Yesterday the New York Times reported on a recent Human Rights Watch report that claimed that during its campaign in Gaza Israel killed 29 civilians in six separate attacks.
Twenty-nine civilians, including eight children, were killed in what appeared to be six missile strikes by Israeli drones in Gaza in December and January, according to a report released Tuesday by Human Rights Watch. The group questioned whether Israeli forces had taken “all feasible precautions†to avoid civilian casualties.
Israel’s military has never acknowledged using the remotely piloted planes to fire missiles. In a statement released Tuesday, it said that it had used an assortment of weapons and technologies to minimize the risk to Palestinian civilians.
There are two obvious problems with this report. The first is that Marc Garlasco wrote the report for Human Rights Watch. Garlasco doesn’t have such a good record when reporting on Israel. Yet the New York Times fails to acknowledge his spotty record.. Also the Times cites PCHR uncritically. Anyone who has been reading Elder of Ziyon recently knows that PCHR is not reliable.
When Elder of Ziyon, looked at the report itself, he showed why skepticism towards Garlasco and he PCHR was warranted – HRW’s report was riddled with inconsistencies and falsehoods, including the identification of dead terrorists as civilians leading him to conclude.
However, HRW either ignored evidence that some of the “civilian” victims they are talking about were actually terrorists or it didn’t do any reasonable research (typing the names into Google should have been enough.) This is either sloppy work or it is purposeful deception on HRW’s part.
The NYT story on the HRW report concludes:
P. W. Singer, the author of a recent book on military robots called “Wired for War,†said Israel might also be finding that using the drones “certainly raises the bar of expectations.â€
“Because you can target more precisely, people hold you to a higher standard,†he said.
This is perverse. Israel’s being singled out because of HRW’s animus towards Israel. Frankly a report on the thousands of Qassam fired into Israel wouldn’t have generated the same kind of buzz. This isn’t holding Israel to a higher standard; it’s holding Israel to a standard and holding Hamas to none.
Mere Rhetoric noted that HRW has a really poor record on Israel and, in fact, raised money for its activities in the human rights unfriendly regime of Saudi Arabia. NGO Monitor observed:
Similarly, Whitson told the Saudi leaders about HRW’s role in anti-Israel activities in the US Congress and the United Nations, boasting that this propaganda campaign was instrumental in the UN’s “fact-finding mission to investigate the allegations of serious Israeli violations during the war on Gaza,†to be headed by Justice Richard Goldstone, who was also a member of HRW’s board at the time. (He resigned after the investigation began; as NGO Monitor noted, his membership on HRW’s board was a conflict of interest.)
So HRW used a “researcher” whose bias had already been established and itself, as an organization, had demonstrated its bias by using its anti-Israel bias as a selling point to collect funds one of Israel’s enemies. Yet the NYT, reported the story of HRW’s report without raising any questions as to the organization biases and record of anti-Israel advocacy. Human Rights Watch? How about Human Wrongs Watch instead?
Crossposted on Soccer Dad.
