Sarah Leah Whitson is the Executive Director, Middle East and North Africa Division of Human Rights Watch. Sari Bashi is HRW's Israel/Palestine Director.
Today they met with Hanan Ashrawi of the PLO.
According to Ashrawi, they spoke about supposed Israeli violations of human rights. She praised HRW for "its ongoing work to expose Israel's deliberate violations of international humanitarian and international law."
The three discussed how best to gather evidence of Israeli crimes that would stand up to scrutiny at the International Criminal Court. They went on to talk about how they could cooperate in the future.
Ashrawi also told HRW that Palestinians are committed to human rights.
The PLO jails and exiles political opponents, it does not provide adequate protection for gays or Christians, it prosecutes people who eat in public on Ramadan, and it considers Jewish freedom of worship to be criminal.
There is no shortage of snarky tweets on the timelines of HRW employees cutting down such statements by politicians that are clearly lies. But the timelines of Whitson and Bashi are barren of any criticism of the Palestinian leadership. More telling, they did not mention a word about this meeting with Ashrawi, who was exposed only a couple of years ago as heading an NGO that said Jews drink Christian blood and that praised terrorists.
HRW's bias against Israel is well-documented by its own statements. But we also need to see what it doesn't say. It's silence about Palestinian violations of human rights, and its willingness to secretly collude with human rights violators just to gather more dirt (real or imagined) on Israel, shows exactly how little HRW really cares about human rights and how it is merely an NGO facade for a political group.
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