Exchange of letters with HRW (in WSJ-E): HRW Agenda Clouds Response

Letter by Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East Director, Human Rights Watch and Gerald M. Steinbergs response

Prof. Gerald M. Steinberg is Member of the Board of Directors of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East

HRW Agenda Clouds Response by Gerald M. Steinberg

Letters The Wall Street Journal Europe February 9 2005

Sarah Leah Whitson’s letter (“The Middle East Through the Looking Glass,” Jan. 18¹) attempts to discredit my detailed analysis of Human Rights Watch’s destructive role (“The Unhelpful Hand,” editorial page, Jan. 10) with the ultimate trump card–the claim that I am a “security consultant for the Israeli government.” If all academics invited occasionally to express their views in government settings were disqualified from writing editorials, newspapers would be much thinner.

And Ms. Whitson’s boss, Ken Roth, who served as a prosecutor in New York before heading HRW, would lose a major platform to promote his ideology. Or perhaps her problem is with the legitimacy of this activity only with respect to the Israeli government –a position reflected in HRW’s agenda.

Beyond this awkward attempt to stifle debate, Ms. Whitson’s substantive points are thin reeds indeed. As Anne Bayefsky, Shimon Samuels and other delegates to the 2001 Durban conference have testified, HRW’s representatives were parties to shifting the conference’s focus from battling racism to attacking Israel. While Ms. Whitson highlights HRW’s single “definitive” study of suicide bombing, she does not explain why they buried all the evidence of Arafat’s role, in the spirit of Durban. And her claim that the defense of Israeli lives against terror constitutes the source of radical Islam (abetted by HRW’s accusations of “Israeli war crimes”) is both foolish and outside the human rights framework for which HRW solicits contributions.

In summary, Ms. Whitson’s letter is another example of the NGO political agenda that inflames incitement and hatred. It also highlights the importance of watching the watchers.

Gerald M. Steinberg Editor, NGO Monitor

¹ See below

Letters to the Editor

The Middle East Through the Looking Glass

18 January 2005 The Wall Street Journal Europe

There’s a certain Alice in Wonderland quality to Gerald Steinberg’s diatribe against humanrights groups as supposed obstacles to peace (“The Unhelpful Hand,” editorial page, Jan. 10). For example, Human Rights Watch’s repeated condemnations of terrorism, including authorship of the definitive critical study of suicide bombing in Israel, somehow “contributed to incitement to terrorism.” Our strong and widely publicized rejection of unjustified criticisms of Israel at the 2001 nongovernmental conference on racism in Durban, South Africa become a “contribution of NGOs to incitement in the Palestinian territories.”

Mr. Steinberg dismisses human-rights criticisms of Israeli war crimes and other violations simply because Palestinians have also condemned them. For him, there is no difference between “Israeli defensive actions” and blatant violations of the Geneva Conventions, which seek to spare civilians from government excesses even in time of war or serious security threat. Israeli abuses are fueling radicals in Muslim countries and eroding Western sympathy for the embattled country, but criticizing those abuses somehow “boosts the most radical Palestinians and undermines moderate voices.”

Mr. Steinberg, a man who describes himself as a professor and NGO leader while omitting from his author’s biography that he is a security consultant for the Israeli government, should leave such twisted reasoning for fairytales.

Sarah Leah Whitson Middle East Director Human Rights Watch New York

AUTHOR

Gerald M. Steinberg

Prof. Gerald Steinberg is president of NGO Monitor and professor of Political Studies at Bar Ilan University, where he founded the Program on Conflict Management and Negotiation. His research interests include international relations, Middle East diplomacy and security, the politics of human rights and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), Israeli politics and arms control.

NGO Monitor was founded following the 2001 UN World Conference Against Racism in Durban South Africa, where powerful NGOs, claiming to promote human rights, hijacked the principles of morality and international law. NGO Monitor provides information and analysis, promotes accountability, and supports discussion on the reports and activities of NGOs claiming to advance human rights and humanitarian agendas.

In 2013, Professor Steinberg accepted the prestigious Menachem Begin Prize on behalf of NGO Monitor, recognizing its “Efforts exposing the political agenda and ideological basis of humanitarian organizations that use the Discourse of human rights to discredit Israel and to undermine its position among the nations of the world.”

Steinberg is a member of Israel Council of Foreign Affairs; the Israel Higher-Education Council, Committee on Public Policy; advisory board of the Israel Law Review International, the research working group of the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI), and participates in the Inter-parliamentary Coalition for Combating Antisemitism (ICCA). He also speaks at a variety of high-level government sessions and academic conferences worldwide.

Publications include “NGOs, Human Rights, and Political Warfare in the Arab-Israel Conflict" (Israel Studies); "The UN, the ICJ and the Separation Barrier: War by Other Means" (Israel Law Review); and Best Practices for Human Rights and Humanitarian NGO Fact-Finding (co-author), Nijhoff, Leiden, 2012.

His op-ed columns have been published in Wall St. Journal (Europe), Financial Times, Ha’aretz,International Herald Tribune, Jerusalem Post, and other publications. He has appeared as a commentator on the BBC, CBC, CNN, and NPR.

Read all stories by Gerald M. Steinberg