Ken Roth tries to give a lesson in context

From the New York Times:

Ken Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, said that both forms of killing should be condemned.

“ISIS’s despicable conduct shouldn’t make us lose sight of the largest killer of civilians in Syria: Assad’s barrel bombs,” he said in an email.

Really? Ken Roth is giving the world lessons on how to put human rights in context?

As I showed recently, the latest world report from Human Rights Watch implies that Israel is only slightly better than Syria and worse than every other nation on the planet, judging from the amount of attention HRW gives to Israel. But here is a list of counts of fatalities from conflicts in 2014:

Syria 76,000
South Sudan 40,000
Iraq 21,000
Afghanistan 14,000
Boko Haram/Africa 11,000
Mexico 7,000
Yemen 7,000
Pakistan 5,500
CAR 5,200
Ukraine 4,700
Somalia 4,400
Libya 2,800
Gaza 2,200
Darfur 2,100

Judging from that 2015 HRW report, Israel more worthy of attention than South Sudan, Somalia, Pakistan and Yemen - combined.

So sorry if I have to laugh when Ken Roth reminds the world that ISIS isn't so bad compared to Syria. When it comes to distorting the seriousness of human rights abuses, Human Rights Watch does not have a very good record.

Speaking of not being able to distinguish between events that are different by orders of magnitude, another HRW researcher today compared Gaza to the Holocaust:

@BBCKimGhattas @DRovera @HolocaustMuseum @BBCNewsUS should also show pics of death and destruction in #Gaza
— Sarah Leah Whitson (@sarahleah1) January 29, 2015

(h/t EBoZ)