I have noticed that he really likes to accuse Israel of "war crimes," often for the heinous crime of building houses.
So I looked at how often he used that term in 2020 and which countries he was referring to.
Judging from his result, the US and Israel are by far the worst violators of war crime on the planet.
This is just another data point on how Human Rights Watch and its leader are obsessed with Western nations and downplay the horrific, actual war crimes done by other countries.
In the case of Israel, three of the references were to "settlements" and the rest were to nothing in particular, just saying that Israel does "war crimes" in Palestinian areas without specifying them, because it is so obvious to him that Israel is one of the biggest violators on the planet that it doesn't even need specifying. . For Russia and Syria, they were very specific tweets about bombing civilians in Syria.
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The Trump administration is considering declaring that several prominent international NGOs — including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Oxfam — are anti-Semitic and that governments should not support them, two people familiar with the issue said.
The proposed declaration could come from the State Department as soon as this week. If the declaration happens, it is likely to cause an uproar among civil society groups and might spur litigation. Critics of the possible move also worry it could lead other governments to further crack down on such groups. The groups named, meanwhile, deny any allegations that they are anti-Semitic.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is pushing for the declaration, according to a congressional aide with contacts inside the State Department.
The declaration is expected to take the form of a report from the office of Elan Carr, the U.S. special envoy to monitor and combat anti-Semitism. The report would mention organizations including Oxfam, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. It would declare that it is U.S. policy not to support such groups, including financially, and urge other governments to cease their support.
The report would cite such groups’ alleged or perceived support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, which has targeted Israel over its construction of settlements on land Palestinians claim for a future state.
It’s also expected to point to reports and press statements such groups have released about the impact of Israeli settlements, as well as their involvement or perceived support for a United Nations database of businesses that operate in disputed territories.
There is absolutely no doubt that these groups are structurally and systematically biased against Israel. They hire people to "research" Israel with a history of anti-Israel advocacy.
One example is Amnesty's Saleh Hijazi, Deputy Regional Director of the MENA Region, whose Facebook pages include support for terrorists Leila Khaled and Khader Adnan, a glaring piece of hypocrisy for a supposed human rights advocate.
Similarly, Omar Shakir had a well-documented history of supporting BDS against all of Israel (not just "settlements") and of being obsessively anti-Israel when he was hired by HRW - and that continued even as he was employed by them.
This results in these NGOs issuing anti-Israel reports that are longer, more numerous and more detailed than their reports on virtually any other nation, with only a smattering of reports about Palestinian human rights or Arab human rights abuses against Palestinians (which only exist when their anti-Israel obsessions were revealed so they wrote token reports for "balance.") In fact, in some cases these groups have supported terror-linked NGOs.
Israel is routinely accused of "apartheid" by these NGOs. There is literally no other nation in the world that they make similar accusations of.
These NGOs become obsessed about companies like TripAdvisor and AirBnB that operate in disputed territories. There is literally no other nation in the world that they make similar accusations of, let alone participate in huge funded campaigns against international companies.
Amnesty and HRW knowingly twist international law to pretend that Palestinians have a "right to return." As many as 60 million Europeans became refugees after World War II, but none of them have the same "right to return" that the 700,000 Palestinian refugees and their millions of descendants are considered to have today by these NGOs. The only purpose of this demand is to destroy the Jewish state demographically.
Do these obsessions cross the line into antisemitism?
By the IHRA working definition of antisemitism, there is no doubt that these groups are antisemitic because they hold Israel to standards that they do not apply to any other country.
Even if you do not accept the IHRA definition these NGOs seems to have a problem with Jews.
For example, this report from HRW denigrating religious Jews:
Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef, who holds the state-funded, statutory position of Israel’s Chief Sephardic Rabbi, said in a March 12, 2016 sermon, partly in response to Eisenkot’s admonition to limit the use of lethal force, that the Bible authorizes a shoot-to-kill policy: “‘Whoever comes to kill you, rise up and kill him first.’ … let them afterward take you to the High Court of Justice or bring some military chief of staff who will say something else … As soon as an attacker knows that if he comes with a knife, he won’t return alive, it will deter them. That’s why it’s a religious commandment to kill him.”
The Sephardic Chief Rabbi does not command police or soldiers, but he heads the Supreme Rabbinical Tribunal and is tasked with advising on the interpretation of religious law.
...
According to Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics, about half of Jewish Israelis define themselves as religious or traditional, not including ultra-Orthodox Jews, who usually do not serve in the army. Conscription for non-ultra-Orthodox Jewish men is universal. Most soldiers are in their teens or early 20s, and after a few months of basic training, they can be sent to serve in the occupied West Bank.
This is an accusation that religious (and traditional) Jews are bloodthirsty fanatics who would kill Arabs at a drop of a hat - and against army regulations. That is antisemitic slander.
Or this Amnesty employee that denied Egypt's expulsion of its Jews - meaning that Jews are the only group whose human rights are not to be defended.
Or these groups pushing to expel Jews - and only Jews - from their homes in disputed territories when there are also thousands of Israeli Arabs who live across the Green Line but are never called "settlers."
Or Oxfam selling antisemitic literature on its site - copies of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and other antisemitic books that Oxfam members owned, photographed and blurbed on their website without even considering this to be a problem.
In total, it is obvious that these NGOs have a problem not just with Israel, but many of their members have problems with Jews.
Even so, it is unclear whether it is wise for the State Department to declare them antisemitic. Outside the Middle East, the groups seem to do some excellent work and have dedicated employees who really care about human rights. (If the NGOs really wanted to be objective, they would rotate their researchers to different areas of the world instead of allowing obsessive haters of Israel to choose to demonize Israel.)
Declaring the entire organizations themselves to be antisemitic could be counterproductive. But they do have an crazed focus on attacking the Jewish state, and that needs to be publicized.
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Human Rights Watch issued a new report, Israel: Discriminatory Land Policies Hem in Palestinians: Palestinian Towns Squeezed While Jewish Towns Grow.
As usual with HRW, it plays fast and loose with the facts to make Israel appear to be monstrous.
It starts off with
The Israeli government’s policy of boxing in Palestinian communities extends beyond the West Bank and Gaza to Palestinian towns and villages inside Israel, Human Rights Watch said today. The policy discriminates against Palestinian citizens of Israel and in favor of Jewish citizens, sharply restricting Palestinians’ access to land for housing to accommodate natural population growth.
Decades of land confiscations and discriminatory planning policies have confined many Palestinian citizens to densely populated towns and villages that have little room to expand.
Notice that HRW refers to Israeli Arabs as "Palestinians." As Daled Amos recently showed, the majority of Israeli Arabs do not identify as Palestinian. If anything, HRW is trying to place an artificial distinction between two sets of Israeli citizens more than they accuse Israel of doing!
While the issue of land use in Israel is very complex, and there has been validity to the charge of Israel showing a preference for growth in Jewish communities over the decades, Israel has recently been addressing the issue and putting enormous amounts of time and effort into solving the problem. HRW glosses over, minimizes and ignores these efforts. By saying at the outset, as a fact, that Israel is "boxing in" its Arab communities, HRW is lying, as we will see below.
Another indication of bias comes from this paragraph:
Palestinian citizens of Israel constitute 21 percent of the country’s population, but Israeli and Palestinian rights groups estimated in 2017 that less than 3 percent of all land in Israel falls under the jurisdiction of Palestinian municipalities.
The implication is that Arabs are allocated only one seventh of the land they should have by their population.
However, one cannot compare the land of Arab municipalities with the total land of Israel - because most of the land in Israel is not part of any municipality, Jewish or Arab. Only about 6400 of Israel's 22,000 square kilometers is urban. Which means that the actual percentage of municipal land dedicated to Arab-only towns is over 10%. Furthermore, many Arabs live in "mixed" towns like Lod or Jerusalem or Acre or Haifa making this statistic an even less accurate metric of reality since they aren't "hemmed in" at all and can build and buy real estate exactly like their Jewish neighbors. Additionally, tens of thousands of Bedouin in the Negev do not live in any municipality at all.
By using the 3% figure, HRW is distorting the truth by an order of magnitude.
The bias continues:
Jisr al-Zarqa, between Netanya and Haifa in northwest Israel, is the only Palestinian town in Israel on the Mediterranean coast. Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics lists its population as 14,700. Jisr al-Zarqa, a local council in the Haifa District with a size of about 1,600 dunams, is one of Israel’s poorest towns, with about 80 percent of residents living below the poverty line.
Policies of Israeli governments and institutions under the British mandate dating back almost a century have effectively boxed in its residents. In the early 1920s, the Palestine Jewish Colonization Association, according to Israel’s Foreign Ministry, drained the swamps, from which local residents derived their livelihood herding buffalos and weaving reed mats, to make room for new Jewish settlements. Residents say they ended with roughly their current plot of land, far less than they had historically lived on.
Again, one can make an argument that Israel hasn't treated the Arabs fairly - but to say that ridding the country of malaria is a bad thing is a fairly ridiculous argument. And it isn't like the Zionists controlled the land in the 1920s; the British were who moved the residents so the swamps could be drained, which is the sort of thing governments do all the time when people are living in a dangerous area. It was the British who decided how much land the residents would have, not the Jews. HRW says none of this.
HRW included an appendix with a letter from the Israel Planning Administration which listed in great detail what Israel was doing in recent years to help Arab residents achieve equality with Jews in regard to land use. Specifically for Jisr al Zarqa, it says:
The plan allocates new development areas, some west of the built-up areas within the municipal boundaries and some east of Road No. 2 and outside the municipal jurisdiction, on land that belongs to the Beit Hanania moshav community. In answer to your question, the added development areas in the west necessitated the advancement of planning measures for zoning changes of “green” areas (a national park, a landscape conservation area, and agricultural land), which are approved as part of national masterplans, to allow residential use on state land for the purpose of developing new residential neighborhoods. The zoning changes were approved by the National Planning and Building Council Subcommittee.
This undermines the entire thrust of HRW's report - the Israel government is not only allocating state land to this community, it is taking land away from a Jewish moshav to give to the Arabs of Jisr al Zarqa.
So when HRW says Israel is "boxing in" Arab communities, it is flatly lying.
The IPA lists everything it has been doing over the past few years:
Of the 132 Arab communities, 119 have current master plans that have been approved, are in the approval
process, or are in preparation. These plans cover some 96% of the total population of these communities.
The plans form a planning framework that encompasses the entire area of the community and determines
zoning distribution for the coming decades as well as future development trajectories (residential,
employment, tourism, public buildings, open public spaces and more), and they are made in a process that
includes public involvement and participation.
These plans are complex and intricate, given the unique features of Arab communities, which are related
to the structure of land ownership: Most of the land in these communities is privately owned, with few
landowners in possession of a great deal of land (Some 20% in possession of some 80% of the land).
As a result of this, there are many unutilized agricultural enclaves. In addition, there is a short supply of
land for public use, partly due to the inability of local authorities to utilize land for public purposes and
authorize infrastructure on privately owned land. Most existing construction is in the ineffective form of
diffused single-family dwellings. This precludes large-scale solutions for young couples and features
multi-generational construction implemented over the years while forcing the authorities to deliver
infrastructure over an expansive area, which constitutes both a financial and operational burden. All of
this takes place in tandem with large-scale unregulated construction and challenging topographic
conditions, particularly in communities in the Galilee.
The comprehensive plans promoted by the Planning Administration, as detailed above, address these
issues on several planes: First, the plans recognize thousands of existing housing units, including ones
located at a significant distance from the area approved for development. Second, the planning process
includes great efforts to locate state-owned land that would allow both large-scale construction of housing
units in order to provide solutions for individuals in need of housing, as well as the allocation of core
public spaces needed for these additional housing units and as compensation for shortages in the older
core. State-owned land is sometimes located at some distance from the existing community, with
agricultural enclaves in between. These lands are included in the new development zones in order to
produce a compact urban structure that is not detached from the urban tissue. The result of these measures
is masterplans that include new areas for development on an extremely extensive scale, and are suited to
contain a number of housing units far exceeding the programmatic and demographic needs of the
community, as required by projected natural growth and internal migration over the coming decades.
Some of the plans include vast development areas reaching beyond the jurisdiction of these communities.
These plans bridge the gaps of the past and provide infrastructure for growth over the extended long term,
while taking into consideration construction practices characteristic of privately owned land. All of this is
in contrast to the compact high-density planning that is characteristic of planning in the Jewish sector.
HRW breezily dismisses this entire letter by saying,
in 2019, the Israeli group “Bimkom: Planners for Planning Rights” noted an increase in planning activity in Palestinian towns, including steps to allow for more housing construction, but observed that the housing shortage in Palestinian municipalities would continue without the state allocating them more state land.
This is a far cry from "boxing in." This is saying that Israel is trying to accommodate all its citizens and some interest groups are complaining that it is not enough.
HRW knows that no reporter is going to go past the first paragraphs of the report that accuses Israel of wholesale crimes against its Arab citizens and read the details and appendix that show that the situation is far more complex and that Israel is investing enormous resources into fixing the issue. Because HRW isn't interested in telling the truth, but in pushing an anti-Israel agenda.
As always.
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Ken Roth, the head of Human Rights Watch, tweets more that President Trump does. Yet I cannot find any tweets where he denounces antisemitism that cannot be blamed on white nationalists.
Essentially, he denies that any other sort of antisemitism exists.
The one tweet that shows this more than any other was written in 2018:
Of 1,453 anti-Semitic crimes in Germany in 2017, nine out of ten were committed by members of far-right or neo-Nazi groups. But let’s blame the Muslims. https://t.co/T3W3DLMJ1p
The New York Times article he refers to is about a rally against antisemitism that was prompted by an attack by a Syrian on someone (who wasn't Jewish!) wearing a kippah.
The article describes all kinds of antisemitism in Germany - from immigrants, from a rap duo as well as from the far-Right. But Roth ignores almost the entire article to take one sentence that claims that 90% of antisemitic attacks are from the far-Right as he sarcastically demeans anyone who says that Muslim antisemitic attacks are worth mentioning.
Yes, a human rights advocate is literally making fun of anyone concerned about Muslim attacks on Jews.
Certainly Roth knows that the vast majority of violent attacks against Jews in Europe have been done by Muslims. He not only fails to acknowledge them, but he smugly denounces anyone who mentions it!
What about this German study that supposedly says that 90% of attacks are from the far-Right? It turns out that the study was worthless.
The German government uses outdated and ambiguous definitions of the motivation behind antisemitic attacks that by their nature do not include specifically Muslim antisemitism as a category, only the vague "foreign ideology" or "religious ideology" as well as right and left wing. So, for example, when 20 Muslims chanted "Sieg Heil" at an Al Quds demonstration in 2014, the government absurdly classified that as "right wing" antisemitism. Four Palestinians who burned down a synagogue were not charged with an antisemitic crime.
In reality, German Jews have reported that 41% of the antisemitism they have experienced comes from Muslim extremists, and only 20% from the far-Right - not much more than the 16% from the far-Left.
The German government itself has written a 40-page report specifically on Muslim antisemitism.
Ken Roth never mentioned any of this.
If the German government and German Jews (as well as other studies) refute the claim that nearly all antisemitism in Germany comes from the far-Right, then why does a supposedly human rights defender actively deny the evidence and cherry picks only one specific type of antisemitism to ever denounce?
There is nothing wrong with combating the very real danger of right wing antisemitism. There is something very wrong about denying that any other types exist or are worth talking about. If you deny the very existence of a type of antisemitism that conflicts with your political beliefs, then you are a denier and enabler of antisemitism.
What kind of a human rights leader makes fun of the very real fears of people of Islamic extremist antisemitism?
Ken Roth, by sarcastically denying that any non-Right version of antisemitism even exists, shows that he is unqualified to call himself a human rights advocate at all.
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The latest Human Rights Watch report is again a piece of theater. It believes wholeheartedly what Palestinians accuse Israel of, it doubts everything Israel says, and it pretends to understand human rights laws that it has no idea of.
The first 12 pages or so is a discussion of human rights laws under occupation. The report concentrates on the Right of Peaceful Assembly, Right to Freedom of Association and Right to Freedom of Expression, saying that all West Bank Palestinians do not have these rights. However, the 95% of Palestinians who live under Palestinian Authority rule can and do create mass anti-Israel rallies, complete with people dressing as terrorists with guns and masks.
A centerpiece of HRW's legal argument is this:
Article 43 of the Hague Regulations of 1907, recognized by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg and the International Court of Justice as having the force of customary international law binding on all states, outlines the powers and responsibilities of an occupying power:
The authority of the legitimate power having in fact passed into the hands of the occupant, the latter shall take all the measures in his power to restore, and ensure, as far as possible, public order and safety, while respecting, unless absolutely prevented, the laws in force in the country. This provision authorizes an occupying power to take restrictive measures that are militarily necessary to ensure its own safety, but also requires the occupier to restore and ensure public life for the benefit of the occupied population. Measures that are militarily necessary are those likely to “accomplish a legitimate purpose and are not otherwise prohibited by international humanitarian law.”
What HRW doesn't tell you is that the person who determines whether an action falls under the definition of "military necessity" is the field commander in charge, and he or she is given a great deal of latitude in that determination (obviously not to the point of violating any other humanitarian law rules.) It is not up to HRW or professors or other NGOs to look at a situation with the luxury of hindsight and determine whether something was a military necessity.
...In calling on occupiers to “ensure, as far as possible, public order and safety,” Article 43 requires an occupier to use all practical means at its disposal to minimize the impact of its actions on the local population. The logical corollary of this article is that the means available to an occupier increase with the duration of an occupation. A foreign army occupying a village for a month or a year may be limited in the sophistication of the security measures it adopts, for lack of time, resources, and familiarity with the location and population under occupation. A foreign army, though, occupying a territory for decades, has more time and opportunity to refine its responses to threats to the security of its forces in ways that minimize restrictions on rights and freedoms. The longer the occupation, the greater the ability and therefore the obligation to arrive at security measures that minimize impact on the local population.
This is HRW's major argument that Israel has not done all it can to provide for freedoms of the Palestinian population - because during a short occupation there may be very restrictive measures taken but over time it is the responsibility of the occupier to refine the methods to help the population have more public order and safety.
There is one major flaw in this argument: since 1987, every couple of years, a new wave of violence erupts that forces Israel to go back to a more restrictive rule. HRW simply doesn't admit the existence of the two intifadas,or the later car ramming and stabbing sprees, or the violent weekly riots, as a factor in what Israel is allowed to do to protect its soldiers and Israeli civilians.
Anyone who looks at the freedom of Palestinians under Israeli rule from 1967 to 1987 would see that they indeed gained more and more freedoms - until the first intifada.
This report does not even mention the word "intifada" once. It does not mention the word "riots." It doesn't mention "Molotov cocktails" or "firebombs." In other words, HRW strips Israeli security force actions and decisions of any context.
There is far more, of course.
HRW, when discussing the case of Nariman Tamimi, says
Officers interrogated Nariman three other times, each time returning to her "incitement." She said they also asked her about her Facebook posts, some dating as far back as seven years, of Palestinians who carried out attacks against Israelis or were killed by Israeli forces.
It puts "incitement" in scare quotes and trusts her to say what the IDF considered her incitement.
She didn't mention sharing this handy guide on how to stab someone effectively:
HRW may know about this (one of many offensive posts by Nariman) but they would never share it, because it undermines their lies.
Another innocent victim of Israeli capriciousness is "artist" Hafez Omar. HRW doesn't mention that his posters glorify violence as the only way to freedom:
This report was of course written by Omar Shakir, whose work permit was revoked by Israel. Ever since the, Shakir and HRW have embarked on a vindictive crusade against Israel - as always, at the expense of real human rights abuses happening within a couple of hundred miles of Israel's borders.
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A couple of days ago this tweet received a lot of attention, with over 5000 Likes:
It is an obvious lie. I even offered him a $10,000 bet that he couldn't provide proof of this incident, and he blocked me in response.
When someone more sympathetic asked him details on this fictional incident, here was Samer's answer:
Samer, whose profile says he lives in Chicago, has over 35,000 followers, many of whom believe his lies without question - because they subscribe to his philosophy that Zionists are not human.
Human Rights Watch has some 4 million followers and it followed about 20,000 people back - half of one percent. Samer is one of them.
Here is my list of who HRW follows that also block me, a veritable Who's Who of Israel haters and leftists who cannot stand the truth.
I've mentioned before that Human Rights Watch doesn't treat Zionist Jews as if they are human. Here we see that they seem to be fans of people who say that explicitly.
(To be fair, HRW also follows some prominent Zionists, but those all tend to be official spokespeople or organizations, not random anonymous people like Samer.)
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Hamas condemns the Israeli occupation’s deportation of the director of Human Rights Watch (HRW) in Palestine Omar Shaker as an act against humanitarian work and human rights. Indeed, the Israeli occupation is unable to see its crimes and violations being documented by such organisations.
This Israeli demeanor aims to block reality and hide its daily violations, including killing and targeting Palestinians, in order to evade accountability.
The Israeli practices should prompt the international community to defend the rights of the Palestinian people and hold the Israeli occupation accountable for the crimes committed against Palestinians.
Hamas spokesperson Fawzi Barhoum
It's a two way street. Hamas supports HRW because HRW excuses Hamas war crimes.
It is worth reminding everyone that @HRW doesn't only have a bizarre obsession with demonizing Israel, but that its obsession spills over into excusing Hamas war crimes.
Here's one example.
The@ICRCdefinition of "human shields" is "the intentional co-location of military objectives and civilians or persons hors de combat with the specific intent of trying to prevent the targeting of those military objectives."
ihl-databases.icrc.org/customary-ihl/… Plainly speaking, it means that Hamas or Islamic Jihad placing rockets or bases or weapons caches in civilian neighborhoods makes them guilty of the war crime of human shielding.
During the 2014 war, @KenRoth consistently absolved Hamas of that crime. HRW and Ken Roth made their own, more restrictive definition for Hamas, saying that Hamas must FORCE civilians to stay in the area.
Although that definition is not consistent even within @HRW.
They've said that fighters joining a wedding march would violate that law. What's the difference between putting military targets in a civilian neighborhood or in a wedding procession? Yet HRW consistently DEFENDED Hamas for placing arms in civilian neighborhoods.
Then, the news came out that Hamas actually instructed civilians to ignore Israeli warnings to evacuate to safer places.
So now there is an element of coercion, but STILL@HRWexcused Hamas saying that they still weren't guilty of the crime of human shields.
What kind of a human rights org goes out of their way to excuse war crimes?
But only when the criminals are fighting Israel.
Amazing, no?
During that war, Hamas kept civilians in an UNRWA shelter even after Israel warned them to leave. It warned Fatah members not to leave their homes under threat of being shot.
These are war crimes even according to HRW's more restrictive definition. But HRW never admitted it.
There is only one possible reason for this "human rights organization" to excuse and deny Hamas war crimes against civilians. Because HRW wants to paint Israel as the truly evil party, and mentioning Hamas war crimes dilutes that goal.
This is inexcusable.
This is HRW.Postscript:@HRWwrote its own factsheet on the Gaza war where their definition of shielding is accurate, yet@kenrothkept insisting that Hamas wasn't guilty.hrw.org/news/2014/08/0…
From my post at the time (Ken Roth tweets in italics:)
August 4 Do you want to know what "human shields" really are beyond ritualistic sloganeering? Read @HRW's Q&A on the law: http://trib.al/l8wdv4t Truth: This is sort of amazing. Here are Roth's previous tweets defining human shields:
Jul 19Much confusion about "human shields" which generally require coercion. Different from unnecessarily endangering civilians, tho both illegal. Jul 24 #Hamas is putting civilians at risk but "no evidence" it forces them to stay--definition of human shields: @NYTimes. http://trib.al/61iwSoM Jul 25Hamas must as feasible not fight in populated areas http://trib.al/CA94avT but no human shield unless coerced to stay http://trib.al/YQwIIau
Yet when you read the official HRW Q&A that Roth tweeted here, you see a completely different definition - one that is actually accurate!
Forces deployed in populated areas must avoid locating military objectives – including fighters, ammunition and weapons -- in or near densely populated areas, and endeavor to remove civilians from the vicinity of military objectives. Belligerents are prohibited from using civilians to shield military objectives or operations from attack. "Shielding" refers to purposefully using the presence of civilians to render military forces or areas immune from attack.
There is nothing here about coercion.
HRW's definition is completely at odds with the definition their own executive director gave three separate times! The HRW definition simply says that using civilians to shield military objectives is what makes one a human shield.
Roth's tweet, by invoking "ritualistic sloganeering," of his critics, gave the impression that HRW's definition was agreeing with his multiple tweets, but amazingly it proves him wrong.
Roth never corrected his earlier tweets, though, nor did he acknowledge that his critics were correct all along.
Of course Hamas is a supporter of Human Rights Watch. HRW actively tries to make Hamas look as good as a genocidal terror group can possibly look.
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Ken Roth, the leader of of Human Rights Watch tweets - a lot.
For a man who makes over $630,000 a year, it is amazing that the HRW board has no problem with his prolific tweeting.
His obsession is tweeting about Israel. While the percentage of tweets slamming Israel has gone down in recent years as his biases were revealed, he has maintained a consistent habit of practically never going more than 24 hours without tweeting something about Israel, nearly always negative.
Until this week, that is.
His last tweet about Israel was a typically absurd - and anti-peace - comment:
The Israel-Jordan peace agreement included Jordan's leasing back land that Israel owned and in which Israelis had farms. The lease was for 25 years and intended to be renewed automatically every 25 years as a symbol of peace and cooperation. Yet Jordan decided to not lease the land, symbolically telling Israel, screw you - we have the land and you have no rights to it. A land for peace deal turned into an opportunity for Jordan to show how much it hates Israel.
But Roth twisted Jordan's hate into, somehow, being about Palestinians. No Palestinians live anywhere near this plot of land. It isn't even in the West Bank. Roth took Jordan's side in their symbolic move against peace with Israel, which is a strange position for a supposed human rights organization.
Hours after that tweet, Israel assassinated an Islamic Jihad terrorist who was planning major terror attacks on behalf of Iran. HRW is on the record as saying that such attacks are legal under international law
Since then, over 200 rockets were shot towards Israel. Every single rocket is a war crime since they are being aimed at civilians.
And Ken Roth has not tweeted a word.
As always, he wants to tweet anti-Israel lies and vitriol, but suggesting that Israelis are victims of human rights abuses by a recognized jihadist terror group supported by Iran is simply not something Ken Roth can tweet about.
So he is silent.
He is waiting for an Israeli attack that accidentally kills a child or family - something nearly unavoidable when terrorists and terror groups purposely plot and plan in civilian areas. Then he'll tweet against Israel, and mention the rockets as an aside so he can claim to be "objective."
No, Ken Roth isn't objective. His silence while a million Israelis seek shelter under fire shows that he effectively supports terrorism - when it is directed against Israel.
UPDATE: Roth tweeted about the EU wanting Israel to renew the visa of HRW BDS activist Omar Shakir - but nothing about the rockets. So his anti-Israel streak of 36 hours is over but still nothing about Gaza terrorism.
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The crime that these Muslims committed? They showed an interest in learning about the Zionist point of view and attended a workshop in Israel called the Muslim Leadership Initiative.
In reality, what panicked BDSers about the MLI is that it showed that intelligent, caring Muslims could speak to Israelis and learn their perspective as a way to help bring peace. BDS is against any sort of "normalization" because it wants Israeli Jews to be demonized, not treated with respect.
These Muslims who want peace rejected BDS, so BDS called on all Muslims to boycott them - not to let them speak in schools and mosques.
We pledge to not give a platform to any MLI participant to speak about their experiences at our community centers, places of worship, and campuses and call on a complete boycott of MLI.
Everyone who signed this petition is against peace. They are against dialogue. They are against treating Israeli Jews or Zionists as human beings.
HRW claims that Shakir is an objective researcher. Yet they hired him knowing that he was not only a supporter of BDS but he hates Muslims who don't share his opinion about it.
HRW knowingly hires people with a rabid hate for Israel - and deliberately chooses to use these same haters to "research" Israel.
This isn't human rights. This is pure hate. And HRW is part of it.
(h/t Petra)
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Omar Shakir from Human Rights Watch responded to his critics that wanted him deported from Israel last April:
Israeli authorities say they’re deporting me because I promote boycotts of Israel. Setting aside the paradox of the region’s self-proclaimed “only democracy” deporting a rights defender over peaceful expression, the claim isn’t true.
Human Rights Watch neither supports nor opposes boycotts of Israel, a fact that Israel’s Ministry of Interior acknowledged last year. Rather, we document the practices of businesses in settlements as part of our global efforts to urge companies, governments and other actors to meet their human rights responsibilities. We also defend the right of individuals to support or oppose boycotts peacefully, as a matter of freedom of speech and conscience.
Initially, the Israeli government said it revoked my work visa based on a dossier it compiled on my long-past student-activist days, before I became the Human Rights Watch Israel-Palestine director in October 2016. When we challenged the deportation in court, noting that the Interior Ministry’s own guidelines require support for a boycott to be “active and continuous,” they shifted to highlight Human Rights Watch research on the activities of businesses such as Airbnb and our recommendation that they cease operating in settlements.
His entire argument is that advocating businesses boycott settlements is not a boycott of Israel but a human rights activity against occupation. He says he hasn't advocated boycotting Israel since he was hired by HRW.
His latest tweet shows this to be an absolute lie:
Shakir is now explicitly calling for Airbnb to boycott Israel itself.
By this criterion, Airbnb couldn't operate anywhere in the Western Hemisphere or Australia because all land is "stolen." Is that HRW's position? Or is it, as always, only Israel that has to fit these bizarre and arbitrary criteria to be considered moral enough?
This also shows that the rhetoric against the "occupation" has always been a smokescreen by critics of Israel. They are against Israel, period, and they latch onto the "settlements" as an easier target, but their true aims are shown here.
Including the true aims of Human Rights Watch.
(h/t Michael Elgort)
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An amazingly vacuous tweet from a person and organization that we've come to expect such from:
Human Rights Watch sees a similarity between protests in Hong Kong and riots in Gaza?
The goal of the Hong Kong protests is (generally) to move towards independence from China. The goal of the Gaza protests is to destroy Israel - not to build an independent Palestinian state but to invade the independent Jewish state.
Hong Kong demonstrators don't shoot rockets into China. It doesn't start fires with balloons or kites in China. Most of all, they are not controlled by internationally recognized terrorist groups that decide if and where the protesters gather, when, and what activities they will do. Terror groups that decide how many children will approach the fence with Israel and put their lives in danger.
Hong Kong protesters don't have Molotov cocktails (as the PCHR article she links to admits) and guns.
The only comparison between Gaza and Hong Kong is that Gaza could have become a Hong Kong by now if its citizens and rulers wanted to. After Israel's disengagement they could have built a Mediterranean paradise, tourist hub and high tech center - there was no blockade then.
Instead, they decided that they wanted to keep attacking Israel.
This is a very false analogy, but HRW and Whitson have a monomaniacal hate for Israel that trumps all logic.
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A Palestinian from the West Bank who converted to Judaism in Israel was inexplicably arrested by Palestinian Authority forces security forces over two weeks ago and has been held in custody ever since. He claims to have been tortured during that time on multiple occasions, which left his limbs badly burned.
The 50-year-old is Hebron resident who worked at a supermarket in the Jerusalem area. He converted on the eve of Rosh Hashanah three weeks ago at a strict Haredi court in the city of Bnei Brak by Rabbi Nissim Karelitz, who passed away on Monday.
Prior to his conversion he studied at Machon Meir Yeshiva in Jerusalem, an institution strongly associated with nationalist politics and settler movement. He was in the process of having his conversion recognized by the Chief Rabbinate of Israel before he was arrested, which would have allowed him to apply for Israeli passport.
On the eve of Yom Kippur, the man traveled to an area of the West Bank under Palestinian security control, just beyond the section of the territory under Israeli security control. There, he was supposed to meet with one of his nine children, who along with their mother are all Muslim.
During the family reunion, a white Skoda vehicle carrying four men approached the 50-year-old. The men got out of the car, dragged the Palestinian into the vehicle and drove away. Later, the man was dropped off at a police station in Hebron by the four.
Haim Perg, the leader of the Jewish community in Hebron, is helping the Palestinian with his legal troubles and according to him, the 50-year-old is the grandson of a Palestinian man who helped save Jews during the 1929 Hebron massacre.
"As far as I'm concerned, he's like my son, and I will shake up the world for somebody to come and save him," Perg said. "The man's grandfather rescued 26 Jews during the events in Hebron. Now that he is in danger, we have a commitment to help him."
Perg added that he spoke by phone with the Palestinian who told him he was being badly beaten and had even had his hands and feet burned during the torture he’s had to endure.
This story has been out in English for 24 hours, and tweeted to Human Rights Watch. Yet even though they tweet lots about Israel, this story somehow is not important enough to even tweet.
The reason, of course, is that to HRW, Arab and Muslim antisemitism is a topic that must never be mentioned or hinted at.
Look at this article from a HRW researcher about antisemitism in Europe in 2015 after a spate of mostly Muslim attacks on Jews:
In January, four Jewish men were killed in a kosher supermarket in Paris, two days after the brutal attack on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo that left 12 people dead. Last week, a man attacked a synagogue in Copenhagen, killing a Jewish man as he guarded the building during a Bat Mitzvah celebration.... Last May, a man shot four people dead in a Jewish museum in Brussels. In 2012, a man and three children were shot dead at a Jewish school in Toulouse.
Not once is the fact that these were Muslim attacks mentioned. And if you would come up with that conclusion on your own, HRW doesn't want you to take any guesses that perhaps Islamists have a problem with Judaism:
[T]he factors which drive some to commit violence are complex too; some attackers may have been exploited and coerced, while others may have acted more out of frustration than deep-seated hatred.
HRW is bending over backwards to excuse Islamist antisemitism!
But when the synagogue in Halle was attacked on Yom Kippur, then HRW mentioned "right wing extremism." That can be named, Islamic and left wing extremism cannot be.
Interestingly enough, the German report on extremism linked to by HRW has separate sections on right-wing, left-wing and Islamic violence. But HRW only mentions one of them and does everything it can to erase the other two.
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Another hypocritical tweet from Human Rights Watch's chief Ken Roth:
Beyond humanitarian reasons, there are good strategic reasons to resettle refugees in safe places: the frustration of endless stays in refugee camps tend to make them breeding grounds for radicalism and regional instability. But Trump isn't listening. https://t.co/lLt2uCwRQFpic.twitter.com/Xy2LwFpNuK
Since Ken Roth took his position, I am fairly certain that he never said anything remotely like this for Palestinian "refugees." On the contrary, HRW advocates the "right to return" for them claiming that Israel must be forced to accept an arbitrary number of Arabs as citizens if they choose to "return" to where their grandparents lived.
The further irony is that the camps in Lebanon and Syria, Gaza and the West Bank are indeed places that so-called "refugees" get radicalized. In Lebanon, fighting erupts between different parties in the camps fairly regularly, and the sometimes spill into the rest of Lebanon. Roth doesn't care about Palestinians getting radicalized. He doesn't call for the camps to be demolished and the residents integrated into their host countries. And if anyone should be resettled, it is Palestinians whose statelessness has gone on for three generations, a much more acute problem than that of any real refugee group.
Just like Israel is expected to live up to standards that no other nation does, Palestinians have unique human-rights rules as well. They can be denied human rights as long as the reason is to make them cannon fodder against Israel.
Roth is a hypocrite, and this tweet proves it.
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This blog may be a labor of love for me, but it takes a lot of effort, time and money. For over 14 years and 30,000 articles I have been providing accurate, original news that would have remained unnoticed. I've written hundreds of scoops and sometimes my reporting ends up making a real difference. I appreciate any donations you can give to keep this blog going.
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