HRW's definition of "human shields" changes when Israel is involved

We previously discussed how Human Rights Watch was claiming a very restrictive definition of "human shields" contrary to the clear definition given by the ICRC, to clear Hamas of that charge.

A little further research shows that not only does HRW often use the correct definition of human shielding for other conflicts, but it has tightened up its definition over the years for Israel's enemies.

Here is Human Rights Watch, February 19, 2014, discussing a reported drone attack by US forces against a wedding in Yemen:

The legality of the December 12 attack hinges on both the applicable body of international law and the facts on the ground. If international humanitarian law, or the laws of war, applies to the December 12, 2013 attack, only valid military objectives such as AQAP leaders or fighters could have been lawfully targeted. The burden is on the attacker to take all feasible precautions to ensure that a target is a combatant before conducting an attack and to minimize civilian harm.

Had AQAP members deliberately joined the wedding procession to avoid attack they would have been committing the laws-of-war violation of using “human shields.”

In this case, HRW says that the terrorists merely need to purposefully place themselves around civilians. When Israel is the enemy, HRW says that the civilians must be coerced.

That wasn't always the case. HRW tried very hard to excuse Hezbollah from the accusation of human shielding in Lebanon in 2006, but the excuses they used - feeble as they were - do not apply to Hamas in 2014:

A key element of the humanitarian law violation of shielding is intention: the purposeful use of civilians to render military objectives immune from attack.

As noted above, we documented cases where Hezbollah stored weapons inside civilian homes or fired rockets from inside populated civilian areas. At minimum, that violated the legal duty to take all feasible precautions to spare civilians the hazards of armed conflict, and in some cases it suggests the intentional use of civilians to shield against attack. However, these cases were far less numerous than Israeli officials have suggested. The handful of cases of probable shielding that we did find does not begin to account for the civilian death toll in Lebanon. (The related issue of Hezbollah's illegally using several UN posts near the Lebanon-Israel border as shields is discussed in the next section.)

In addition to its own research, Human Rights Watch carefully reviewed local and international press accounts, IDF and Israeli government statements, and the work of various independent think tanks to evaluate allegations of human shielding by Hezbollah. While the Israeli government and certain commentators have described Hezbollah shielding as widespread, they have not provided convincing evidence to support such allegations.[111] The Israeli government provided some video footage taken from drones showing Hezbollah fighters firing rockets from what appear to be civilian structures, or entering such structures, but the footage gives no indication whether these structures were inhabited by civilians or located in then-populated areas.

The Israeli government's allegations seem to stem from an unwillingness to distinguish the prohibition against human shielding-the intentional use of civilians to shield a military objective from attack-from that against endangering the civilian population by failing to take all feasible precautions to minimize civilian harm, and even from instances where Hezbollah conducted operations in residential areas empty of civilians. Individuals responsible for shielding can be prosecuted for war crimes; failing to fully minimize harm to civilians is not considered a violation prosecutable as a war crime.[112]

To constitute shielding, there needs to be a specific intent to use civilians to deter an attack....

HRW disingenuously gives examples of Hezbollah firing rockets from fields nearby villages and of only taking over uninhabited homes, in order to protect Hezbollah from the charge of war crimes:

While failing to take precautions to protect civilians violates humanitarian law, intentionally making use of civilians to render military forces or a place immune from attack is considered to be the more serious violation of "shielding." Because the definition of shielding incorporates the concept of intent, any individual ordering shielding would almost invariably be committing a war crime.

Well, guess what: Hamas explicitly instructed Gazans to not evacuate their homes (and UNRWA schools) in Hamas-stronghold neighborhoods when Israel warned them to. Here is the webpage of the Ministry of the Interior where they tell Gazans to ignore Israeli warnings and stay in their homes.

HRW, instead of condemning what are clearly cases of human shielding under international law and under their own definitions, is going out of its way to excuse Hamas, downplay their war crimes - and endanger Gazans. In this case we see that twice HRW changed their definition deliberately to excuse first Hezbollah and then Hamas - moving the goalposts as each terror group gets more depraved.

What kind of a "human rights" group tries so hard to excuse violations of human rights?

(NGO Monitor has documented many other examples of HRW's fluid definitions of "human shielding" to defend terrorists from the charge when Israel is involved.)

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Human Rights Watch's Ken Roth goes to bat for Hamas war crimes

Is Human Rights Watch really biased against Israel, or is it merely that they are zealous about protecting everyone's human rights and Zionists are sensitive to their criticisms of Israel?

HRW chief Ken Roth clearly wants the world to believe that it is the latter. As he wrote a couple of days ago in this sarcastic tweet:

People accept @HRW reporting as fair & accurate around globe but when it comes to poor, helpless, defenseless #Israel we're suddenly biased.
— Kenneth Roth (@KenRoth) July 22, 2014

If what he says is true, then we would expect HRW to be just as energetic in uncovering human rights abuses from Gaza terror groups as it is for attacking Israel.

Yet here is what he tweeted last night:

#Hamas is putting civilians at risk but "no evidence" it forces them to stay--definition of human shields: @NYTimes. http://t.co/9yvh1cRSer
— Kenneth Roth (@KenRoth) July 25, 2014

Roth chooses to refer to a NYT article in order to defend Hamas.

What exactly did The New York Times write that Ken Roth finds so wonderful as to defend Hamas?

Nothing is ever so clear in the complex and often brutal calculus of urban warfare. There is no evidence that Hamas and other militants force civilians to stay in areas that are under attack — the legal definition of a human shield under international law. But it is indisputable that Gaza militants operate in civilian areas, draw return fire to civilian structures, and on some level benefit in the diplomatic arena from the rising casualties. They also have at times encouraged residents not to flee their homes when alerted by Israel to a pending strike and, having prepared extensively for war, did not build civilian bomb shelters.

Guess what? The New York Times is wrong.

The Geneva Conventions and their additional protocols do not use the words "human shields" anywhere. But the ICRC article on customary international humanitarian law has a fairly comprehensive description:

Rule 97. The use of human shields is prohibited.

State practice establishes this rule as a norm of customary international law applicable in both international and non-international armed conflicts.
International and non-international armed conflicts

In the context of international armed conflicts, this rule is set forth in the Third Geneva Convention (with respect to prisoners of war), the Fourth Geneva Convention (with respect to protected civilians) and Additional Protocol I (with respect to civilians in general).[1] Under the Statute of the International Criminal Court, “utilizing the presence of a civilian or other protected person to render certain points, areas or military forces immune from military operations” constitutes a war crime in international armed conflicts.[2]

...The prohibition of using human shields in the Geneva Conventions, Additional Protocol I and the Statute of the International Criminal Court are couched in terms of using the presence (or movements) of civilians or other protected persons to render certain points or areas (or military forces) immune from military operations.[18]

...It can be concluded that the use of human shields requires an 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.

While various military manuals do have specific prohibitions against forcing civilians to act as human shields, international law considers any situation where military targets (weapons tunnels, caches, rockets launchers) are deliberately placed near civilians to be cases of human shielding.

Under international law, even if Hamas doesn't force civilians to be in a certain area, they are considered human shields according to the ICRC. Israel is right, and the NYT is wrong.

Ken Roth could have chosen to attack the New York Times for narrowing the definition in such a way as to downplay Hamas culpability for this war crime - which is what a zealous human rights defender would be expected to do. Instead, he went to bat for Hamas against the civilians of Gaza he supposedly cares so much about. Even the Times article says explicitly that "Experts in international law say that...Hamas is legally obligated to minimize its operations near civilians" yet Roth doesn't want to highlight how bad Hamas is, but to emphasize Hamas is not really that bad. Roth is giving a terror group the benefit of the doubt that Israel has never received.

The New York Times article was written before yesterday's events at the UNRWA school, but Roth's tweet was written after details already were being published. And already at that time it was known that Hamas did force civilians to stay in the UNRWA shelter even as Israel was trying to get the civilians evacuated. As Washington Free Beacon recounts the events:

UNRWA spokesman Chris Gunness had similarly accused the IDF of preventing a civilian evacuation.

“Over the course of the day UNRWA tried 2 coodinate [sic] with the Israeli Army a window for civilians 2 leave & it was never granted,” UNRWA spokesman Chris Gunness tweeted, following the strike.

However, in an unusual move late Thursday, multiple IDF sources rejected UNRWA’s claims and characterized them as outright falsehoods when reached by the Washington Free Beacon.

“For two days we were trying to move people out of that school in particular and the Beit Hanoun area in general,” said an IDF official who was involved in the interactions between the IDF, UNRWA, and International Red Cross (ICRC) leading up to the incident.

The official continued: “This morning we sought a cease-fire in the area and a humanitarian evacuation of civilians, but Hamas refused—because they wanted to keep civilians in the area to protect their fighters who were firing on the IDF,” the source said. The claim by Gunness and UNRWA that the IDF did not respond to their request to evacuate civilians, the source said, is “a flat-out complete and total lie.”

Who is telling the truth? I see no reason to doubt the IDF version of events. But the issue is that Ken Roth, whose very job is to prevent war crimes against civilians, chooses to ignore any evidence of Hamas war crimes - in this case, of using human shields even according to the falsely restrictive definition in the New York Times!

If Roth's only bias was towards human rights, then why does he go out of his way to excuse and minimize Hamas war crimes - war crimes under any interpretation of the Geneva Conventions?

The only explanation is that Roth is biased, all right - but not for defending Gaza civilians' human rights from Hamas.

Which tells you volumes about Ken Roth.

(h/t Seth Miller)

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HRW's Ken Roth proves his anti-Israel bias in tweet meant to do the opposite

Ken Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, proves his anti-Israel bias in an absurd tweet intended to show HRW is unbiased!

No one is saying that Israelis "poor, helpless, defenseless" - that is Ken Roth's own hate of the Jewish state revealing itself quite publicly. 

Because the evidence of HRW's, and Ken Roth's bias against Israel is incontrovertible.

The quick answer to his tweet is the huge amount of resources and attention HRW has given to castigating Israel (and the US) compared to every other country on the planet. Multiple, huge reports are written about events with death tolls that are a fraction of those in other areas of the world. Here I compare HRW's attention given to every country compared to their Freedom House scores - there is no correlation. 

Here are only some examples I've written about over the years:

• HRW condemned Ariel Sharon for his indirect role in Sabra and Shatila when he died - but never condemned the Christian Phalangists who actually did the killings. It never condemned any other world figure at the moment of their death. 

• HRW does not support equal rights for Palestinians in Lebanon who want to become citizens. 

• HRW twists international law in regards to Israel repeatedly.

• HRW has one definition of "occupation" for Israel, and another for the rest of the world. 

• Ken Roth insulted Israel when it announced plans to save the lives of Syrian Alawites, even as no other country in the world was doing anything for Syrians.

• Ken Roth wrote an article castigating Israel that had quite a few lies. he tried to weasel out of some but never admitted his errors. 

• HRW never answers whether they believe Jews have the right to pray on their holiest spot.

• HRW once had its employees write pro-HRW comments on numerous websites pretending that they were ordinary people - engaging in "sock-puppetry" - in defense of their employee with the Nazi memorabilia obsession. 

• The Sunday Times once showed HRW's obsession with Israel out of proportion to every other conflict.

•  A HRW researcher falsely claimed Palestinian Arabs in the territories live in "shanties" while Jews live in "spacious villas." 

This is beyond looking at their reports and press releases on Israel and the numerous patterns of bias, ignoring any facts that contradict their pre-conceived anti-Israel bias, as well as proof of their ignorance of military methods, every time.

Ken Roth likes to speak about Israel's "impunity" but HRW is not transparent about their methods of information gathering and reporting, about how they hire their Middle East "experts,"or really about their methods altogether - even as they demand the same from everyone else. It is HRW that acts with impunity against Israel.

Ken Roth never answered these charges - because he can't. Instead he tweets snarky comments insulting the very nation he claims he is not biased against.

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Beitunia Pallywood again: The injury of Mohammed Azza/Azi/Aziz (update)

The HRW report I mentioned earlier today does shed light on something: the time of the shooting of the injured youth Mohammed Azza.

HRW says:

Israeli forces shot and wounded Azza in the chest at around 12:20 p.m., about 15 meters from where Nawareh and Salameh were later fatally shot, Azza’s father and a witness told Human Rights Watch.

Human Rights Watch has not seen any video footage of Azza at the time he was shot. Azza stated he was not throwing rocks at that time.

...According to the reports, Azza suffered a gunshot injury to the left anterior chest wall and the left lung.

We have video from Camera 2 of Azza apparently being shot:



Starting from 12:20:00 on the security cam (37:20 of the video) you can see Azza moving towards the lower right side of the view, right next to a burning tire. He is hurling lots of stones, breaking some into smaller pieces on the ground.

Now that we have established how truthful Azza is in his testimony, we can go on.

At 12:20:42 on the CCTV time we see Azza suddenly crouch and turn - again, completely inconsistent with being shot in the chest with live fire, but possibly consistent with being hit with a rubber bullet. Two Arab girls in the lower right of the screen barely flinch at the sound, and continue to walk into the apparent line of fire, unconcerned.

Azza staggers back north, where he is quickly aided by a few people who help bring him to an ambulance.

There are photos of, supposedly, Azza with what appears to be a lot of blood. (I am not sure at what point he loses his light colored top/scarf.)

At least one photo appears to have been retouched, though. Here is the first one from the photographer's Facebook page:



Here's the version from Palestine News Network:

That is very bright blood, especially on dark clothing.

In the video, no blood is apparent on the street after the shooting. Still, this photo of him being carried to the ambulance seems to show blood on the carrier's jeans.

HRW's account is wildly different from the "eyewitnesses" that they love to quote. Mohammed told The Guardian that he was shot in the back, not the chest. 

Fakher Zayed in the same Guardian video says that he witnessed three youths get shot: first one in the chest, the second in the back, and the third in an unspecified area, a half hour after the second. Since Nawareh was facing south and Salameh was facing north, and Azi was according to the video and HRW hit 85 minutes before Nawareh, none of what Zayed says squares with the facts (unless there was a mystery fourth incident.)

Azza's account of the events to The National is also utterly inconsistent with his statements elsewhere and with the video:

“The protest wasn’t so big when we got there [at about 10.30am], there were only around 70 boys and four soldiers who were shooting rubber bullets and tear gas. When we went to the front, everyone was moving fast and throwing rocks. I was looking directly at a soldier under the vine tree and I wasn’t moving,” Mohammed recalls, sitting next to his father in their detached home.

“Then I heard the sound of the rifle. I thought it was a rubber bullet but then I felt something burning inside me. I started running with some of the other guys and they told me that I had been shot in my back. Some people picked me up and carried me to the ambulance.”

So he was looking directly at the soldier who shot him and he was shot in the back? He started running with them even though no one is seen on the video?

None of this bothers Human Rights Watch. HRW says that Azza suffered wounds "to the chest" but then later says that "Mohammed Azza, 15, told Human Rights Watch that Israeli forces shot him in the back earlier during the protests." So HRW, trying to square the accounts, instead of showing skepticism over Azza's words compared to the medical report, seems to be claiming that Azza was shot twice!

The accounts are absurdly inconsistent, and they do not jive with the video at the moment that HRW says the event occurred, but HRW just shrugs and insists Israel shot him with live fire in the chest, causing him to...crouch down and run under his own power.

Here is the supposedly critically wounded Azza, smiling for the camera in a photo posted on the day after the incident:

And here is is five days later:

I have no idea what really happened at 12:20 PM on May 15. I do know that Azza is lying, big time, about what he was doing at the time, as are all the other "eyewitnesses" and his family. Based on his reaction and the reaction of the passersby, I think it is highly unlikely that he was hit by a live bullet.

More importantly, Human Rights Watch also has no idea what really happened - but that doesn't stop them from pushing their own theories as if they are fact.

(h/t Bob Knot)

UPDATE: I wrote this based on HRW's time of 12:20 for the incident. But DCI is claiming that they have a CAM 3 view of the incident that happened around 13:00. (Conveniently, we don't have CAM 1 footage at 13:00, it starts at 13:04, and that's the highest quality camera.)

Someone is wrong. 

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HRW lies about Beitunia

In a  move that surprises no one, Human Rights Watch has released a report on the Beitunia shootings that uncritically reports every anti-Israel claim and ignores everything that is self-contradictory:

Video footage, photographs, witness statements, and medical records indicate that two 17-year-old boys whom Israeli forces shot and killed on May 15, 2014 posed no imminent threat to the forces at the time. The boys, who had been participating in a demonstration in the West Bank, were apparently shot with live ammunition, Human Rights Watch said.

Video footage clearly shows Israeli soldiers firing in the direction of the boys, Nadim Nawareh and Mohammed Salameh, and the boys falling to the ground. Medical records indicate that the two boys, as well as 15-year-old, Mohammed Azza, whom Israeli forces also shot and seriously wounded, suffered wounds to the chest caused by live ammunition. Nawareh and Salameh were shot right through the chest. Witnesses told Human Rights Watch they heard the sound of live ammunition being fired, quite distinct from the sound of rubber bullet fire, at the time the three boys were shot.

“The willful killing of civilians by Israeli security forces as part of the occupation is a war crime,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East and North Africa director. “Israel has a responsibility to prosecute the forces who targeted these teens, and also those responsible for assigning the use of live ammunition to police a demonstration.”

The Israeli military stated that it is investigating the killings but that its forces “did not use live fire,” only rubber bullets and teargas. However, rubber bullets are specifically designed not to penetrate bodies. It is highly unlikely that, at a range of at least 60 meters, rubber bullets would have caused the injuries that killed Nawareh and Salameh and wounded Azza. Nawareh’s family retrieved what may be the live bullet that killed him.

Offenses committed by Israeli security forces as part of the occupation, such as deliberate attacks on civilians, would be subject to prosecution under international humanitarian law as war crimes. Israeli forces have repeatedly shot Palestinians who posed no imminent threat with live ammunition during similar protests, including at an April 4 demonstration in the same location, and the Israeli military has a poor record of bringing soldiers to justice for such acts, Human Rights Watch said.

The boys were shot in three separate incidents but in virtually the same location in the town of Beitunia, where Palestinians had earlier held a demonstration to commemorate “Naqba Day,” which marks the expulsion of Palestinians from present-day Israel from 1947 to 1949. After the demonstration, there was a violent confrontation during which Israeli forces fired rubber bullets, live ammunition, and tear gas at Palestinians who threw rocks at the forces.

A photojournalist taking pictures at the time, Samer Nazzal, told Human Rights Watch that Israeli forces shot rubber bullets at a group of Palestinians who gathered to carry Nawareh away. Human Rights Watch viewed a series of Nazzal’s high-shutter-speed photographs taken immediately after Nawareh was shot that show a projectile, apparently a rubber bullet, coming from the direction of the Israeli forces. It struck the head of a Palestinian medic, who was wearing a bright orange vest and was part of the group carrying Nawareh.

The Israeli rights group B’Tselem reported that Israeli occupation forces also shot and wounded a 23-year-old man in the arm that day with live ammunition.

...Witness statements, medical reports, security camera videos, news media videos and photographs by journalists, which Human Rights Watch viewed, indicate that Israeli forces fired live ammunition.

As we have shown conclusively, at least Nadeem Nawarah's fall to the ground was accompanied by what was undoubtedly the firing of a rubber bullet.



Nazzal and the other "eyewitnesses" are lying.

Nazzal, 28, a photographer and journalist for Raya news, told Human Rights Watch that he arrived at the scene at around 1:30 p.m., after the clashes had started. He later heard Israeli forces fire both rubber bullets and live ammunition. Witnesses at demonstrations, as well as Israeli, Palestinian and international human rights monitors, have repeatedly confirmed that the sound of live fire is easily distinguished from the sound of the type of rubber bullets used by the Israeli Defense Forces. Nazzal said:

There were seven or eight soldiers on foot in an elevated area, behind a concrete wall and fence, about 60 meters away. There were also a lot of [military vehicles] about 200 meters away from us. There were dozens of protesters, most of them doing nothing but watching, and about 20 others were throwing rocks. Two or three of them would run forward and throw rocks at a time, but because the soldiers were in an elevated place and shielded, none of the rocks seemed to actually hit them. They were shooting tear gas and rubber bullets constantly, and once in a while we would hear live ammunition.

I started taking photos of the clashes as soon as I got there. Nadim [Nawareh] decided to cross the street. At that time he wasn’t throwing rocks; he was just crossing the street. As soon as he was in the middle of the street he was shot straight in the chest. I saw it. I was just 15 meters away from him. I heard the bullet, and he dropped to the ground and didn’t move.

Zayed, the store owner, and Abbas Mamoni, another journalist, corroborated Nazzal’s account.

Nazzal took a rapid series of photographs that show a projectile flying toward the group evacuating Nawareh, and apparently striking the head of a man wearing a medic’s fluorescent vest. The man stumbles and holds his head in subsequent images.

This photograph, if accurate, exactly corresponds with the second gunshot sound in the CNN video, a sound identical to the first one that corresponds to Nawarah's fall. If the sound of a rubber bullet is so easily distinguishable from that of live fire - and it is - then the two shots were of the same type and Nawara was not hit by live fire.

HRW pretends to look at the inconsistencies but dismisses them with what can only be described as a wild conspiracy theory: (There are links in HRW's report that do not go anywhere, and there are no links to the description of the rifle.)

Some commentators and news reports have incorrectly stated that the CNN footage could not show Israeli forces shooting live ammunition because the assault rifles seen in the footage have attachments that are used to fire rubber bullets. However, the Israeli military has used at least one type of assault-rifle attachment, produced by Israel Military Industries, that allows forces to fire rubber bullets, but also to fire live ammunition without removing the attachment. A brochure states that the 22-centimeter-long “launcher” can be “attached to any rifle with NATO flash suppressor” and allows “immediate 5.56-mm lethal firing capability without removing adapter.”

Human Rights Watch could not determine whether the gunshot in the video fired a live round or a rubber bullet, or to rule out the possibility that Nawareh might have been killed by another gunshot that the video did not record.

The gunshot in the CNN video was accompanied by the appearance of a paper wad (you need to go frame by frame to see it) that accompanies many but not all rubber bullet firings, but do not correspond with live fire. In addition, the sound of a live fire round even from such a rifle would sound different, as HRW emphasizes. So HRW prefers a conspiracy theory involving several layers of IDF command over the clear evidence from the CNN video and photographs that HRW relies upon.

HRW's presentation of the facts here simply do not jive with the reality of the videos and the photos. The organization casts no doubt on the supposed bullet that Nawara's family has shown to the media that could not possibly have passed through a human body as an  expert showed. And it is credulous regarding "eyewitnesses" who are known to lie.

But HRW isn't interested in discovering the truth - it is interested in damning Israel.

(h/t Gidon)

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Why HRW is racist: it condemns Sharon in death, ignores Phalangists, supports Dieudonné

Human Rights Watch remains as disgusting as ever.

As Ariel Sharon died after his long illness, HRW is very sad. Not about his death, of course:

Ariel Sharon died without facing justice for his role in the massacres of hundreds and perhaps thousands of civilians by Lebanese militias in the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps in Lebanon in 1982. The killings constituted war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Sharon also escaped accountability for other alleged abuses, such as his role expanding settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, prosecutable as a war crime. Sharon ordered the removal of all Israeli settlers from the Gaza Strip and from four West Bank settlements in 2005, but the overall number of settlers in occupied territory increased significantly during his term as prime minister.

“It’s a shame that Sharon has gone to his grave without facing justice for his role in Sabra and Shatilla and other abuses,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East and North Africa director at Human Rights Watch. “His passing is another grim reminder that years of virtual impunity for rights abuses have done nothing to bring Israeli-Palestinian peace any closer.”

As far as I can tell, HRW has never written an article like this about the death of any other person. Not Osama bin Laden, not Moammar Qaddafi, not Saddam Hussein. Only Ariel Sharon gets treated this way.

Now, if you do a search through HRW's archives of the word "Phalangist" (or "Keta'eb," which is the current name of that group in Lebanon, still an active political party) you will not find a single condemnation of their massacres in Sabra and Shalita. Every single time they are mentioned it is in context of - Ariel Sharon.

To HRW, the people who actually slaughter human beings and mutilate pregnant women are blameless. They are not worthy of any calls to investigation, there is no reason to seek justice from them.

How can this be? How can Human Rights Watch ignore the perpetrators of the crime and give the lion's share of responsibility to someone who, while he should have anticipated and stopped the crime, was not either its planner nor executor?

The answer is very simple, and it betrays the racism of Human Rights Watch and many other such groups, media and politicians:

Middle Easterners are expected to be savages. Arabs and Maronite Christians, in HRW's world, are animals. They have no free will - their actions are disgusting but inevitable, a consequence of their subhuman natures.

Jews, on the other hand, must act like human beings. They must prevent two sets of animals under their control from killing each other.  Indeed, this is how human beings should act, and Sharon was correctly slammed by Israeli commissions for his not being proactive in stopping what was almost inevitable.

Human Rights Watch, however, only blames Sharon. The esteemed organization cannot be bothered to condemn Maronites or Arabs for acting like this - that is their nature. This is pure racism.

Sabra and Shatila would not exist on the website of Human Rights Watch if it wasn't for Ariel Sharon. In fact, Lebanon saw much worse massacres in recent decades- even against Palestinian civilians - and HRW has not a word to say about those massacres. Only if a Jew can be blamed is it worth being brought up.

Another angle: Sharon forcibly expelled thousands of people from their homes in Gaza and the West Bank. This would seem to be against the Geneva Conventions. The ICRC interprets international law this way: "Individual or mass forcible transfers...are prohibited, regardless of their motive." But they were Jews, so HRW has nothing bad to say about that. Jews in the territories are the only group of people in the world that HRW insists should be forcibly removed from their homes. There is a double standard clear to all: international law must be twisted to ensure that Jews, the indigenous people of ancient Israel and Judah, are always violators of law while Arabs who invaded or moved in millenia later are nearly blameless in their actions.

To put the icing on the HRW anti-semitism cake, they also wrote this about antisemitic French "comedian" Dieudonné:

France made the wrong decision when it banned controversial comedian Dieudonné M’Bala M’Bala, known for appallingly and insultingly mocking the Holocaust, from performing a number of his stand-up shows.

The government’s representative in Nantes banned a show scheduled for Thursday, on grounds of threats to public order. On the day of the show, one of the city’s courts overturned the ban. But Minister of the Interior Manuel Valls, who has spoken out openly and strongly against Dieudonné, appealed to France’s highest administrative court, the Conseil d’Etat, which later in the day upheld the ban.

On Friday, another court upheld the ban on another show by Dieudonné that was to take place in Tours in the evening. Welcoming the ruling by the Conseil d’Etat, Valls said that “The Republic has won”.

Yet a country’s dedication to human rights and democratic values is measured in the way it treats those with whom it disagrees, and in this instance, France has failed that test. France should respect freedom of expression, including those opinions that shock, offend, or disturb – unless they amount to inciting violence. Any restrictions to this freedom must be necessary and proportionate, and banning Dieudonné shows is neither. If there are indeed threats to public order, authorities should deploy enough police officers to deter violence, not ban the show altogether.

Please, HRW, explain how making fun of the Holocaust and Jews is anything less than incitement. How does creating an environment where Jews being gassed and burned is a subject of mockery make it a safer country for Jews to live in? There is a reason that record numbers of French Jews moved to Israel this year, but, hey, HRW probably considers that a war crime as well.

And, of course, Arab media regularly has much more open incitement against Jews, as I have documented countless times. Yet to this day, HRW has never said a word against Arab antisemiticm and incitement to kill Jews.

HRW has a halo effect as being one of the most prestigious human rights organizations. And in some parts of the world, perhaps it does some good work. But its standards are twisted into a mockery of human rights when the subject or object of the reports happen to be Jews. The standard for Jews to tolerate hate against themselves is lower than that for anyone else; while the standard for Jews to act in a humane manner is much, much higher than that of their neighbors.

 It is hard to find this to be a coincidence.

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How HRW and Amnesty have failed women in the Middle East (NGO Monitor)

NGO Monitor has just released a very impressive report, titled "Second Class Rights: How Amnesty International & Human Rights Watch Fail Women in the Middle East."

Here are some excerpts from its executive summary and introduction:

Given the importance of women’s rights and their contribution to the development of society, the promotion of liberal democracy, and the strengthening of other human rights, they should be a primary focus of the most prominent human rights NGOs, specifically Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch (HRW). And as noted above, given that women’s rights are the least protected within MENA countries, it would seem to follow that these organizations should direct significant resources and sustained campaigning toward promoting women’s rights within the MENA region.

As NGOs with huge budgets rivaling those of multinational corporations, and with tremendous influence among policy makers and in UN frameworks, Amnesty and HRW have a distinct advantage in championing women’s rights. Research and advocacy by these organizations can give women’s issues international prominence. Conversely, violations ignored by Amnesty and HRW may lead the media, academics, and policy makers to conclude that these problems are not serious enough to warrant attention.

Despite the advantages of being well-funded, highly organized, and powerful actors, campaigning on women’s rights in the MENA region leading up to the Arab Spring was not a priority for Amnesty and HRW. While these NGOs project an image of prioritizing women’s rights, both quantitative and qualitative analyses of their activities demonstrate that this is not, in fact, an accurate assessment. Amnesty’s and HRW’s campaigning was sporadic and impressionistic, without sustained advocacy, and not aimed at achieving concrete objectives.

Instead, these groups chose to focus on issues related to criminal detention, armed conflict, and counter-terrorism. Often, the NGO agenda appeared to be driven by media interest and prominent world events, or as a foil to U.S. policy.

Because of the core agenda drivers for these NGOs, there was relatively little campaigning on women’s issues in the MENA region from 1990 through 2011. There was no reporting at all for some MENA countries; in other instances, the minimal reporting soft-peddled abuses by repressive governments. As a result, these NGOs were ill-prepared to deal with the Arab Spring upheavals.

In the aftermath of the Arab Spring, sustained campaigning by these NGOs has been all the more important given the ascendancy of Islamist parties and the backlash against women throughout the region. There is a sense of urgency among women activists for the need to “create a strong body to lobby and advocate for rights” in order to prevent further deterioration. This period of tremendous uncertainty, however, has not seen Amnesty and HRW step in to fill the vacuum.

...With regards to Amnesty, for example, external consultants hired by the NGO to evaluate its women’s rights program found that “there is little evidence that Amnesty International was able to use its ‘might’ (name and reputation, resources, research and campaign work) to ‘change the global conversation’, ”12 and further concluded that “Women’s rights are not yet part of Amnesty International’s DNA.”13 The evaluators noted many problems, including that new campaigns “lack any explicit analysis of or com- mitment to women’s rights, despite a commitment to gender being explicit in [Amnesty’s strategic plan],”14 “Some staff do not see the need to learn about or work on women’s rights; it is still seen as optional,”15 and “with the ending of [the Violence Against Women (VAW) program] the number of staff employed to work on VAW and women’s rights has declined.”16 The main recommendation in the evaluation was that “a clear plan for ensuring that Amnesty International takes women’s rights seriously is needed urgently.”17

For HRW, no case better illustrates the NGOs soft-peddling approach on women’s issues in the MENA region than its activities relating to Saudi Arabia. HRW acknowledges that the situation for women in Saudi Arabia is untenable.18 Yet, despite this recognition, the organization has undertaken little substantive and sustained campaigning on the fundamental issues relating to women in the Kingdom. Instead, it has chosen to focus on relatively minor concerns that may garner media attention, but have had little to no impact on eliminating systemic abuse.

HRW’s reporting on Saudi Arabia has also included analyses of whether its repressive guardianship system is required under Islamic law – a discussion that would be unthinkable, for instance, in HRW reports on gay rights and abortion in Catholic countries. Moreover, HRW’s reporting on Saudi Arabia is hesitant and often lacks the language of demand, certainty, urgency, and immediacy, and offers praise for the most minor and illusory of rights reforms. In contrast to recommendations in reports on the U.S., Israel, and other countries, there is no call for external intervention by other nations and international institutions, no demand for the establishment of international investigations or fact-finding inquiries, no call for the imposition of international sanctions and embargoes, and no demand for international prosecutions or other hard-hitting measures.

This approach has also been coupled with offensive statements by HRW’s leadership such as Executive Director Ken Roth who has written “Of new #Saudi reforms for women municipal voting, Olympics a greater work role, even if segregated, will matter most.” It is inconceivable that Roth would have made similar statements relating to African-Americans or other minority groups.

The most troubling aspect of HRW’s soft approach is that it appears to coincide with a new strategy by the organization to intensify fundraising from Gulf elites. This financing plan raises numerous ques- tions regarding the impact of such funding on HRW’s priorities and agenda setting, as well as HRW’s commitment to moral and ethical principles.

...The research also demonstrates that Amnesty and HRW officials’ attitudes towards rights abuses against women in the Middle East is largely motivated by post-colonial ideology and a fear of being labeled “Western” or “Islamophobic.” The failure to report and the “soft-peddling” of abuses also appears to be driven by a desire not to be seen as supporting the policies of the U.S. government.

Additionally, in discussing abuses against women, Amnesty and HRW often employ language that is much softer than that used to describe alleged violations committed by Western countries, reflecting a tendency by these groups to opine on politics, promote specific regimes, and justify religious strictures. In many cases, as will be described in the report, rather than documenting and condemning offenses, Amnesty and HRW gave praise and encouragement to abusive regimes. In several instances, these NGOs marketed a façade of regime reforms that were mostly illusory, as in Saudi Arabia, and even false, as in the case of Libya. In other examples, and in contrast to the approach towards Western or non- Muslim countries, these NGOs relied on Islamic precepts for their analyses, rather than the standards established by international human rights law. And in still other cases, these organizations actively promoted those who oppose true political and social freedom for women such as Amnesty’s embrace of a Taliban supporter and HRW’s stance towards the Muslim Brotherhood. In essence, these organizations have chosen a “kid-gloves” approach to promote change in dictatorial societies rather than engaging in hard-hitting advocacy, tough “naming and shaming,” and application of universal, internationally-adopted human rights standards.

As will be shown in this report, HRW and Amnesty have allowed ideology and politics to prevail at the expense of true freedom for women. Doing so has compromised the role of these organizations as independent “non-governmental” actors that monitor and report on universal human rights. Had a different, more sustained, hardline approach been adopted or even just attempted by these organizations, perhaps women’s rights would be far more advanced in the MENA region, and the Arab Spring would have truly led to positive change for women.

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