“Clearly, Human Rights Watch (HRW) has morphed into a political advocacy organization characterized by double standards and bias – this is now widely understood,” says Professor Gerald Steinberg, president of NGO Monitor. “But the recent racially-charged Huffington Post article, which exploited the American Civil Rights movement to incite racial hatred in the Middle East, crosses new red lines even for HRW and falls far outside any definition of ‘legitimate criticism.’ Action must be taken because this type of language contributes to animosity and hate.”

Steinberg adds, “Our letter demonstrates that ‘the inclusion of HRW in official United States government policymaking and consultation is entirely inconsistent with the moral principles of human rights.'”

The inflammatory op-ed, authored by HRW’s Middle East and North Africa (MENA) division head Sarah Leah Whitson, falsely accused Israel of “racial discrimination.” Whitson employed racial stereotyping in race baiting American Jews and Israelis. NGO Monitor noted that the words “segregate,” “race/racist,”  “discrimination” and “equal/unequal” are repeated 23 times in this short piece, as Whitson sought to justify her support for discriminatory boycotts against Israel. (The BDS strategy was adopted in the antisemitic NGO Forum of the UN’s 2001 Durban Conference, in which HRW also played a central role.)

Whitson’s article also stated: “In a week when the U.S. paused to recall the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, President Peres might have considered King’s message — an end to segregation — and why such a system of racial inequality remains in place in the Occupied Palestinian Territories…”

“This oped and other HRW statements recall efforts to pit Jews vs. African Americans, making a complete mockery of Dr. King’s legacy,” Steinberg notes. “Similarly, HRW’s unjustifiable framing of the Arab-Israeli conflict as motivated by ‘Israeli racism’ is a total distortion of the national and religious dimensions, and erases central peace and security issues from the agenda.”

Ms. Whitson’s op-ed followed her 2009 fundraising trip to Saudi Arabia, in which she raised the specter of the pro-Israel lobby in order to solicit donations from Saudi elites, including members of the governing Shura Council.  Whitson also embraced and helped market the Gaddafi regime, and in particular, Moammar Qaddafi’s son Seif Islam.  In May 2011, the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court requested an arrest warrant for Seif Islam on charges of crimes against humanity.

In November 2010, Whitson praised “the Lebanese sophistication for human rights” and in May 2010, she visited with Hamas officials in Gaza to reassure them of HRW’s “impartial” reporting and promised that HRW’s next report would allege Israeli violations of international law. Such ideological bias is clearly inconsistent with the universality of human rights.

Ken Roth, HRW’s Executive Director, has similarly displayed racial hostility, such as the offensive religious slur during the 2006 Lebanon War where he referred to the Jewish Bible as the “morality of some more primitive moment.”

Other failures show HRW’s lack of moral clarity – in 2009, Marc Garlasco, HRW’s “senior military analyst” and author of many publications accusing Israel of war crimes, was exposed as an obsessive collector of Nazi memorabilia. And in January 2011, Shawan Jabarin, an alleged “senior activist” from the PFLP terror group (as pronounced by the Israeli High Court), was appointed to HRW’s Mid-East advisory board.

“The U.S. government should look to other organizations for policy recommendations,” says Steinberg. “Race baiting is the antithesis of human rights values.”

NGO Monitor Letter to U.S Officials

President Barack Obama

The White House

1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW

Washington, DC 20500

USA

President Obama,

Human Rights Watch’s (HRW) disturbing use of racially-charged rhetoric directed at Israel and American Jews raises major concerns regarding the appropriateness of United States government consultations involving HRW officials.

Attached is NGO Monitor’s statement HRW’s Whitson Race-baits Jewish Community; Exploits US Civil Rights Movement (April 17, 2011).  We analyze the article by Sarah Leah Whitson, director of HRW’s Middle-East and North Africa Division, in the Huffington Post (“A Matter of Civil Rights, April 15, 2011), falsely and repeatedly accusing Israel of “racial discrimination and segregation.” This distortion is amplified by offensive stereotypes and generalizations about American Jews.

This is not an isolated example, but rather reflects a pattern of behavior. HRW employed an obsessive collector of Nazi memorabilia (Marc Garlasco), who wrote many of the reports targeting Israel.  Other examples of HRW’s exploitation of human rights and moral language include a Saudi Arabia fundraising trip led by Whitson to combat pro-Israel “pressure groups”, and the embrace of the Ghaddifi regime. (See http://www.ngo-monitor.org). And in response to the killing of Osama bin Laden, HRW issued a statement drawing equivalence between terrorists and their victims (“US: Osama Bin Laden Killed in Shoot-out,” May 2, 2011), and Executive Director Ken Roth posted on Twitter that killing bin Laden was not “justice”.

On the basis of this immoral behavior, it is our position that the inclusion of HRW in official United States government policymaking and consultation is entirely inconsistent with the moral principles of human rights.

We look forward to your response,

Sincerely,

Prof. Gerald Steinberg

President, NGO Monitor

NGO Monitor: HRW’s Whitson Race-baits Jewish Community; Exploits US Civil Rights Movement

JERUSALEM – The leaders of Human Rights Watch, and the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) division, in particular, frequently employ highly offensive and racially charged language regarding Israel, to accompany numerous false “fact finding” claims, notes Jerusalem-based research institute NGO Monitor.

In an op-ed “A Matter of Civil Rights“, (Huffington Post, 15 April) Sarah Leah Whitson, director of MENA, manipulates and distorts the moral framework of the US civil rights movement in order to incite racial hatred. Whitson writes: “In a week when the U.S. paused to recall the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, President Peres might have considered King’s message — an end to segregation — and why such a system of racial inequality remains in place in the Occupied Palestinian Territories…” The words “segregate,” “race/racist,” “discrimination” and “equal/unequal” are repeated 23 times in this short piece, as Whitson seeks to justify her support for discriminatory boycotts against Israel. (The BDS strategy was adopted in the infamous NGO Forum of the UN’s 2001 Durban Conference, in which HRW also played a central role.)  Whitson’s article also employs racial stereotyping and generalization in making crude references about American Jews.

“HRW has consistently exploited human rights principles to promote a campaign of discrimination against Israel, and now, officials such as Whitson are using race baiting against American Jews,” noted Professor Gerald Steinberg, president of NGO Monitor. “Abusing Dr. King’s assassination for this purpose is particularly offensive, erasing both the Jewish community’s leadership in the civil rights struggle and Dr. King’s support for Israel. In contrast, Whitson takes a racist position denying the right of the Jewish people to sovereign equality. The appropriation of these images and the comparison of the complex Arab-Israel conflict to the dark history of American racial inequality marks a new low in HRW’s history of immorality in relation to Israel.”

Such vulgar anti-Israel campaigning was recently condemned by a group of African-American student leaders who called it “as transparent as it is base.”  Similarly, Dr. King decried discriminatory attacks on Israel, declaring, “When people criticize Zionism, they mean Jews.”

HRW’s campaign rests on manufactured allegations in order to falsely portray the decades-long Arab-Israeli conflict as one allegedly motivated by Jewish race-hatred of Arabs, erasing Palestinian violence and ignoring competing national and territorial claims.  Much of HRW’s rhetoric simply repeats crude propaganda developed by the PLO’s Negotiation Affairs Department, promoting the myth of “Israel’s plan to segregate the Palestinian People while continuing the colonization of Palestinian land.”

Whitson’s op-ed follows HRW’s December 2010, unsourced “report” targeting Israel, under the title of “Separate and Unequal“, also abusing the legacy of the US civil rights movement. Whitson, who has abused the term “apartheid” to further the discriminatory assault on Jewish self determination rights, equates Israeli policies to “Jim Crow laws of the American south.”

Whitson’s campaigning includes a 2009 fundraising trip to Saudi Arabia, in which she ignored the daily violations of the regime. Instead, she referred to HRW’s leading role in promoting the discredited Goldstone report “which depleted HRW’s budget for the region,” and the canard of “pro-Israel pressure groups.”  Whitson also embraced and helped market the Gaddafi regime.  Marc Garlasco, HRW’s “senior military analyst” and author of many publications accusing Israel of war crimes, was exposed as an obsessive collector of Nazi memorabilia. And in January 2011, Shawan Jabarin, an alleged “senior activist” from the PFLP terror group, was appointed to HRW’s Mid-East advisory board. In 2006, HRW Director Kenneth Roth displayed his deep-seated religious prejudice, referring to Israeli policy as “an eye for an eye” which he described as the product of a “more primitive moment.”

Steinberg adds, “HRW and Whitson cynically use double standards and race baiting against Jews to attack Israel, while ignoring the universal basis of human rights norms.  This abuse of moral standards to promote hatred has grave consequences for the human rights movement that go far beyond the anti-Israel racism in this agenda.”

HRW’s obsessive assault on Israel, and close cooperation with Arab and Islamic dictators, was cited by HRW founder Robert Bernstein, who condemned his NGO for turning “Israel into a pariah state.”  In a 2010 speech at the University of Nebraska, Bernstein documented HRW’s targeting of Israel as one of the “principal offenders” of human rights. In a 2010 article in The New Republic, Ben Birnbaum quotes Whitson’s praise for Norman Finkelstein — “making Israeli abuses the focus of one’s life work is a thankless but courageous task”.

Whitson, who was hired by HRW after having worked as an anti-Israel activist (as is the case of Joe Stork, the MENA deputy director), also makes security and legal claims without any evidence or knowledge: “Israel’s security justifications fall far short of the strict and narrow limits on differential treatment permitted under international law between people of different ethnicities or national origins.” For over a decade, HRW officials have minimized Palestinian terror and rocket attacks that kill and injure Israeli civilians, as well as numerous instances of incitement to genocide.  Whitson’s op-ed is the latest in a continued effort to erase of the wider context of legitimate self-defense against Palestinian attacks.

On this basis, NGO Monitor demands the resignation of Whitson, Stork and HRW Executive Director Kenneth Roth. We also call on HRW funders, including the Ford Foundation and the Open Society Institute  (George Soros), to reconsider the implications of their support for this immoral agenda.