Joe Stork, Human Rights Watch’s deputy director for the Middle East, has been attacked in the blogosphere for his anti-Israel views. Much of the attack is justified. Stork has spent much of his career attacking Israel, has made some rather vicious and inaccurate statements that he seems to have never recanted, is a current supporter of the campaign for a worldwide boycott of Israel, and has no apparent qualifications for his position beyond his history of Israel-bashing.
However, one thing that Stork did NOT do, but that he has been widely accused of doing since an article in Ma’ariv accused him of it, is support the 1972 Munich massacre of Israeli athletes by Palestinian terrorists. I went back and read the relevant article. First of all, the article is billed as a a collective statement by the journal’s editors, but is not signed by any of them. Therefore, one can’t say for sure that Stork supported the entire editorial, or any given line in it. The most one can say is that he didn’t publicly object.
Second, while the editorial does apologize for the Munich massacre, and does say that it gave Palestinians a needed morale boost, and further adds that Israel has engaged in much worse crimes, it ultimately says, as a bit of an afterthought, that all of these factors do not justify it. This hardly amounts to the sort of unequivocal condemnation one would expect from people with any decency, but it’s simply inaccurate to say that this amounts to “supporting” the massacre.
I’ve noted before occasions on which critics of Israel have mistranslated, distorted, or otherwise mangled things to serve their political agenda (e.g.). Indeed, Stork’s critics have noted that he once spread the lie that Menachem Begin called Palestinians “two-legged beasts” when Begin was clearly referring specifically to Palestinian terrorists who murdered children. It’s not any better when “our side” engages in similar behavior.
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