In her ongoing attempt to defend Human Rights Watch’s indefensible, Israel-bashing, fundraising dinner with Saudi elites, with government officials in attendance, Sarah Leah Whitson has now played the racism card. Oh, she hinted at it before, when she responded to my Wall Street Journal piece by snidely writing, “believe it or not, some Arabs believe in human rights too,” even though NOTHING in my piece suggested or implied that no Arabs believe in human rights, or, for that matter, that Arabs are inherently less likely to believe in human rights than anyone else. And it’s not like I left the source of my criticism to the imagination: I criticized HRW for “raising funds among the elite of one of the most totalitarian nations on earth, with a pitch about how the money is needed to fight ‘pro-Israel forces,'” and for risking “becoming dependent on funds emanating from a brutal dictatorship [which] leaves you vulnerable to that brutal dictatorship later cutting off the flow of funds if you don’t ‘behave.'”
Now Whitson’s more explicit. She has told the Beruit-based news service Menassat that my (and others’) beef with Human Rights Watch’s Saudi Arabian venture is “fundamentally a racist one.” This just shows how low Whitson will go, and how desperate she has become. Her defense of fundraising through Israel-bashing in Saudi Arabia has fallen flat. She won’t release a video or transcript of her remarks at the Saudi fundraising dinner. The one recent video of her that has circulated, before an American audience, where she was likely more restrained then she would be in Saudi Arabia, shows her lambasting Israel for minutes at a time for its alleged human rights violations during its wars with Hezbollah and Hamas, while not managing to identify a single violation by the latter two terrorist groups, whose very method of combat–hiding behind civilians, not wearing uniforms, targeting civilians–violates all international norms. This video led one previously wishy-washy observer to conclude, “I don’t know how, after this, HRW is not fatally compromised when it comes to reporting Israel.” I guarantee Whitson can’t reasonably explain why as the representative of an allegedly non-partisan human rights group she hires Palestinian political activists with a long record of hostility to Israel as her “neutral” researchers. And of course, Whitson has never acknowledged Human Rights Watch’s various errors in its reporting on Israel–here’s one example–and her boss, Ken Roth, asserts that all criticism of HRW amounts to “lies and deception”.
Ironically, nothing offends Human Rights Watch officials and its defenders more than unsubstantiated allegations that HRW’s anti-Israel agenda (which, counterfactually, HRW denies having) is driven by anti-Semitism. But throwing out charges of racism against its critics, which are not only unsubstantiated but completely irrelevant to the issues at hand, is apparently a-okay with HRW’s Middle East director, Ms. Whitson.
I will not, however, sink to Ms. Whiton’s level in this debate. Oh, what the heck: I’m rubber, you’re glue, anything you say bounces of me and sticks to you.
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