Allegations of Political Bias in Human Rights Watch Reporting on Hezbollah Conflict

4.2.12 WC: 191694 The Guild decided to abandon any pretense of reporting neutrally on human rights and has continued to serve only as the legal and political arm of the hard left. It has now lost all of its credibility as a human rights organization. Nor was the Guild alone in shifting from “a purely human rights perspective” to a largely political perspective that used the label of human rights selectively against its ideological enemies. Other organizations which were founded on the principles of neutral human rights, such as Human Rights Watch,'” the Carter Center and Amnesty International, '® As an early supporter of Human Rights Watch and an admirer of its founder, I have taken upon myself the responsibility of monitoring its actions very carefully—of guarding the guardians. I was particularly critical of its reporting on Israel’s war against Hezbollah in 20___, after Hezbollah fired thousands of rockets at civilian targets in the north of Israel. I focused on the highly publicized “conclusion” reached by Human Rights Watch allegedly after extensive “imvestigations” on the ground: “Human Rights Watch found no cases in which Hezbollah deliberately used civilians as shields to protect them from retaliatory IDF attack.” (emphasis added) After investigating a handful of cases, Human Rights Watch found that in “none of the cases of civilian deaths documented in this report [Qana, Srifa, Tyre, and southern Beirut] is there evidence to suggest that Hezbollah forces or weapons were in or near the area that the IDF targeted during or just prior to the attack.” No cases! None! Not one! That’s what Human Rights watch reported to the world. But anyone who watched even a smattering of TV during the war saw with their own eyes direct evidence of rockets being launched from civilian areas. Not Human Rights Watch. “Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?” That’s not Chico Marx. It’s Human Rights Watch. Their lying eyes belonged to the pro-Hezbollah witnesses its investigators chose to interview—and claimed to believe. But their mendacious pens belonged to Kenneth Roth, HRW’s Executive Director, and his minions in New York, who know how to be skeptical when it serves their interests not to believe certain witnesses. How could an organization, which claims to be objective, have been so demonstrably wrong about so central a point in so important a war? Could it have been an honest mistake? I don’t think so. Despite its boast that “Human Rights Watch has interviewed victims and witness of attacks in on-on-one settings, conducted on- site inspections ... and collected information for hospitals, humanitarian groups, and government agencies,” it didn’t find one instance in which Hezbollah failed to segregate its fighters from civilians. In arriving at this counter-factual conclusion, Human Rights Watch willfully ignored credible news sources, such as The New York Times, The New Yorker and other sources. After I exposed the double standard practiced by Human Rights Watch, its founder, Robert Bernstein, wrote the following in the New York Times. As the founder of Human Rights Watch, its active chairman for 20 years and now founding chairman emeritus, I must do something that I never anticipated: I must publicly join the group’s critics. Human Rights Watch had as its original mission to pry open closed societies, advocate basic freedoms and support dissenters. But recently it has been issuing reports on the Israeli-Arab conflict that are helping those who wish to turn Israel into a pariah state. Israel, with a population of 7.4 million, is home to at least 80 human rights organizations, a vibrant free press, a democratically elected government, a judiciary that frequently rules against the government, a 334 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_017421