How exactly are you disagreeing with me?

Not on the facts, but on the way I would reframe raoul’s statement of the supposed essence of the arguments. Perhaps not a disagreement, in that your counterquestions to him did not purport to do that.

Yankev: No, if I may disagree with both you and Neurodoc, it seems to me that the point is this: given that the IDF, like any military force in the world, commits at least some human rights violations, has HRW accurately and fairly assessed accusations of human rights violations against the IDF, or has HRW instead disgraced itself and betrayed the human rights constituency by exaggerating and distorting the IDF’s actions, whether willfully or through incompetence, and if so, given HRW’s consistent refusal to confront flaws in its work on Israel and the IDF, how much uncritical reliance can be placed on HRW reports on the IDF in the future?

How exactly are you disagreeing with me? Neither you, nor I believe that the IDF has never ever transgressed, and aren’t we both in agreement that HRW has not “accurately and fairly assessed accusations of human rights violations against the IDF”? “Proportionality” (that is not “exaggerating”) and not taking out of context (“distorting”) are certainly part and parcel of accurate and fair assessments of accusations of human rights violations. And yes, we are speaking apropos HRW here, though it could apply to certain other NGOs too.

Yankev: No, if I may disagree with both you and Neurodoc, it seems to me that the point is this: given that the IDF, like any military force in the world, commits at least some human rights violations, has HRW accurately and fairly assessed accusations of human rights violations against the IDF, or has HRW instead disgraced itself and betrayed the human rights constituency by exaggerating and distorting the IDF’s actions, whether willfully or through incompetence, and if so, given HRW’s consistent refusal to confront flaws in its work on Israel and the IDF, how much uncritical reliance can be placed on HRW reports on the IDF in the future?

How exactly are you disagreeing with me? Neither you, nor I believe that the IDF has never ever transgressed, and aren’t we both in agreement that HRW has not “accurately and fairly assessed accusations of human rights violations against the IDF”? “Proportionality” (that is not “exaggerating”) and not taking out of context (“distorting”) is certainly part and parcel of accurate and fair assessments of accusations of human rights violations.

raoul: I think the arguments have been distilled to its essence: does the IDF commit human rights violations?

No, if I may disagree with both you and Neurodoc, it seems to me that the point is this: given that the IDF, like any military force in the world, commits at least some human rights violations, has HRW accurately and fairly assessed accusations of human rights violations against the IDF, or has HRW instead disgraced itself and betrayed the human rights constituency by exaggerating and distorting the IDF’s actions, whether willfully or through incompetence, and if so, given HRW’s consistent refusal to confront flaws in its work on Israel and the IDF, how much uncritical reliance can be placed on HRW reports on the IDF in the future?

raoul: I think the arguments have been distilled to its essence: does the IDF commit human rights violations?

Of course, the IDF does. Now tell us, do you know of any military force that has not committed human rights violations? Do you think the IDF is more/less likely to commit human rights violations than other military forces, especially those of their enemies.

josh:Certainly, addressing a critic’s bias has merit, but I wonder if that aspect itself is credible by an organization (or an individual) whose sole focus appears to be to attack critics of Israel. 

HRW purports to be “objective,” that is without predilections, its focus supposedly advocacy of human rights without any biasing point of view; NGO Monitor unashamedly announces its predilection, that being engagement with NGOs critical of Israel. Also, HRW undertakes investigations and purports to bring “facts” and syntheses of facts to greater attention, making it something of a “primary source,” and hence putting its own credibility front and center as a key question; NGO Monitor responds to HRW, which is a very different business

David Bernstein: Af, only if you don’t understand the arguments, and what constitutes proper evidence to support the arguments.

You are of course 110% correct about failure to “understand the arguments, and what constitutes proper evidence to support the arguments.” It seems there are many who think it always the fallacy of ad hominem to attack the credibility of the witness when considering their testimony, though “impeachment” of witnesses is entirely proper and permissible. The credibility of Sarah Whitson, Joe Stork, Mark Garalasco, et al., and what they say, is not to be questioned?!

Saying that they are not objective, that they don’t hold press conferences condemning the abuses of various countries in proportion to the incidence of abuse of those countries, that their founder has repudiated them or even that they are ANTI-SEMITE NAZI SCUM totally misses the point. It’s clear that they’re performing a socially valuable service in shining sunlight on human rights violations, even if the light is not shone equally on all.

But they provide a disservice if they misdirect the blame for the human rights violations, distort the definition of human rights violation, and publish as fact supposed evidence of events that never happened.

Tyrone Slothrop: Why does anyone pay any attention to Andrew Sullivan?Virtually everything he writes is just plain wacky.At the risk of sounding uncharitable, I’m convinced he is suffering from HIV-induced dementia.If the Atlantic was more concerned with its credibility than it is with generating traffic it would buy him a ticket home.

Sorry, but “just plain wacky” was uncharitable. It would be extremely charitable to call what followed “uncharitable.”

When NGOs report on the conflict without engaging in demonization, present both sides of a particular incident without making inflammatory or false claims, and do not distort or even invent international law, we note that fact. Unfortunately, in this part of the world, it doesn’t happen all that often. See our reports on Human Rights First or Kav LaOved for some examples of NGOs that are critical of Israel without the baggage of most of the other organizations we cover.

Anne Herzberg
Legal Advisor
NGO Monitor

http://daledamos.blogspot.com/2009/10/gerald-steinberg-of-ngo-monitor.html “…counting publications from the Middle East division is very misleading. Some HRW statements are “fire and forget”, while others (mainly when Israel is the target) are accompanied by major marketing campaigns. HRW issued four lengthy and largely fictitious “research reports” condemning Israel in six months — each with a press conference at the American Colony Hotel (the hub of the Palestinian media campaign) in Jerusalem, numerous one-on-one press interviews, and meetings with diplomats. In contrast, most of the statements on the Saudi, Egypt, etc. are quickly buried, with no UN investigations , sanctions or ICC action. The token report on Hamas rocket attacks (HRW’s artificial “balance” and involving no research) appeared six months after the war ended, with no mention of Iranian support and weapons. A week later, HRW held another press conference which generated far more attention via the sensational (and fabricated) charge that the IDF killed Palestinian civilians waving white flags. The Hamas rocket report, like HRW’s criticism of Hezbollah in 2006, was immediately forgotten.”

Sounds like Israel does some rotten stuff. Saying that other people do even rottener stuff totally misses the point. Saying that the people who dig up and publish stories about the rotten stuff have a personal dislike of Israel totally misses the point. Saying that they are not objective, that they don’t hold press conferences condemning the abuses of various countries in proportion to the incidence of abuse of those countries, that their founder has repudiated them or even that they are ANTI-SEMITE NAZI SCUM totally misses the point. It’s clear that they’re performing a socially valuable service in shining sunlight on human rights violations, even if the light is not shone equally on all.

I think the green helmet man photos were inconclusive, unlike the videos of the missile crews moving around the villages, but your unwillingness to understand that his role was worth discussing says a great deal.

If only Hezbollah had cared as much for Lebanese civilians as you and I.

HGB

HipposGoBeserk: It’s inter­est­ing the lengths to which some peole will go to avoid acknowl­edg­ing that liv­ing a right­eous life requires more than sim­ply choos­ing white over black.Infan­tile.

All of this reminds me of all of the obsessive posts about “Who is green helmet man?” when civilains were being blown apart by Israeli bombs a few months ago. Instead of facing that reality head-on, many people chose to clever propaganda technique, about quibbling about whether or not some doofus in a green helmet was or was not an actual ambulance driver or whatever. There was much fevered speculation that he must be some kind of operative for the other side and that he must be participating in staging photos.

Much easier to argue about that and whistle past the fact that Israel was, at that time, dropping thousands of pounds of explosives on civilians.

Same here, just a different diversion.

Infantile.

HGB

So much easier to prattle on about what Blogger A said about Person X discussing what Group A thought about Group B.

Pathetic.

When the facts involved speak for them­selves, they can do so with­out ref­er­ence to the opin­ions of either NGO Mon­i­tor or Bernstein.

I’m very curious to have you identify which facts “speak for themselves.” And also, for that matter, to suggest which “scholarly” unbiased sources Sullivan and Yglesias are relying on.

1) By that definiton, one is left without data on the Israeli-Palestinian dispute to analyze. Good luck with that.

Or

2) Apply that same filter to the equally biased (but hiding it) NGOs.

HGB

A broken watch shows the correct time twice a day yet cannot be said to be a reliable source of ANY information and need not be consulted at all in order to determine the actual time of day.

Fox News comes to mind as well as a source of marginally correct information on occasion. yet it cannot be viewed as a credible source whose opinions must ever be refuted.

NGO Monitor and Bernstein are both goal oriented sources whose clear and accepted biases are known and understood

Those biases effectively eliminate their opinions from any pool of information that a scholarly approach need address.

David’s challenge to Andrew was essentially “you must prove you have stopped beating your wife” before you can properly address your marriage.

It is unnecessary and counter-productive.

When the facts involved speak for themselves, they can do so without reference to the opinions of either NGO Monitor or Bernstein.

the claim is if he did not, Andrew Sul­li­van has no busi­ness stat­ing the opin­ion he did

I’m not sure that’s the precise claim at issue. Rather, regardless of whether he read the report, he seems to be dismissing any evidence offered by NGO Reporter out of hand simply because it takes a stand defending Israel, rather than being–or pretending to be–neutral.

This is a very strange way to evaluate evidence. If you think a group is so biased that their claims are necessarily falsified, then you should have some additional evidence for that view, yes? If not, then you might read the report with a careful eye, knowing that they are taking a particular stance, but it doesn’t discredit anything they might say.

Sigivald is correct about the use of ad hominems here. Sullivan is using ad hominem in the fallacious sense: because NGO Monitor has an openly acknowledged opinion on the issue, it must be so perniciously biased that it’s not even worth listening to. I’ve been following Bernstein’s posts on this matter for a long while, and he is not using ad hominem in a fallacious sense. If he says that the group or an individual in the group is biased, he a) gives evidence for those claims, and b) concludes that they should not claim to be purely neutral, as a result. He does not automatically infer that they are wrong, which would be the fallacious version. Discussing bias or other individual characteristics does not automatically result in an ad hominem fallacy; that only happens when you try to draw unjustified or irrelevant conclusions based on those claims.

However, this being said, I think there is an argument to revisit the whole question of natural human rights from a perspective of functional structuralism. One of the underappreciated points (that I don’t even thing DB buys) is that that the whole question of human rights is as corrosive to any ideal of global pluralism (where ethnic religions like Judaism have any place in the world) as is the influence of large, conversion-oriented religions like Christianity or Islam. In fact, the whole question grows out of early Renaissance Christian thought.

If we accept the notion of universally applicable human rights than it is obvious that Israel should be FORCED by whatever means (foreign aid and trade embargoes, etc) to live by them.

If we don’t accept this notion then many of the questions remain but they admit at least of dialog. We can ask what our role as a country should be in ensuring stable borders, and a stable regions, and we can ask what appropriate reactions to the settlement plans really are (proposal: Declare all settlers to be “Palestinian Jews” and declare that they have full rights to their property and to participation in the Palestinian political system but have no more rights wrt involvement in the Israeli state than the rest of the diaspora).

I propose reviewing elements via functional structuralism because this gets away from some of the worst problems and allows some focus on solutions that are not incredibly disruptive rather than assuming we know the answers going in.

I don’t necessarily disagree that notions of bias has a place in the discussion, but doesn’t that also require an analysis then of the critic of the critic

Andrew Sullivan overall has discussed (his posts often are short, so this includes citing longer discussions) critics. He very well might be better off looking over the report in question specifically given your comments suggests it could be used to promote his point of view.

DB noted:

All three sections are relevant to the claim that HRW is biased against Israel, which as the quote Joe reprints above, is what the argument is about.

“relevant” is a low bar … “the argument” right now is specifically about the necessity of reading that report … the claim is if he did not, Andrew Sullivan has no business stating the opinion he did.

Bias against Israel itself is the broader debate. That one blog post centered on one specific authority.

I would say that the issue that you’re calling the “underlying” issue–the actual moral and legal merits of Israel’s actions–is more important than the credibility of HRW’s watching of human rights. However, this series of threads has openly been about the collateral issue, not the underlying one, and both have gotten their fair share of airtime. (In fact, given how minor I view the Palestinian-Israeli conflict to be, I would suggest that both the underlying and collateral issues have gotten significantly more than their fair share of airtime, to the point where they’re taking up more oxygen than North Korea, Burma, Sudan, Zimbabwe, Iran, Libya, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Mordor, and other places where the both the depth and breadth of endemic human rights violations are far greater.)

Josh, be careful to distinguish between “appropriate,” “best,” “legal,” “justified,l etc., when you discuss your opinions about dropping that 1 ton bomb in the urban area.

HGB

And no, it wouldn’t be “hunky-dory” if HRW behaved exactly as it does now, but acknowledged that it was anti-Israel, because it would still mean that HRW was, from my perspective, promoting pernicious views. But people have a tendency to be more skepitcal of a source that is known to be biased that to a source that is known to be objective. Look at Sullivan and Heller: HRW should be paid attention to, because it’s objective, but NGO Monitor should be ignored because it’s biased. If HRW would ackhnowledge that it, too, has an agenda, then logically Sullivan and Heller would either have to ignore HRW, too, or would have to read both NGO Monitor and HRW’s reports with equal skepticism, or would have to acknowledge that they prefer HRW because they share its biases. Any of these three scenarios would be preferable to the status quo.

Replace “beasts” and “subhuman” with “raised in a non-Western culture” and you are headed in the right direction. The other change you need to make is from “superficial” to “limited, discrete violations of law.”

The problem provoked by Cast Lead is that many have the impression that the level of violence implies viuolation of law. It is hard for some to acknowledge that a few hundred civilians can be legally killed in war, yet it is. To the extent they see smoke and expect fire they cannot process the facts – the allegations are few and can readily be proven false by limited investigation.

The simple truth is that Israel conducted a few dozen investigations that yielded no evidence of illegal acts. I hope the Israelis compile that work into a rebuttal. Sadly, I think it would be helpful on the PR front.

HGB