The hundreds of tons of weaponry aboard the Francop ship marks the largest arms seizure in Israel’s history. Many of the containers were labeled ”I.R. (Islamic Republic of) Iran Shipping Lines Group,” while others featured the logo of the Iranian Petroleum Ministry. Cargo certificates showed that the ship departed from an Iranian port and its destination is listed as Syria, from where these weapons, like tens of thousands of missiles before them, would be transferred to Hezbollah in Lebanon. (Of course, Syria’s Foreign Minister issued the ritual denials, claiming not only that the ship had no weapons, but that it was headed in the opposite direction - from Syria to Iran).

HRW’s total disregard for and lack of interest in such blatant violations of UN Security Council resolutions is more evidence of the biased agenda, as documented in NGO Monitor reports. It also reinforces HRW founder Robert Bernstein’s accusation (published in the New York Times) that: “Human Rights Watch has lost critical perspective on a conflict in which Israel has been repeatedly attacked by Hamas and Hezbollah… groups… supported by the government of Iran.”

In her October 22 posting, Cobban attacked Bernstein for ostensibly advocating an “old fashioned” view of human rights in which some kinds of societies (open and democratic) are better than others (closed and tyrannical). Continuing with an eerily similar kind of argument, Cobban then expounded her views on Hamas, demonstrating how this ostensibly stalwart defender of universal human rights is actually an apologist for terror. In her January 2009 blog post Cobban is quite convinced Hamas is little more than a social welfare and educational organization made out to be a “terrorist organization” [she uses those quotation marks herself]  by the US State Department. Cobban praises Hamas for its “systems for educating successive generations of youth and for cultivating leadership skills in a broad array of skill-sets.” The mind boggles. In this moral twisted universe, Helena Cobban seems to think that all violence is equal, and equally bad. In a December 2008 post she argues that Israel and Hamas are morally equal because they both use violence. For Ms. Cobban, it would seem that Israel’s attempts to defend its citizens from murderous attack are indistinguishable from the actions of those who violently strive to kill Israelis and Jews. This moral equivalence is repugnant, and is akin to condemning a woman for fighting a would-be rapist, since both use violence.

All rights, all countries, all violence, cannot be equal simply by virtue of their all being rights, countries, or violence. Universal human rights are based on the ability to make such fundamental moral distinctions - in which we acknowledge that freedom is better than tyranny, health is better than suffering, choice is better than coercion. For a HRW Middle East Division board member to erase the critical differences between immoral aggression and self-defense is simply another sign of the profound moral confusion in this organization that exploits the rhetoric while destroying the substance of human rights.

Hat tip to AugeanStables, “Hullo, Can you see Florida from here?”: Helena Cobban opens a window onto the “global hamoulah” of progressives

MRAP (France):

“Despite the dozens of resolutions adopted by various UN bodies condemning the actions of the state of Israel, colonial occupation follows the destruction, massacres follow the abuses, and the international law is constantly trampled.”

FIDH, PCHR (Raji Sourani) (Norway, Ireland, Sweden, Denmark, Austria, Switzerland, Netherlands, European Union):

“The smell of death and destruction because of the war [is] still there. Still there in criminal siege imposed among the protected civilians in Gaza…For the first time ever war crimes were broadcasted live on air at the real time and the whole world witnessed it. Can we hold these criminals accountable? Can we bring sort of justice to the victims?…I want to say here, on its part, Hamas expressed its readiness publicly to investigate judicial body. To investigate all things related to [it in the] Goldstone report…By the name of victims and whom we represent, what we are seeking, asking for, simple: rule of law, not rule of jungle. And we are saying for those who are going to abstain or to vote against Goldstone endorsement report – you are for rule of jungle, you want Israel to repeat that once again against Palestinian protected civilians.”

Al Haq (Ireland, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland), Badil (Switzerland, Sweden, Netherlands, Denmark, Ireland, Norway), DCI-PS (Switzerland, Sweden, Netherlands, Denmark):

“There can be no justice, peace or security without accountability. Impunity has prevailed and will continue to prevail if you, Mr. President and member states, do not take concrete action. The Israeli justice system has consistently failed to provide the Palestinian people with effective avenues for any meaningful action and effective remedies… we urge you, Mr. President and member states, to demand an end to the relentless blockade on the Gaza Strip which collectively punishes the people of Gaza and deprives them of their basic needs. The occupation, which is the root cause of this conflict, has persisted for over 42 years. Impunity effectively encourages the continuation of unlawful activities by Israel in the entirety of the Occupied Palestinian Territory. In East Jerusalem…houses are being systematically demolished, settlement construction and expansion continues and holy sites are violated…Let us be sure that no one escapes the hand of justice…”

HRW (Oxfam NOVIB (Netherlands), Trocaire (Ireland)):

“Actors on all sides played political games to the detriment of civilian victims of the Gaza conflict…Those who argue that the report will derail peace efforts should acknowledge that persistent impunity, not the prospect of justice, is the greater threat to peace. The OHCHR should follow up on the implementation of recommendations contained in the report, not the resolution adopted during the 9th special session of the council which focused solely on the responsibility of Israel…the blockade in Gaza [] amounts to collective punishment against the civilian population.”

Amnesty International:

“Without effective action to address accountability and impunity there will be no long term peace in the Middle East.”

Badil (Switzerland, Sweden, Netherlands, Denmark, Ireland, Norway):

“Justice delayed is indeed justice denied. Approximately 500,000 Palestinians in 92 communities are currently facing the risk of forced displacement…Unlawful destruction of human lives, confiscation of private and public Palestinian property and forced displacement of the Palestinian people continues in the OPT because Israel, the occupying power, has never been held accountable for its legal obligations. In the climate of impunity Israel continues to commit serious violations of international humanitarian law and gross violations of international human rights law…We Palestinian and international human rights organizations ask the HRC to condemn Israel’s recent human rights violations in occupied East Jerusalem, in particular Israel’s efforts at changing the demographic composition of the city by demolishing Palestinian homes, expanding construction of the wall and Jewish settlements, restricting Palestinian freedom of movement and access to essential services and religious sites…Our special concern is still with the victims of Israel’s military practice of targeting civilian shelters and shelter seekers…this practice has escaped justice…the impunity of these crimes has undermined faith in international law globally…”

ICJ (France, Austria, Finland, Cyprus, UK, Sweden, Ireland, Greece):

“The request for national investigations do no restrict the duty of every state of the international community to stop condoning pervasive impunity and prepare the ground for the investigation and possible persecution of all those suspected of serious violations of international law.”

Adalah (EU, Switzerland):

“The Israeli legal and judicial systems have consistently failed in providing any legal remedies to the Palestinian people who are protected under international humanitarian law…Since the beginning of the occupation the Israeli legal system has consistently approved illegal policies and practices in the occupied Palestinian Territories which violate international law…Since the second intifada Israel has stopped investigating the killing and injury of civilians who were not involved in hostilities except for in extraordinary circumstances…The most famous example is of the assassination of Salah Shehadah…since 2006 Gaza became a legal black hole with no applicable legal protection…the Israeli Supreme Court approved all punitive measures imposed against the one and a half million living in Gaza…The HRC has to act and put an end to the culture of impunity and the lack of justice in the region.”

PCHR (Norway, Ireland, Sweden, Denmark, Austria, Switzerland, Netherlands, European Union):

“The Goldstone report provides a historic opportunity to end the status of impunity of Israel to international law…Any abstention from condemning the Israeli attitude, any abstention from condemning the Israeli crimes would actually blow up the possibility for peace because it would encourage Israel to continue its occupation which has become the longest in modern history and the consolidation of an apartheid system that has become the worst in modern history. This report…sends a message that after today, no state, no government, can attack civilians without being held accountable…[Justice Goldstone and his committee members] were not standing against Israel, they were standing against oppressive Israel, occupying Israel…there is nothing to be proud of in the beginning of the 21st century to be a country that is creating a much worse apartheid system than what prevailed in South Africa…this opportunity of ending impunity serves the interest of all people in our region.”

ITTIJAH, Union of Arab Jurists, General Arab Women Federation (GAWF), Arab Lawyers Union (ALU), Arab Organization For Human Rights (AOHR), International Educational Development (IED), Inc.

“As long as we have those who want to convince us that these crimes are legitimate self-defense or that they are just a mistake and as long as there are those who need more time to take a stand vis-à-vis such crimes even though they have been taking place for over 50 years…we totally refuse to equate the aggressor with the victim. We all know what the Hamas missiles are and what is the Israeli military arsenal and where it comes from, the fact-finding mission report has documented this difference clearly.”

Nord-Sud XXI

“The Palestinian people who continue to suffer from conditions of life imposed by Israel with the apparent intention of destroying these people in whole or in part cannot be forced to wait for action to be taken to protect their rights…when bodies such as this council…do not act, people fighting for self-determination against foreign and oppressive occupiers are forced to turn to the use of force to try to end their oppression.”

“Human Rights Watch does not devote more time and energy to Israel than to other countries in the region, or in the world. We’ve produced more than 1,700 reports, letters, news releases, and other commentaries on the Middle East and North Africa since January 2000”

Well, one country HRW is not reporting on is the African country of Mauritania. HRWs “Browse by Country” page does not list Mauritania and neither is the country found on its Africa or North Africa pages. Mauritania is also conspicuously absent from HRW’s 2009 World Report.

The Islamic Republic of Mauritania is quite notorious, however for human rights violations. The government only criminalized slavery in 2007 and the enslavement of the black African population there remains rampant (estimates put the number around 600,000). A cached version of what appears to have been at one time HRW’s “Mauritania” page only lists two publications– one from 2003 and one from 2001 – and neither of these address slavery. Its only report documenting the repression of Mauritania’s black population by white “Moor” rulers dates back to 1994 – FIFTEEN YEARS ago. Even Amnesty International has several reports from 2008 on the systematic torture that is routine in the country.

Hmmm….Twenty Eight statements (and counting) in six months lobbying for the Goldstone mission and Zero reports on slavery in Mauritania in fifteen years? I guess the slaves of Mauritania will continue to suffer because as Ken Roth admitted in an interview in the Tablet, “’Why are we more concerned about the [Gaza] war rather than on other rights abuses?’ Well, we’ve got to pick and choose-we’ve got finite resources.”

On Tuesday, October 27, 2009, Amnesty will be issuing a 112-page report (www.ngo-monitor.org/data/images/File/Amnesty_water_112.pdf), along with a glossy 12-page summary report (www.ngo-monitor.org/data/images/File/Amnesty_water_12.pdf) and a press conference, echoing this patronizing logic.  Absurdly, Amnesty claims that Israel is violating the human rights of Palestinian because the Oslo Accords “codified inequality in access to water resources”. According to the authors, the PA and the Palestinian Water Authority have “extremely limited control over water resources in the West Bank. Under the Oslo Accords, [they] merely acquired the responsibility of managing an inadequate water supply…and for maintaining and repairing a long-neglected water infrastructure that was already in dire need of major repairs.”

In other words, Amnesty is saying, that when they entered into Oslo (1993-95), Yassir Arafat and the PLO were incapable of taking their own interests into account and lacked the ability to negotiate and enter into a deal to their own benefit (whether they actually stuck to the deal once entered into is another question).  Under contract law, an agreement can be invalidated for a lack of capacity on the basis of infancy, mental illness, or drunkenness.  Amnesty must think that the Palestinians involved in negotiating and agreeing to Oslo were children, insane, or wasted if it is advancing such an illogical and silly argument.  If I was a Palestinian, I am not sure I would want this paternalistic organization advocating on my behalf.

Garlasco is doing a pretty good job destroying himself all on his own. In contrast to Richardson’s version, NGO Monitor has systematically documented the methodological, technical, and factual inaccuracies in Garlasco’s reports for HRW (Gaza Beach, Razing Rafah, White Phosphorous, Drones). We have also examined the basis of Garlasco’s position as HRW’s “senior military analyst”. In his version of the seven years in the US military establishment (we found no independent sources on this), Garlasco was involved in “interrogat[ing] prisoners…and chart[ing] the coordinates for the bombing campaign against Saddam Hussein in the early days of the [Iraq] war.” As “chief of high value targeting,” he was responsible for the deaths of “a couple of hundred civilians at least,” without killing any of the targets – this would make him a war criminal, but not much of an expert.

Richardson’s defense makes the following preposterous claims that are all directly refuted by Garlasco’s “research” for HRW:

•  Garlasco: “Israel has every right to defend itself — not only a right, but an obligation,”

Fact:  Garlasco has never written anything remotely similar in his HRW reports.  Instead, these publications are all about delegitimizing Israel’s right to self-defense against vicious terrorism.

•  Garlasco:  “Garlasco also criticized Israel for a number of human-rights violations, like . . . using drones to kill too many people from a distance.”

Fact:  On this, as on other such hi-tech allegations, Garlasco’s case is speculative, at best, and mostly hand-waving. His case studies rely on claims by Palestinian witnesses that they “heard” the drones.  In contrast, several military experts criticized his report when it was issued, clarifying it would be impossible to identify an attack as coming from a drone simply by sound.  And the weapon, the Spike missile, that Garlasco claimed to have been launched from drones can also be fired from other weapons delivery systems.

It is also disingenuous for Garlasco to claim he was open about his Nazi festish.  In fact, prior to the release of his 430-page opus on Nazi war medals, Garlasco asked his friends at germancombatawards.com the following:

“Flak88: So I am trying to figure out what to do. My book is close to done, but I am not sure if I should put my name on it. If folks at work found out I might very well lose my job. . .”

Garlasco is in trouble, and Esquire has come to his aid by trying to deflect attention from his seedy and bizarre Nazi memorabilia fetish, and the pseudo-technical propaganda published in his HRW indictments of Israel.   Do we need to repeat that it is more than a bit strange for a “human rights” activist to idolize swastika-adorned medals and Nazi soldiers?  And how many other moral campaigners use the name of a gun and the symbol for “Heil Hitler” as their screen names?  But more important than Garlasco, HRW – a superpower in the human rights world – needs to account for its reliance on this biased and unreliable “research” – unfortunately, not an anomaly for Ken Roth’s organization.

HRW and Sarah Leah Whitson (head of the Middle East division) have again issued a  ridiculous condemnation against Israel (October 9).  This time, the organization, whose Middle East division is run by radical ideologues, and whose “military expert” is an obsessive collector of Nazi medals (Garlasco, aka Flak 88), repeats the canard that Israel is in violation of international law and the Geneva Conventions for not supplying Gazan school children with pens, textbooks, and paper.

Notwithstanding that international law does not require Israel to supply such materials, and that Egypt could easily supply school supplies to Hamas, what exactly is HRW demanding that Israel provide Hamas’ young charges?

Does HRW demand include providing textbooks that call for denial of the Holocaust? Books that refuse to recognize Israel’s existence or wipe Israel off the map? Educational passages extolling the benefits of martyrdom and how best to murder Israeli civilians?  Or is Israel simply required to provide raw materials, so that Hamas can print it on its own?

If  HRW, including its board members and donors, want to preserve whatever is left of this organization’s reputation, and return to promoting human rights, these propaganda blasts against Israel need to end immediately.

P.S. We’ll save for another time an analysis of the silly claims made by HRW that Israel controls Gaza’s “population registry” (are Israeli officials stationed in Gaza’s hospitals recording births and deaths?) or that economic sanctions (perfectly legal under international law) constitute “collective punishment.”

” Some 75% of HRW’s money comes from the United States, the group has noted, which is viewed in the Middle East as a bastion of pro-Israel influence. HRW also has many Jewish donors. ‘Since many people in the Middle East believe that HRW is too soft on Israel because of our donor base, we often cite the vehement attacks on us by reflexive Israel supporters to show the reality, which is that we criticize Israel, the Palestinian Authority, Hamas, Arab governments - anyone - when we find evidence of human rights violations,’ he said.”

In other words, Roth is ezxplaining that Israel-bashers (including wealthy Arabs & Moslems) need to be shown that HRW’s American and Jewish funders and board members have not turned this organization into a Zionist mouthpiece (”too soft on Israel”). The moral issues and the substance (or their noticeable absence) revealed by NGO Monitor in our analysis of HRW’s “reports” on Israel are entirely irrelevant — the main point is to appease the Arab critics by proving HRW not “soft on Israel”. On Al Jazeera and in the UN Human Rights Council (where HRW’s halo shines bright next to the Libyan and Iranian delegates), the more absurd the attacks on Israel (war crimes, collective punishment, drones, white flags, deliberate killing, etc.), the better.
Any resemblance to reality is strictly accidental and infrequent — as demonstrated in HRW’s barrage of publications. (Youtube videos showing Hamas using false “white flags” highlight the latest examples of HRW’s political fiction.) And the rare fig-leaf reports criticizing Hamas and Hezbollah (usually a ratio of 1 in 4) are “fire and forget” — no one takes them seriously, including HRW.
So one of the reasons that Israel is targeted uniquely by HRW is to show that they are free from influence by the hated Zionists. In contrast, on China, Roth doesn’t need to demonstrate that he is not a “mouthpiece for Tibet”. But expect this to change when HRW starts to raise funds in Beijing.

• There was no effort to uncover details of weapons smuggling into Gaza, and no mention of the central Iranian role. In contrast, the US-Israel security links were emphasized in HRW’s speculative allegations about Israel’s use of drones and white phosphorous.

• The report falsifies history, blaming Israel for ending the undeclared ceasefire on November 4th 2008.  In HRW’s version, the Hamas rocket “attacks virtually stopped…but resumed after Israeli forces killed six Palestinian fighters.”  In reality, the IDF responded to the exposure of tunnels (used for cross-border terror attacks such as the kidnapping of Cpl. Gilad Shalit in June 2006) and intelligence suggesting more planned kidnappings.

• HRW distorts the human shields issue, blaming Israel for Hamas’s use of civilian areas to launch rockets.  According to this publication Hamas fighters were “redeployed from more open and outlying regions -many of which were…controlled by Israeli ground forces…into densely populated urban areas.” To make this claim, HRW had to ignore the thousands of attacks from these same urban areas that occurred long before the Gaza war.

• HRW failed to condemn Hamas for extensive use of human shields, using the excuse that they were unable “to determine whether or not militants launched rockets from close to civilian areas with the intention of deterring Israeli forces from counter attacking.” Since the evidence was abundant and obvious, HRW must have been influenced by other factors.