Allan Dershowitz, professor of law at Harvard has this to say about a once great Human Rights organization “Human Rights Watch” which I have known for a long time is a discredited partisan anti-Semitic organization many of whose former supporters, as Professor Dershowitz explains, “have become alienated from the organization, because of, in the words of one early supporter, ‘their obsessive focus on Israel’.”
When it comes to Israel and its enemies, Human Rights Watch cooks the books about facts, cheats on interviews, and releases predetermined conclusions that are driven more by their ideology than by evidence. These are serious accusations, and they are demonstrably true. Consider the following highly publicized “conclusion” reached by Human Rights Watch about the recent war in Lebanon between Hezbollah and Israel: “Human Rights Watch found no cases in which Hezbollah deliberately used civilians as shields to protect them from retaliatory IDF attack.” No cases! Anyone who watched even a smattering of TV during the war saw with their own eyes direct evidence of rockets being launched from civilian areas. But not Human Rights Watch. How could an organization, which claims to be objective, have been so demonstrably wrong about so central a point in so important a war? Could it have been an honest mistake? I don’t think so. Human Rights Watch not only failed to interview witnesses who had contrary evidence, it ignored credible news sources, such as the New York Times and the New Yorker.
He goes on to document case after case of eye witnesses who tell the same story that Hezbollah embedded themselves and their weapons among civilian Lebanese populations intentionally endangering the Lebanese civilains while they used them as human shields.
Professor Dershowitz concludes:
How could Human Rights Watch have suppressed this evidence from so many different sources? The only reasonable explanation is that they wanted there to be no evidence of Hezbollah’s tactic of hiding behind civilians. So they cooked the books to make it come out that way. Even after the fighting ended and numerous reports of Hezbollah hiding among civilians were published, Kenneth Roth essentially repeated the demonstrably false conclusions that “in none of those cases was Hizbullah anywhere around at the time of the attack.” So committed is Human Rights Watch to its pre-determined conclusions that it refused to let the facts, as reported by objective sources, get in its way.
Human Rights Watch is a totally partisan anti-Israeli organization. Anybody who quotes any of their “findings” should know better. It is pathetic that a group of people would attempt to portray themselves as an organization comitted to furthering the cause of human right’s violations when their real aim is to create propoganda to turn world opinion against Israel.
Perhaps Kofi Annan will offer Human Rights Watch a seat on the UN Human Rights Council along with China and Cuba.