It may be debatable if Israel’s recent decision to deny a
work permit to Omar Shakir, the Israel and Palestine Director of Human Rights
Watch (HRW), was prudent. Indeed, the inevitable outcry – amplified by coverage
in the New
York Times, Ha’aretz
and numerous other outlets around the world – quickly produced assurances that
Israel’s “Foreign Ministry … intends to reexamine” the matter. Yet, the Foreign
Ministry was absolutely right when it accused
HRW of promoting “Palestinian propaganda.”
You don’t even have to dig deep – just scroll through Shakir’s
recent tweets and you’ll find excellent examples for HRW’s trademark
anti-Israel propaganda (which has been documented
extensively by NGO Monitor; the site also has a relevant
profile of Shakir).
Before we look at some of Shakir’s recent tweets, it is
important to realize that he has been an anti-Israel activist for all of his
adult life. Given his biography, this is noteworthy, because Shakir has
apparently long been exposed to the countless crises all over the Arab world. A
biographical
note from the Islamic Scholarship Fund, which sponsored him in 2010, tells
us that he is “of Iraqi descent” and grew up in the San Francisco Bay area; he
“graduated from Stanford University in 2007 with honors in international
relations” and spent 2007-2008 as a Fulbright
scholar in Syria, where “he conducted research on contemporary Syrian economic
reform and studied Islamic jurisprudence;” he also studied “at Oxford
University and in Morocco and Cairo.”
Yet, neither Morocco’s
occupation of Western Sahara nor the repression he must have witnessed in
Egypt and Syria seem to have interested Shakir as much as the Palestinian
struggle against the Jewish state. Starting in his freshman year, Shakir was already involved
in efforts to promote a positive image of the Palestinians. Back then, in May
2004, the Palestinians perhaps needed some PR: the murderous “Al Aqsa Intifada”
was still going
on – having already claimed more than a thousand Israeli lives, with many
thousands more wounded. The exploitation of Palestinian children and teenagers
for terrorist
attacks was already well known, and reliable
polls showed that a shocking 71% of Palestinians “say they have confidence
in [Al Qaeda leader Osama] bin Laden [to do the right thing regarding world
affairs].” Incidentally, the Pew surveys at that time were also
showing that “[b]y wide margins, most Muslim populations doubt that a way
can be found for the state of Israel to exist so that the rights and needs of
the Palestinian people are met. Eight-in-ten residents of the Palestinian
Authority express this opinion.” To put it in a less convoluted way: most
Muslims – including 80% of Palestinians – felt that “the rights and needs of
the Palestinian people” require the elimination of Israel as a Jewish state.
But this was a view Shakir apparently shared, and there is
no indication that he changed his mind in the following years. Quite the
contrary: in May
2005, Shakir is listed as the organizer of a “Nakba Day” event at Stanford,
commemorating what was described as “The Palestinian Catastrophe … the historic
day, which saw the mass deportation of a million Palestinians from their cities
and villages, massacres of civilians, and the razing to the ground of hundreds
of Palestinian villages.” Two years later, in April 2007, an
article on “Celebration and protest of Israel” in The Stanford Daily
identified Shakir as “president of Students Confronting Apartheid by Israel
(SCAI)” and quoted him as saying: “To be celebrating [Israel’s Independence
Day] without even acknowledging what happened is really offensive … Our goal is
to be here and to remember the events of May 1948. This is a day 750.000
refugees were created.” Shakir reportedly estimated “the current number of Palestinian
refugees at close to five million” and explained his objections to celebrating
Israel’s independence further: “While some celebrate the creation of a
homeland, we stand here to remember the destruction of the indigenous society
and a 59-year subjugation of the indigenous population that resulted from that.”
So for Shakir, it was not about Israel’s occupation of the
West Bank since 1967; as far as he was concerned, it was Israel’s
re-establishment in 1948 that resulted in “the destruction of the indigenous
society and a 59-year subjugation of the indigenous population.” In other
words, as long as Israel exists as a Jewish state, Shakir considers “the
indigenous population” as ‘subjugated.’ It seems that even if you graduate from
an elite university like Stanford “with honors in international relations,” you
don’t necessarily know that the Jews are as least as indigenous to the area
west of the Jordan River as the descendants of the Muslim Arabs who conquered
the region.
In 2009, Shakir was busy protesting
Israel Independence Day celebrations at Georgetown University, where “protestors
held signs with slogans such as, ‘61 Years a Refugee’ and ‘Israeli Independence
= 4,000,000 Palestinian Refugees.’” A year later, he marked the “the 62nd
anniversary of the Palestinian Nakba (Catastrophe) and the beginning of the
Israeli occupation of the Palestinian people” in a radio
program devoted to comparing “Israeli & South African Apartheid;”
alongside other notorious anti-Israel activists, he also participated in an
event at UC Irvine for “Israeli Apartheid Week: A Call to Boycott, Divest,
and Sanction.” In 2006, the same event had
been advertised
under the title “Apartheid State of Israel Carries Out Holocaust,” which is
just one reason why the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) eventually felt it
necessary to document
(PDF) that the “University of California, Irvine (UCI) has become a center for
anti-Semitic activity in recent years.” As the ADL noted:
“Much of this activity has been
organized by the Muslim Student Union (MSU), a vocal student group at UCI,
which is responsible for staging large events every spring featuring virulently
anti-Semitic speakers. In July 2010, the MSU was suspended for one year because
of its involvement in disrupting a speech by Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren in
February of that year.”
We also learn from the ADL documentation that Shakir
“praised the students” who had disrupted Oren’s speech, emphasizing at the
“Israeli Apartheid Week” event he spoke: “it’s an honor to be speaking at the
campus that made a statement heard around the world, the campus that officially
said: ‘we have no place for a war criminal…’ you guys should be very proud of
what you are doing.”
It’s worthwhile reading what the ADL reported on the event
Shakir felt so ‘honored’ to participate in:
“As in previous years, Amir Abdul
Malik Ali delivered one of the more radical speeches. Titled ‘Death to
Apartheid,’ Malik Ali compared Jews to Nazis, expressed support for Hamas,
Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad and called for the destruction of the ‘apartheid
state of Israel.’ He also accused supporters of Israel of ‘using’ the Holocaust
as an excuse to oppress Palestinians, and claimed that it is easier to
criticize Israel because people ‘are no longer being afraid of being called
anti-Semitic.’ […]
Hatem Bazian, president of the anti-Israel
American Muslims for Palestine, gave a speech titled ‘Roots of the Conflict.’
Bazian portrayed Israel as a foreign colonial power and rejected the legitimacy
of Jewish claims in the Middle East. He characterized [the] Jewish presence in
the Middle East in Biblical time as ‘occupation,’ which he said was similar to
the ‘occupation in the present context.’ […]
Prior to each presentation, an MSU
representative read a prepared statement rejecting accusations that the event
was anti-Semitic. The statement argued that it is ‘hypocritical and immoral’ to
describe ‘anyone who has the courage to stand up and speak out against the
genocidal Zionist policies of Israel as anti-Semitic.’ The statement then
compared Israel’s policies to ‘the oppression that took place in Nazi Germany.’
The event’s organizers erected a
mock version of Israel’s security barrier, which displayed anti-Israel messages
and a poster that hailed Hamas as ‘Freedom Fighters’ decorated with a picture
of Hamas founder Sheik Ahmad Yassin.”
Given that Shakir considered it “an honor to be speaking” at
such an event, it’s only natural that he continued with his anti-Israel
activism in the following years (see e.g. here
and here).
Just three years after he had the ‘honor’ to participate in the UC Irvine
hate-fest – and while he was still involved in anti-Israel activism –, HRW hired Shakir as the “2013-14
Arthur R. and Barbara D. Finberg Fellow at Human Rights Watch;” eventually, when
he was appointed HRW “Israel and Palestine Country Director,” Shakir must have
been very pleased to have found an employer willing to pay him for doing what
he had done as a volunteer for so many years.
It is thus no surprise that Shakir was now only too happy to
give an interview
to Ali Abunimah’s notorious Electronic Intifada (EI) – a site dedicated
to demonizing Israel, mainstreaming antisemitism,
and cheering
Islamist terror groups like Hamas. EI contributor Charlotte Silver, who
wrote about Israel’s “ominous” refusal to grant Shakir a work permit, probably
knows him from the good old days ten years ago, when they
both protested the celebration of Israel’s Independence Day at Stanford.
While Shakir is surely aware that EI readers are
already convinced that Israel is too evil to be allowed to exist, he told Silver
that by refusing to issue a work permit for him, “Israel puts itself in the
same group as Sudan, Uzbekistan, North Korea and Egypt, all of which have
barred Human Rights Watch from entering.” A similar charge is made in an
official HRW statement,
and Shakir’s Twitter timeline is
littered with tweets emphasizing
that Israel should now be counted among the “most repressive states we [i.e.
HRW] cover.”
I have archived
Shakir’s own tweet because the breathtaking arrogance and the implicit
disregard for the untold misery inflicted by the world’s “most repressive
states” – as well as the deep-seated hostility to Israel – seem worth
documenting. All it takes for Israel to be counted among the world’s “most
repressive states” is denying a long-time opponent of Israel’s existence as a
Jewish state in any borders a work permit for a job in which his main task is
coming up with “evidence” that will be eagerly seized by his old BDS buddies to
further their campaigns of demonizing the world’s only Jewish state as simply
too evil to be allowed to exist.
While there are
several other revealing tweets (or re-tweets) recently posted by Shakir, one by Kenneth
Roth, Executive Director of Human Rights Watch, is arguably particularly
noteworthy.
Roth’s own openly displayed bias against Israel has been
amply documented (e.g. here
my own effort in 2014 and a stunning
EoZ analysis from the same time). So now Roth objects to Israel’s
defense minister (not FM, i.e. foreign minister) emphasizing the threat posed
to Israel by Iran during the recent Munich Security Conference. It is downright
bizarre that Roth apparently expects that instead, Israel’s defense minister should
compete with HRW and talk about “Israel persecuting Palestinians.” While we can
only speculate what exactly Roth means by that, I think it’s safe to assume
that a lot of the “persecuting” occurs whenever Israel defends itself against
Palestinian terror.
But what about Iran? Does Roth disagree with the many respected
analysts who think
that Iran’s destabilizing
role in the Middle East poses very serious security risks?
As it happens, on the same day Roth complained about
Israel’s focus on the threats posed by Iran, the Tehran Times had an article
announcing that Iran was about to hold a “conference on Palestinian intifada.”
A few days later, the conference duly took place; reportedly,
there were reserved seats for the heads of the terrorist groups Palestinian
Islamic Jihad, Hamas, and Hezbollah. Let’s just quote for Ken Roth one short
passage from the rambling speech
given by Iran’s Supreme Leader on the happy occasion of this “Sixth
International Conference in Support of the Palestinian Intifada”:
“From the beginning, this cancerous
tumor [i.e. Israel] has been developing in several phases until it turned into
the current disaster. The cure for this tumor should be developed in phases as
well. Until today, several intifadas and a constant and continuous resistance
have managed to achieve very important phased goals. The Palestinian intifada
continues to gallop forward in a thunderous manner so that it can achieve its
other goals until the complete liberation of Palestine.”
As far as Ken Roth is concerned, Israel should apparently
just shrug off being called a “cancerous tumor” by a regime that massively
supports several terror groups – most notably Hezbollah – dedicated to the
elimination of the Jewish state.
Last but not least a few words on the media coverage of
Israel’s refusal to give Omar Shakir a work permit. If you google “Omar Shakir
Human Rights Watch,” you will see that this incident received global media
coverage. But most of this coverage amounted to not much more than giving HRW a
megaphone to broadcast its outrage as entirely justified. The organization’s
longstanding and well-documented record of bias against Israel was largely
ignored, and nobody noticed that HRW demanded a work permit for an employee who
would “investigate” Israel’s human rights record even though he has a long
record of opposing the existence of the world’s only Jewish state in any
borders.