PART 5
(Part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4)Continuing my series of lies that were tweeted by Ken Roth of Human Rights Watch over the past two months.
| August 8 Young men over-represented among Gaza dead: unclear if Hamas won't acknowledge fighters or Israel targets young men. http://trib.al/UkKu8z4 |
Truth: Nowhere in the article was there mentioned a possibility that Israel "targets young men." (A later version of the article than the one Roth linked to on August 8 added some theories as to why young men may be more at risk but it still never accused Israel of targeting them.)
Roth simply could not abide by the idea that Hamas was lying to inflate apparent civilian casualties, even though Hamas has done that in the past and it instructed Gazans to do exactly that. So since the emerging statistics from Gaza showed that his earlier memes of indiscriminate Israeli fire were clearly not true, Roth created a new Israeli war crime out of thin air without the tiniest bit of evidence.
(Retweet - August 14) Trita Parsi @tparsi ·Wondering why the excessive police violence? Here's a guess: #Ferguson police chief got training in Israel... #Gaza
Truth: The fact that Ken Roth felt that this was worth retweeting is, by itself, the most damning piece of evidence of his hate towards Israel.
Twitter is an interesting medium because it's very ease of use makes it a window into one's subconscious. Tweets you believe are true are easily retweeted, tweets from an opposing perspective would not be.
This tweet is ridiculously wrong on many levels:
- Counter-terrorism training is completely different from training on how to handle civil unrest and riots. They aren't even close.
- The responsibility for killing someone rests with the person who did the killing, not the people who supposedly once gave a course to his or her boss.
- The Ferguson police chief that took the training retired from the force months before this incident!
This is from the $400,000+ salaried executive director of an organization that claims to be objective.
To tie Ferguson to Israel prima facie proof of bias against Israel There is no other way to interpret this retweet. (Of course, Roth never apologized or clarified his position on this matter.)
August 19 Because of Iron Dome & indiscriminate #Israel attacks, 5% of Israelis killed were civilians versus 50-82% of Gazans. http://trib.al/4nxVtE9
Once again, Roth takes a tangential part of an article and adds his own bizarre additions while ignoring the bulk of the article.
The article, in a relatively obscure blog but written by a research fellow at National Defense University, discusses how Hamas can use new, cheap technology to change its current tactics of targeting Israeli civilians to targeting military targets. He discusses how Israel would be hampered in its responses to purely miliary targeting (although it is implied that Hamas would continue to mount attacks from civilian areas.) Nowhere does the author accuse Israel of indiscriminate attacks, although he does quote some pundits saying that the civilian toll is unacceptably high.
Roth is again showing his bias by editorializing, with no expertise whatsoever, beyond what the article he links to actually says.