground information channel known as "email." I didn't have the time to exhaustively research it all, and Omri Ceren of Mere Rhetoric took the story and ran with it (with my full support.) My later contributions to the story included the sock-puppets that HRW sent out to defend themselves and the picture of Garlasco wearing the Iron Cross sweatshirt (which I believe someone else found first and alerted me to.) [And now Omri has a radio show, where such information can be shared with even more people! See how deep our Zio-connections are?] Notably, even then the Guardian quoted HRW implying some sort of blog conspiracy when the story broke. One has to wonder if, say, HRW and Amnesty and the UNHRC and the PCHR and Al Mezan and Al Addameer share information with each other - and whether this is a terrible conspiracy as well? (The answer to the first question is, of course, "yes.") The difference is that the NGOs have multi-million dollar budgets, and will often repeat the claims of other NGOs - even clearly biased ones - without any of their own fact checking. For example, Al Addameer's absurd claim of 750,000 Palestinian Arab prisoners since 1967 has been accepted as fact. Would HRW say that this story is above criticism as well? In interests of full disclosure, a Zio Blog conspiracy member list has been published. You can see us in the About Us page on the Understanding the Goldstone Report site. It includes NGO Monitor, CAMERA and Honest Reporting as well as some well-known writers and bloggers. We share information and build on other posts and articles. We do this precisely because it is more effective and focused. In fact, I'm going to now link to another, far more detailed critique of the Guardian article, from Richard Landes and Augean Stables. See how we all conspire together? Booga booga!
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Sunday, November 15, 2009
I'm part of the anti-NGO conspiracy!
The Guardian reports on HRW's whining about being criticized by people like me: