This report on Roth’s lies are finally revealed in detail.
Human Rights Watch Revealed:
Thanks to our friends and colleagues at Elder of Ziyon
As I went through over 400 of Human Rights Watch’s Ken Roth’s tweets, I couldn’t help but notice that dozens of them were flat-out false, and others were knowingly deceptive – virtually always against Israel.
Here are are some:
July 6: After days of near silence on kidnap-killing of Palestinian boy, #Israel PM Netanyahu condemns a “horrific crime.” http://trib.al/iwoM2EG
Truth: Netanyahu called the murder “reprehensible” immediately after it occurred.
July 9: Palestinian rocket attacks on Israel, indiscriminate; Israeli targeting of Gaza homes, collective punishment: @HRW. http://trib.al/AOo4Web
Truth: Without knowing what was in those homes, Roth cannot make that flat statement. In many if not most of the cases, Hamas members used their homes as weapons caches, entrances to tunnels, meeting areas or command and control centers – all of which are valid military targets.
July 13: Unlike Hamas, #Israel says it spares no effort to prevent civilian harm, but UN says 77% of Gaza dead are civilians. http://trib.al/qWcSMy7
Truth: Besides the fact that the percentage of civilians killed in the first days of the war have already been shown to be vastly exaggerated, even the UN report said “Data on fatalities and destruction of property is consolidated by the Protection and Shelter clusters based on preliminary information, and is subject to change based on further verifications.” Anyone who reported these figures as flat facts, which Roth did numerous times, without the UN’s caveat, was lying.
July 14: If Israel uses precision bombing & 133 of 168 of Gazans killed were civilians, what does that say of its intentions? http://trib.al/fkWCvSo
Truth: Again, besides the inaccuracies of civilian casualties reported, Roth is saying that Israel’s intentions must have been to target civilians. Of course, if Israel wanted to target civilians there would have been thousands killed every single day. So what does it say when Roth takes false data and applies it falsely to come up with a preconceived conclusion?
July 15: Even if militant is legit military target, attacking family home likely to cause disproportionate civilian casualties http://trib.al/9oA5bXg
Truth: According to international law, that is not a decision for Roth to make, but a decision that a “reasonable military commander” must make based on the data he has in the field, based on the value of the target and the knowledge about what civilian casualties are likely. That is the reality of international law, not the fantasy that Roth spins. We will see other examples of international law that Roth twists – always against Israel and, unbelievably, for Hamas.
July 16: #Israel warns eastern #Gaza city residents to evacuate, suggesting (contrary to law) that anything goes if they don’t pic.twitter.com/QbxDxADySQ
Truth: Nowhere did Israel imply anything like that – this is only in Roth’s sick imagination. Warnings demonstrate that due care is being taken to minimize civilian casualties, which means that Israel was adhering to (or going beyond) international law. Civilians do not make military objectives immune to attack; if the target is a valid military target then international law accepts that civilians can die as long as their deaths are not disproportionate to the military value. As the ICTY case shows, after a warning is given the responsibility for civilian lives shifts, to an extent, to the authorities that have the ability to evacuate the citizens.
Human Rights Watch Revealed
PART II
July 22: Palestinians killed: more kids (129) than militants (86). 4.7x as many civilians as militants. http://trib.al/LJpSpe1 pic.twitter.com/NeJahDfiTh
Truth: Even his source, the Washington Post, says “These numbers are often not complete, but represent the best available data and do tend to clarify over time. Israel disputes the numbers provided by the United Nations, saying that a large number of those killed, particularly males over 18, were armed terrorists and not civilians.” Roth doesn’t care, he reports the numbers without caveats – but only when they make Israel look bad.
July 24: Good that the commission of inquiry launched by UN rights council is authorized to investigate both Israel & Hamas. http://trib.al/PlOQaBZ
Truth: Even the article he linked to – from The Guardian – doesn’t say this. It says:
The resolution called for the urgent dispatch of “an independent, international commission of inquiry” to investigate “all violations of international human rights law and international humanitarian law in the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem, particularly in the occupied Gaza Strip”.
Which means it is only looking for Israeli crimes in the territories, not Palestinian crimes against Israel.
Notably, the timeframe that the UNHRC chose for its inquiry does not include the kidnapping of the three Israeli teens – which is a clear violation of IHL against Israelis in the territories – but it chose to start the probe from the the day after they were kidnapped and murdered. The only possible reason is to ensure that only Israeli actions would be investigated, not those of the terrorists.
Roth completely made this up.
July 24: #Hamas is putting civilians at risk but “no evidence” it forces them to stay–definition of human shields: @NYTimes. http://trib.al/61iwSoM
and
July 25: Hamas must as feasible not fight in populated areas http://trib.al/CA94avT but no human shield unless coerced to stay http://trib.al/YQwIIau
Truth: The definition of “human shield” according to IHL says nothing about the civilians being forced to stay. The official ICRC definition does not mention anything about being forced. Simply placing weapons and other military objects into a civilian area with the intent to have the civilians deter attack is the very definition of human shielding.
Beyond that, Hamas has instructed people to stay in their homes when Israeli leaflets urged them to leave; it has forced Fatah members and other enemies to stay in their homes under threat of gunfire, it has kept journalists in Gaza against their will, and it has prevented buses from evacuating people from shelters after Israeli warnings. Some of this was known at the time of the tweet. So even according to Roth’s erroneous, narrow definition of human shields, Hamas is guilty – but not once did he say anything about that.
July 26: Remember when #Israel insisted Hamas was behind kidnap-murder of three West Bank teens. Oops, turns out it wasn’t. http://trib.al/BcbP0s8
Truth: As Hamas admits now, it was. Roth reported that news skeptically, not with the cocky assurance that he reported the lie.
Roth also ignored the update that New York Magazine added two days later where the Israeli police spokesperson said he was misquoted – which was the linchpin of the entire false story. Roth didn’t bother to correct his tweet then.
Because the truth is not as important as the propaganda Roth prefers to push.
Human Rights Watch Revealed
PART III
Continuing my series of lies that were tweeted by Ken Roth of Human Rights Watch over the past two months.
July 29: 1st Gulf War showed devastating cascading effects on public health of attacking electricity, yet #Israel just did it. http://trib.al/sZWbwib
Truth: Israel immediately flatly denied targeting Gaza’s power plant, although it allowed that it was possible that it was hit accidentally.
“The State of Israel did not attack Gaza’s power plant,” said Brig. Gen. Yaron Rosen, the commander of IAF Air Support and Helicopter Air Division.
“It has no interest (in that),” he added. “We transfer to them the electricity, we transfer in the gas, we transfer in the food in order to prevent a humanitarian disaster. So we attacked the power plant?”
The general said it was possible the plant had been hit by Israel by mistake.
Munitions, he said, can sometimes “skip,” and strike targets unintentionally, as occurred during 2008-9′s Operation Cast Lead.
“The matter is under investigation,” he added.
Later on, Israel flatly denied that it had done anything in that area that day: altogether
An Israeli military spokeswoman said after checking with ground, air and naval forces in the area of the power plant that there was “no indication that (Israel Defense Forces) were involved in the strike. … The area surrounding the plant was also not struck in recent days.”
The IDF simply doesn’t lie about things like that.
Which means that the power plant was hit by a terrorist rocket, or was otherwise sabotaged from within Gaza.
It is much more likely that Hamas attacked its own power plant deliberately. Besides information that Hamas aimed rockets at its own population, it has many times created an artificial crisis around fuel shortages in order to garner world sympathy and prompt more free aid from Qatar.
A reporter who would say something this inaccurate would be forced to correct him or herself. Why should the head of a human rights organization have lower ethical standards?
July 29: More #Gaza women & kids killed (342) than militants (182). 4.5 as many civilians as militants. http://trib.al/qyLp5s5 pic.twitter.com/hfxhxP1UWX
Truth: Once again, Roth uses sources poorly. This was apparently a Haaretz infographic.
Yet on the previous day, the Meir Amit ITIC had already released the first of its findings – with names – that there were far more terrorists being killed in Gaza than was being reported.
At this point it was also well known that Hamas had instructed Gazans to call everyone an “innocent civilian” and it was clear that Hamas was not releasing the full number of its casualties.
Roth was clearly following the war not only closely, but obsessively. It seems unlikely that he was not aware of these facts. Yet even so, he had no problem using the fig leaf of selectively quoting as fact only the media he trusts, and ignoring the ones that contradict his pre-determined position.
July 29: Tunnels used to attack or capture civilians is a rights violation. Tunnels used to attack or capture soldiers isn’t. http://trib.al/v8CCCj6
Truth: If Hamas acted according to the rules of war and was a regular army, this would be correct in a very narrow sense. But the reality is that it is a lie and Roth knows it.
Hamas has said explicitly many times that it wants to kidnap soldiers to hold them hostage, not to hold them as POWs according to the Geneva Conventions. Hostage taking is a war crime, period. Roth is going out of his way to excuse Hamas’ admitted attempts to perform a grave breach of international law.
One has to wonder why the head of a human rights organization is so callous towards the human rights of Israeli soldiers that Hamas wants to take hostage. B’Tselem calls it a war crime, but Ken Roth refuses to.
| August 4: (Retweeted by Kenneth Roth) Nicholas Kristof @NickKristof · One principle of int’l law is proportionality of response. But so far, Israel has lost 3 civilians; Gaza (by UN count) 1,033 civilians. |
By definition, macro-proportionality can only be defined before a war starts. Given that Israel was responding to rocket attacks and was acting in self defense, the decision to go to war was clearly legal; the question is whether their initial choice of how to go about the war – how many airplanes, how many drones, how many gunships – would be proportionate to what they were trying to accomplish.
It is certain that the test of jus ad bellum proportionality cannot be taken by doing a simple count of civilian victims after the war starts. That falls under jus in bello. To violate macro-proportionality, it would have to be proven that Israel was acting in ways that were completely overkill for the original goal of stopping rockets. Given that the rockets didn’t stop until the current cease fire, it is obvious that Israel’s response was less than that allowed by this proportionality test. It has nothing to do with body counts.
Roth’s retweet of Kristof’s bad definition is especially egregious given Roth’s supposed expertise in international law.
Human Rights Watch Revealed
