DOUBLE STANDARDS AND HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH
Noah Pollack
Wall Street Journal, July 30, 2009

 Over the past two weeks, Human Rights Watch has been embroiled in a controversy over a fund raiser it held in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. At that gathering, Middle East director Sarah Leah Whitson pledged the group would use donations to "battle...pro-Israel pressure groups."

As criticism of her remark poured in, Ms. Whitson responded by saying that the complaint against her was "fundamentally a racist one." And Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, declared that "We report on Israel. Its supporters fight back with lies and deception."

The facts tell a different story. From 2006 to the present, Human Rights Watch's reports on the Israeli-Arab conflict have been almost entirely devoted to condemning Israel, accusing it of human rights and international law violations, and demanding international investigations into its conduct. It has published some 87 criticisms of Israeli conduct against the Palestinians and Hezbollah, versus eight criticisms of Palestinian groups and four of Hezbollah for attacks on Israel...

It was during this period that more than 8,000 rockets and mortars were fired at Israeli civilians by Palestinian terrorist groups in Gaza. Human Rights Watch's response? In November 2006 it said that the Palestinian Authority "should stop giving a wink and a nod to rocket attacks." Two years later it urged the Hamas leadership "to speak out forcefully against such [rocket] attacks . . . and bring to justice those who are found to have participated in them."

In response to the rocket war and Hamas's violent takeover of Gaza in June 2007, Israel imposed a partial blockade of Gaza. Human Rights Watch then published some 28 statements and reports on the blockade, accusing Israel in highly charged language of an array of war crimes and human rights violations. One report headline declared that Israel was "choking Gaza." Human Rights Watch has never recognized the difference between Hamas's campaign of murder against Israeli civilians and Israel's attempt to defend those civilians. The unwillingness to distinguish between aggression and self-defense blots out a fundamental moral fact-that Hamas's refusal to stop its attacks makes it culpable for both Israeli and Palestinian casualties. Meanwhile, Egypt has also maintained a blockade on Gaza, although it is not even under attack from Hamas. Human Rights Watch has never singled out Egypt for criticism over its participation in the blockade.

The organization regularly calls for arms embargoes against Israel and claims it commits war crimes for using drones, artillery and cluster bombs. Yet on Israel's northern border sits Hezbollah, which is building an arsenal of rockets to terrorize and kill Israeli civilians, and has placed that arsenal in towns and villages in hopes that Lebanese civilians will be killed if Israel attempts to defend itself. The U.N. Security Council has passed resolutions demanding Hezbollah's disarmament and the cessation of its arms smuggling. Yet while Human Rights Watch has criticized Israel's weapons 15 times, it has criticized Hezbollah's twice.

In the Middle East, Human Rights Watch does not actually function as a human-rights organization. If it did, it would draw attention to the plight of Palestinians in Arab countries. In Lebanon, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are warehoused in impoverished refugee camps and denied citizenship, civil rights, and even the right to work. This has received zero coverage from the organization... Unfortunately, Human Rights Watch seems only to care about Palestinians when they can be used to convince the world that the Jewish state is actually a criminal state.