HRW: "At the sites visited by Human Rights Watch—Qana, Srifa, Tyre, and the southern suburbs of Beirut—on-site investigations did not identify any signs of military activity in the area attacked, such as trenches, destroyed rocket launchers, other military equipment, or dead or wounded fighters."
It apparently raised no eyebrows among HRW staff that of the fifteen "civilian" victims in Srifa it identifies in its report, all were men, and thirteen of them were of normal fighting age (17-35).
N.Y. Times, August 16th, 2006, at 9: "Mr. Kamaleldin, the Sreifa [same as Srifa] official, estimated that up to two-thirds of the town's homes and buildings were demolished, leaving more than 43 people buried in the rubble. A majority of them were fighters belonging to Hezbollah and the allied Amal Party, residents said."
Of course, Human Rights Watch claimed that its sources are credible, and even claimed that "[a]ll cases for which Human Rights Watch could not find eyewitnesses, survivors, or other credible sources of information have been excluded from this report." Right. I'm sure the "eyewitnesses" and "survivors" who stayed in Srifa during the war had no ties to the Party of God (Hezbollah), and no incentive to lie on its behalf.
HRW's report with the false information is still on its website. Any bets as to whether Kenneth Roth will issue a correction, and an apology?
Thanks to reader Larry Rothenberg for the tip.
UPDATE: Dershowitz at the Huffington Post has much more on HRW, concluding that it is repeating "demonstrably false conclusions."
*Here's the evidence that HRW had for Israel "indiscriminately" attacking civilians in Srifa: According to a villager who was in the village at the time of the attack:
There was no Hezbollah in the neighborhood. This neighborhood is known to be partial to the Communist Party, not Hezbollah. There are no Hezbollah people living there. Hezbollah does not have a need to be in this neighborhood, because we are 40 kilometers away from Israel, and the neighborhood looks out over the sea, it is not a strategic place.
Two additional villagers told Human Rights Watch in separate interviews that Hezbollah had not been present in the neighborhood around the time of the attack. "Except for one person, who didn't even belong to Hezbollah, no one in that neighborhood knew how to handle weapons," said Hussain Nazal. He added, "If they hit some houses that belong to Hezbollah we would understand, but this is not the [Hezbollah] neighborhood."
Apparently, HRW thinks it's okay to accuse a country of war crimes based solely on hearsay evidence of male "villagers", acquired while the war was ongoing, who are hanging out in a POG stronghold during an Israeli bombardment, after being warned to leave. Even if these villagers were not POG affiliates (but maybe they are) or even sympathizers, how do you think Hezbollah would have reacted if they had been quoted in an HRW report during the war as stating that Israel was only carefully targeting POG strongholds? I certainly wouldn't issue life insurance to them under such circumstances.
Related Posts (on one page):
- Human Rights Watch's Credibility--Not So Good:
- The Decline of Amnesty International:
Also, your continued use of "party of god" really does make you seem like a crackpot. Wasn't the original reason that you came up with that because you thought liberals would be hesitant to be sympathetic to an organization calling itself "party of god"? If so, it's not working. You are the only one calling Hezbollah that. It's becoming your signature, like "feminazi" or "democrat party." You have made your point about the translation of Hezbollah, and nobody cares. Move on already.
I'm not entirely sure I understand. Is your criticism that the HRW probably didn't do a very careful job identifying military activity?
Please continue to let us know which articles we are free to take at face value.
Your last statement just shows once more how you have neatly divided your world into people and organizations who are with you (and Israel) and those who are against you and Israel, and how everything gets evaluated using this oversimplified model.
In the real world, the NY Times has both reporters who are pro-Israel and reporters who are anti-Israel, and mostly the NY Times just has semi-competent reporters trying to turn out lots of words under a lot of time pressure and who are neither for nor against Israel. So the statement from the article you quote may be correct or may be incorrect, and given the difficulty of reporting from that area should definitely be taking with a grain of salt.
You taking it as instant proof that HRW was wrong and should post a correction and an apology just shows that you are not even trying to evaluate things objectively.
And as far as the juvenile snarkiness is concerned, I'll put it back into the bottle if you make posts that deserve better.
Instead of saying something like this, which was all the evidence would allow, HRW took a couple of "eyewitness" interviews, and claimed that Israel was "indiscriminately" attacking civilians in Srifa.
The Hezbollah (Arabic: حزب الله ḥizbu-llāh, meaning “party of God”)
put that in your pipe and smoke it
And they've carpeted the ground with cluster bombs.
And here's a map [PDF] of the bombing of Lebanon
Did he mention it for the reason you are clearly assuming, or because Mr. Fattah is the author of the article cited?
Either way, it's hard to get worked up over David "treading close to a dangerous line" when the other side is working frankly (if not quite openly) from ethnic/religious bigotry.
The same thing happened in Jenin, with the "massacre" of Palestinians that proved to be a fiction. Hez counts on getting its propaganda out now, knowing that any subsequent corrections will be buried in the back pages. HRW and AI are not being antisemitic in buying into this; they're showing their anti-Western bias, however, by lending greater credence to Hez than to Israel. (Alternatively you could say they simply hold Israel to a higher standard, but from what I see Hez is held to no standard at all.)
One could insist on translating every name that originated from a foreign language, but the problem is that nobody would know what anyone else was talking about. For instance, if I called up an airline and asked if they flew from Red Stick to The Angels, they would have no idea that I was talking about cities in Louisiana and California.
> Shorter DB: Any NY Times report I don't agree with is proof of their bias against Israel and obviously incorrect.
If you had read the post, you would see that he's relying on the truth of that particular NYT report. Idiot.
More like willful ignorance.
If he were really trying to make a point by using "party of god," wouldn't he keep repeating it instead of using "POG?"
Now THAT is f'ing rich. Yeah, genius, Israel is the combatant who doesn't care about civilian casualties.
Sometimes I read the comments after a post and despair for the future of the human race. How can people so wilfully blind survive?
If this were a pro-Israel blog, I wouldn't get too worked up about it. But since it's the leading, most widely read blawg of the profession I happen to practice, I find it troubling. If I picked up National Law Journal, American Lawyer, or some similar publication and found articles making these kinds of arguments (based on a person's last name!!), I find it similarly disturbing. And, of course, if their LTE section included reader letters denouncing Lebanese 10-year-olds as war criminals (see prior comment threads), I'd cancel my subscription. The legal analysis on the blawg is first-rate, but when I contemplate the possibility that nonlawyers read the non-legal postings, I sometimes get very embarrassed for my profession.
Clearly he is trying to make a point. See here. I actually took Bernstein's update, which was posted after my initial comment, as perhaps tacit acknowledgement that my criticism hit the mark. I think this is the first instance of "POG" or (in the last sentence of the post) an unqualified use of "Hezbollah," since Bernstein started his Party of God campaign last month.
A quick non-exhaustive search I judt did didn't reveal any instance where Bernstein used "Hezbollah" when not quoting another source since the original "Party of God" post.
o'connuh: I'm not sensitive. I know perfectly well what DB means when he says Party of God, but the fact is that nobody else in the universe is calling
Because of this blog?? If you actually practice law, you'll find plenty of real-world reasons to be embarrassed for your (our) profession. Actually, if the comments here are being left largely by lawyers, I'm embarrassed for my profession too.
Prior to the recent mess, which began either with the Israeli kidnapping of 2 Palestinian civilians in Gaza or the following attack by Hezbollah on an Israeli military post (in Israel), how many Israeli civilians had Hezbollah killed since 2000?
The largest number I've heard is "6." The lowest is "0"
You should be directing your quesions and your anger at yourself.
:
True, we generally preserve place names--thus, Beijing is not called "the Northern Capital," nor is Tokyo referred to in English as "the Eastern Capital." But for God's sake, when is the last time you heard the Japanese governing party referred to in English language media as "Jiminto," rather than by its English translation, "the Liberal Democratic Party." Or do you also insist on referring to the Tamil Tigers or Shining Path by what their local adherents call them in their local tongues? If not, why the fanatical insistence that Hizbollah be referred to in its transliterated, rather than translated, form? Is it because using the transliteration fits your ideological preferences? (I would be equally suspicious of someone who insisted on referring to the Japanese Red Army as Nihon Sekigun--the latter sounds much more innocuous to the English speaker.) Shouldn't David Bernstein be free to use the name that is more enlightening to his English--speaking readers? If "Hizbollah" meant "the wipe-the-dirty-Jews-off-the-face-of-the-earth party" would you still insist on using the transliterated form of their name? At what point does insistence on your approach shift from a concern about accuracy to an attempt at obfuscation?
And what if they didn't kill anybody? What if their regular barrage of rockets "only" destroyed buildings? Would that make it a problem for Israel to defend itself?
As for "statement against interest," the reporter's (or possibly the editor's) interest can be inferred from the tone of the article.
Who cares what happened before the war? Your brilliant insight was that *in the war*, Israel was callous vis-a-vis civilian lives. My point is that it is simply morally cretinous to say that of these two combatants, Israel is the one that is careless about civilian casualties.
One side kills civilians when they miss targets. One side kills civilians when they hit targets. Do you know which is which?
Statements against interest by subjects of the article have nothing to do with it.
As to the reporter's name, I can only say that my last name is Goldberg, which obviously proves that I am inherently biased against the World Wrestling Federation.
These believe/don't believe the media debates are a hoot!!
I was probably subconsciously recalling the old debate over the NYT and claims of its bias.
Let's place a strong trackback/link/whathaveyou to this reasoning for DB because I am fairly certain (knowing that area of the world from experience) that there will soon be a story in which (1) Israel is protrayed negatively OR (2) a critic of Israel is protrayed positvely AND (3) the subjects quoted in the story have no motivation to lie.
Under DB's new structure those stories are to be believed. Got it. We'll keep watching.
"I could be wrong, but it seems unlikely that Hassan M. Fattah of the NY Times is making up quotes to absolve Israel of anything, especially since the tone of the article of a whole is about how destructive the air raids were,and how this is causing much suffering."
It had nothing to do with whether he speaks Arabic. His name was highlighted as one of two reasons (the other being the tone of the article) for assuming that his reporting follows a certain ideological stripe. I hope there are no students named Fattah in DB's classes.
One, the NYT account about the Sreifa attack is a bit confusing. According to the article, there were two Israeli strikes on Sreifa; one on July 19th & one that occurred "just days ago" (the article is dated 8/15). The HRW report refers to the July attack; the NYT article focuses on the aftermath of the August strike. The NYT article seems to be saying that Hezbollah fighters moved into the town after the first attack and before/during the second one:
It is plausible that HRW do not report Hezbollah targets in Sriefa because there were none in July, but the NYT reports on Hezbollah fighters because they moved in during August.
Second, in my opinion the burden of proof falls on Israel to demonstrate that its victims are combatants and that it is striking military targets. Because HRW is very transparent about its evidence, I do not see a problem with them reporting that its investigators could not find any evidence of a Hezbollah presence.
Bottom-line, it is not clear to me that there is anything inaccurate in HRW's report, and even if there is, it does not appear to be proof of some anti-Israeli bias that taints HRW's factual claims.
I'm not sure why you're harping on this so much, but yes, basic indicia of credibility do make reporting more believable -- or rather, more likely to be accurate. Has DB stated that criticisms of Israel are inherently inaccurate? Perhaps, but if so I missed it.
BTW, if someone were to directly argue that someone with the name Hassan Fatah is less likely to be sympathetic to Israel than your average American reporter, I'd say that this would be making a leap without sufficient evidence (e.g., I had a Lebanese Christian friend who was extremely pro-Israel), but hardly indicative of hostile feelings toward people of Arab descent as such.
Actually, Hezbollah named itself; Professor Bernstein did not "come up with" anything. I fail to understand your objection to the name Hezbollah adopted for itself. Its choice of name is not your concern, and it certainly has nothing to do with Professor Bernstein.
The implication is that you can tell something about his probably political views from his last name that warrants some kind of special response. Of course, there are those who think they can guess the political views of people named Goldberg. I guess you're part of that crowd, just on the other side of the room.
I have no idea what Fattsh's views on Israel are. But google suggests he is the former editor of Iraq Today, a pro-democracy weekly established in Bagdad shortly after the fall of Saddam Hussein. In other words, he appears to be one of the good guys over there, who risked his life to promote democracy during a very turbulent time.
The world would indeed be a different place... ::smirk::
Or maybe you have no clue what you are talking about.....that might be it also.
Number of times David Bernstein has criticized Israel in his blog posts since July 12: 0 (one post expressed sadness for innocent Lebanese children killed in the fighting, but did not blame Israel for their deaths).
Remind me — whose credibility is "not so good"?
I thought Professor Bernstein named Fattah as the reporter because he was the reporter. Sheesh.
DB, have a coke and a smile and don't let yourself get so worked up.
Ignore the HRW reports just like Nasrallah and Khameini do.
Do you think Nasrallah cares if HRW accuses him of war crimes? Of course not
So, you'd do yourself a favor by tretaing them with the contempt they deserve.
The figure would be much higher had truly indiscriminate and deliberate targeting taken place.
Of course, I'm still waiting for HRW to issue their report calling for Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Harry S Truman and Dwight D Eisenhower to be posthumously brought before the ICC and tried as war criminals. After all, they killed far more civilians than Israel has, by an order of magnitude. In fact, under their leadership, the US killed more civilians in 58 minutes over cities like Tokyo, Hamburg and Wurzburg than Israel has killed in 58 years of existence.
In fact, under HRW's views, every US President since 1932 is a war criminal.
HRW's reports are nice to look at, but in the real world they have no effect.
If you want to laugh yourself silly, go to their website and read their letter to Ahmadinejad. I haven't laughed that hard in a while.
The HRW report describes two Israeli attacks on the Village of Srifa. The Israelis first attacked a school, eventually killing dozens of people in two strikes on July 13 and 19. HRW investigators "saw no signs of Hezbollah military activity in the village."
HRW investigators were wrong.
Last Friday, a few days after the July 31 HRW visit, the Hezbollah commander for Srifa and two surrounding villages—a school teacher—took reporters on a tour of Srifa. He provided an explanation for HRW's failure to detect any Hezbollah activity: "It's not reasonable to walk around in military uniforms and carry rifles when, for example, the Red Cross comes into town."
There are numerous fighters in the area, he told the Agence France Presse reporters. "I know my mission. I must make my rockets hit Israel," said the Hezbollah commander.
Your right that it's fine for HRW to report "that its investigators could not find any evidence of a Hezbollah presence," at least as long as they make clear the cursory nature of their investigation.
The problem is that they then go on to accuse Israel of targeting civilians and hence committing war crimes. HRW clearly had too little evidence to make that charge. And now that what little evidence they had has been undermined, they ought to retract their charges and apologize.
Fattah might be ardently anti-Israel, or ardently pro-Israel. Or perhaps his political views on Israel are more complicated than one can surmise from his name. Or perhaps he's a good reporter who keeps his own political views out of his reporting. Have a nice day.
Thank you for the AFP article, which is a useful piece of data to add to our understanding of what happened at Sriefa. While the interviews with the two Hezbollah militants suggest that Hezbollah militants do not advertise their presence to the Red Cross, and one could deduce that they would do the same with HRW, it does not address the fact that during the 7/31 visit people in the "Moscow" neighborhood told the researcher that Hezbollah was not in that particular neighborhood. Nor do the interviewed militants say outright that they were in Sriefa before/during the 7/19 strike. Maybe they were, maybe they were not. Maybe they are a couple of guys who are lying about being brave, macho Hezbollah fighters.
I am not saying that we must accept the HRW report with 100% certainty, but if Israel &its defenders want to persuasively argue that there were Hezbollah activity in the areas in which it launched strikes, it is going to have to do a better job than denying that any strike took place, which is what the IDF spokesperson quoted in the report did. As I said, the onus is on Israel to show that their killings are justified.
I do happen to think that there is very good evidence that Israel was targetting civilian areas and is in the wrong. Sriefa is just one of many incidents that HRW goes over. There have been numerous civilian causalties. There is the fact that southern Lebanon is just ruined. There are the statements of the Israeli military saying they were going after civilian targets, as reported in Amnesty Internation's latest report.
Funniest part, though: Ahmadinejad lives on Pasteur Street.
Who knew?
(a) 14 out of the 16 named victims are men of fighting age (the other two were fairly old men); we do not know the gender/age breakdown of the ten unnamed victims (HRW estimates 26 civilians killed)
(b) Journalists from the AFP &NYT have interviewed Hezbollah militants in Srifa well after the Israeli strike in July 19th took place. The NYT piece, which says that most of the people killed in a strike were Hezbollah militants, was written after a second Israeli strike in August and it is unclear if it is referring to the aftermath of the July 19th strike. The AFP article was writen two weeks after the 7/19 strike and quotes two Hezbollah militants saying something about disguising their combatant status with the Red Cross.
(c) Three informants told HRW that the "Moscow" neighborhood in Srifa was not a site of Hezbollah activity.
(d) HRW quotes the IDF denying that any strike took place.
I am open to the possibility that Hezbollah was launching rockets from the Moscow neighborhood in Srifa, but I would want much better evidence before justifying an attack that killed 26 people. And I am disturbed that the IDF spokesperson made no effort to justify its attack to the HRW investigator.
I think these facts provide little support for an argument that HRW's credibility is "not so good" or that Israel's conduct in Lebanon in general was justified.
What evidence prior to an Israeli strike should Israel have to justify it?
Counterbattery radar? An outpost with a big scope seeing the rockets being fired? Drone surveillance seeing the things being fired?
But, in the afterwards scenario which persons would be claiming to have seen the launches? The local Hez folks? The local Hez supporters? A civilian who knows he'll be gruesomely murdered if he says he saw the launch? I think I see where you're going with this.
And you also want to be sure all the vics are Hez. Nice. This means, according to you, that the presence of even one civilian in the area means the bad guys are immune. I believe I'm getting something here....an impression.
I know you don't need to be told this, but you apparently think the rest of us haven't figured it out. An army which is good at hiding behind civilians and prevails because the opposition is constrained from doing anything which might endanger a civilian is an intersting concept. It means the army which wins is the army which is best at putting [sometimes their own]civilians at risk. What would you think of the way they'd be likely to treat those they occupy? That's a rhetorical question, btw. I wouldn't want to make you obfuscate this early in the morning.
I think the overall result of the Lebanon war/invasion/whatever support this conclusion. Whatever little security was won by Israel (if any) does not outweigh the toll born by the Lebanese people.
Numerous reporters visited Srifa and had little trouble finding Hezbollah. Why couldn't HRW? Why haven't they changed their conclusions in the light of this additional evidence?
Here's what Robert Fisk, no friend of Israel, found:
And there is no evidence the Israelis have any trouble telling the difference.
Anyway, what evidence in advance of firing would you think justifies firing?
It is possible for Hez to have a stronghold in the village but not have much of a presence in the Moscow neighborhood. If this is the case, it becomes a situation of Israel accidentally hitting a civilian area in the course of trying to strike a military target (which is pretty bad in itself).
Regardless, I agree that if Srifa was a Hez stronghold, it should have included in the report. However, HRW did ask the IDF for their own account, and the IDF blew them off. So it is hard to impugn HRW's integrity based on this one incident.
Moreover, HRW was accusing Israel of war crimes not solely based on Srifa, but on other incidents where civilians were killed. As I have said, the overall pattern does not look good for Israel's conduct. And Amnesty International's 8/23 report has also assembled statements from the Israeli military that sound pretty close to advocating collective punishment for Lebanon.
So even if you are right about Srifa, I do not see that necessitating HRW revising its conclusions about Israel's conduct.
Pretty slick, that guy is.
Lebanese recover from Kafkaesque trip to Israel
By Jonathan Wright
Reuters
Friday, August 25, 2006; 12:49 PM
BAALBEK, Lebanon (Reuters) - Wellwishers gathered in Hassan Nasrallah's garden above the ancient Lebanese town of Baalbek on Friday, delighted to see him and four relatives back from a Kafkaesque three-week adventure in Israeli detention.
Nasrallah, a modest shopkeeper who happens to have the same name as the leader of the Lebanese guerrilla movement Hizbollah, shook hands with his visitors and seated them under the trees as the family prepared a feast of grilled lamb.
Some of them had not seen Nasrallah and the other four men since Israeli commandos descended on his house on August 1, marched them up into the hills, put them on a helicopter and flew them to a secret location in Israel.
The Israelis dumped them on the Lebanese border at Naqoura on Monday after 20 days, without an apology or even an explanation of what was behind their bizarre experience.
Bilal Nasrallah, Hassan's 31-year-old son and partner in the grocery business, told Reuters on Friday that in the 18 hours of interrogation the Israelis never offered any reason for the raid and refused to answer any questions from the Lebanese.
"But the basis of their interrogation was that we had some connection with Hizbollah. In fact, we have nothing at all to do with it," he said. Neighbors and a Hizbollah official also denied that any of the men were members of the organization.
Israel and Hizbollah fought a five-week war until a truce came into effect on August 14. Nearly 1,200 Lebanese, mainly civilians, were killed in the bombing and fighting, along with 157 Israelis, mainly soldiers inside Lebanon.
ADDRESS ON THE INTERNET?
"My theory is that the Israelis were trying to use us to deceive public opinion, to give the impression they had achieved some great success," Bilal Nasrallah said.
Al-Hajj Ahmed Raya, the Hizbollah spokesman in the Baalbek region, in the Bekaa valley northeast of the capital Beirut, said the Israelis had probably found Hassan Nasrallah's name and address on the Internet.
"It's another sign of Israeli impotence, that they should resort to kidnapping someone and his relatives, a builder, a tiler, a plasterer and a supermarket owner, and pretend that they had captured a Hizbollah leader," he added.
The five men were Hassan Nasrallah, 55, and his son Bilal, Mohammed Jaafar Ali Diab, a family friend, Hassan al-Burji and Ahmed Outa, who are relatives of the Nasrallahs by marriage.
The Israelis also took Hassan Nasrallah's 13-year-old son, Mohammed, but when the helicopters arrived they had second thoughts about him and set him free in the mountains in the middle of the night, Bilal said.
Bilal Nasrallah and Diab complained that the Israelis had roughed them up, knocking out some of Diab's teeth, and during the 20 days of detention never allowed them any contact with lawyers, the Red Cross, a judge or anyone else other than the interrogators and jailers.
Before releasing them on August 21, the Israeli military called in still photographers and video cameramen to take pictures of them, again without any explanation, Bilal said.
The Israelis drove them in a bus to the border, where U.N. peacekeepers and representatives of the International Red Cross were waiting. "They left us without any apology," he added.
© 2006 Reuters
Israel reacted to repeated Hezbollah missile attacks against unarmed Israeli civilians. Nothing more is needed.
According to David Anderson, lawyer and former HRW staffer, it is impermissible to use human shields, even if the shields are voluntary.
Hmmm. There was quite a bit about voluntary human shields in the runup to the invasion of Iraq. I do not recall HRW (or anybody else) advising either the Iraq government or the shields themselves that they were on the brink of committing a war crime.
Similarly, there has been much talk on these threads about the practice of Hezbollah of operating in inhabited areas (which is pretty much the story of war all through history), and HRW apparently did make one of its mild, grudging statements against the practice.
It would be helpful if HRW and similar accusation-flinging groups would fling in all directions. It would enhance their credibility with me, which is right now pretty low.