Amazing: 'Human rights watch' actually realizes Gaza 'Palestinians' commit war crimes

(Carl) Well, isn't this amazing? 'Human rights watch' has finally figured out that Hamas and other 'Palestinian' terror groups committed war crimes by shooting rockets from civilian areas in Gaza to civilian areas in Israel during Operation Pillar of Defense.

“Palestinian armed groups made clear in their statements that harming civilians was their aim,” said HRW's Middle East director Sarah Leah Whitson. “There is simply no legal justification for launching rockets at populated areas.”

The group also found that Gazan groups, including Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the Popular Resistance Committee, justified targeting civilian centers as reprisal for Israeli strikes, an act also banned under international law.
Furthermore, such groups "repeatedly fired rockets from densely populated areas, near homes, businesses, and a hotel, unnecessarily placing civilians in the vicinity at grave risk from Israeli counter-fire," the report said.
The detailed report included examples of rockets being launched from densely populated areas in Gaza, and noted that groups fired from underground tunnels with hatches for the first time. HRW faulted Palestinian armed groups for failing to alert civilians or urge them to evacuate prior to launching rockets in their vicinity.
As the ruling power in the Strip, the human rights group said, Hamas was responsible for reining in the behavior of other groups.
“As the ruling authority in Gaza, Hamas has an obligation to stop unlawful attacks and punish those responsible,” Whitson said.

But lest you get your hopes up for a Goldstone or other style of inquiry into these human rights violations....

A week earlier, HRW reported that Israeli attacks on journalists and media facilities during the operation also violated laws of war, saying that Israel provided no specific information to justify claims that they were military targets.
“Just because Israel says a journalist was a fighter or a TV station was a command center does not make it so,” Whitson said. “Journalists who praise Hamas and TV stations that applaud attacks on Israel may be propagandists, but that does not make them legitimate targets under the laws of war.”

Well yeah, except that Israel did provide evidence, and Hamas' al-Aqsa television is a designated terror organization.

Qaddafi Forces Suspected Of Executing Detainees

With time running out, Qaddafi forces get desperate and start killing prisoners.

Six bodies lie in the dry riverbed between Gargur and Bab al-Aziziya, Gaddafi's former compound. © 2011 Human Rights Watch A team of volunteers arrive to recover the bodies of the dead found in and around a makeshift field clinic outside Bab al-Aziziya where there were signs that Gaddafi loyalists had been present. © 2011 Human Rights Watch The body of a dead man at the makeshift field clinic outside Bab al-Aziziya. © 2011 Human Rights Watch Bodies lie outside the south gate of Bab al-Aziziya compound in Tripoli. © 2011 Reuters Hey HRW? Wasn't Qaddafi on the United Nations Human Rights Council? Are you proud of what you were shilling as you condemned Israel?

The body of a dead man lies with his hands tied behind his back in the dry riverbed between Gargur and Bab al-Aziziya. © 2011 Human Rights Watch Corpses in the tents behind the makeshift field clinic outside Bab al-Aziziya.© 2011 Human Rights Watch A truck holds the bodies of the dead from in and around the makeshift field clinic outside Bab al-Aziziya. © 2011 Human Rights Watch Two bodies found in the closet under the stairs inside the Al-Amal al-Akhdar building belonging to the Libyan Internal Security.© 2011 Human Rights Watch ...isn't everyone just HAPPY that the NYTimes tried to promote Qaddafi as a reformer?

Sarah Leah Whitson pushes the race button

Sarah Leah Whitson, the Human Rights Watch official who raised funds for her organization by blasting Israel in uber-racist, slavery-tolerating Saudi Arabia, has made one of the most odious analogies possible. She writes,

Israeli President Shimon Peres visited Washington earlier this month, hot on the heels of an announcement that Israeli authorities had approved yet more housing units for Jewish settlers in the West Bank. In a week when the U.S. paused to recall the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, President Peres might have considered King’s message — an end to segregation — and why such a system of racial inequality remains in place in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.



Back in 1968, when Dr. King was murdered, the debate about discrimination was live and real. Most governments have long since stopped trying to justify separating people based on race or national origin, whether for ostensible security concerns, like the U.S. internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, or plain old bigotry, like the Jim Crow laws of the American south.


Yet in the areas of the Occupied Palestinian Territories where Israel has moved almost half a million Jewish “settlers,” not only do Israeli laws and policies strictly segregate Jews from Palestinians, they deliberately deprive Palestinians of the most basic needs, in many cases forcing them out of their communities.

Human Rights Watch and the selling of Gaddafi

If Whitson is suggesting that the ‘Palestinian cause’ is anything like the civil rights movement in America — clearly she is — she is living in an alternate universe.
Civil rights workers did not fire antitank missiles at school buses, nor did they slit the throats of babies and children. American blacks did not blow themselves up at holiday celebrations, and Mexican and Canadian ones did not launch rockets into American towns and cities.
In fact, try as I might, the only way that Dr. M. L. King and Ismail Haniyya are alike is that they both say they are struggling for their people’s rights. Of course, Dr. King actually was, whereas Haniyya is a racist, genocidal antisemite who wants to wipe out the Jews in Israel and take their country. King indeed represented an oppressed racial minority that was discriminated against in law and custom, while Haniyya is supported by the considerable resources of the Arab world and Iran in his murderous cause. If the analogy makes sense at all, Jewish Israelis are the ones discriminated against in the Middle East and in the broader international community.
But Whitson isn’t interested in reality — as she wasn’t interested in the very real human rights abuses in Saudi Arabia — she is interested in pushing buttons.
So she claims that Israel maintains a system of ‘racial inequality’, when the concept of race has nothing to do with relations between Jews and Arabs, who are genetically closer to each other than to non-Jewish Europeans. Of course she doesn’t have to use the word ‘race’, she could claim that there was a system of cultural or linguistic discrimination. But that wouldn’t push the button.
Whitson refers numerous times to the ‘Occupied Palestinian Territories’. What are these territories? They are part of the lands that were set aside by the League of Nations for a “Jewish National Home” after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in WWI. Various Arab states were also created at the same time, but this was the only area specifically designated for Jewish settlement. These territories were never ‘Palestinian’, and they were only ‘Arab’ insofar as they were illegally occupied by Jordan and Egypt for 19 years. They are not ‘occupied’, since there was no sovereign authority there since the end of the Mandate — they are at most ‘disputed’, and an argument can be made that if any party ought to control them, it’s Israel, the representative of the Jewish people.

She continues,

With little regard for the blatant racial inequality of its policies, the Israeli government provides Jewish settlements with water, electricity, housing, schools, hospitals and roads, while it severely restricts access to these necessities to Palestinian communities under its control.

HRW appoints PFLP terrorist
named Jabarin as an advisor

Race doesn’t have anything to do with it. The territories are not part of Israel. Israel doesn’t have to ‘provide’ anything — there is a Palestinian Authority (PA) which gets enormous sums of money from the West and which governs the areas of Judea and Samaria (Areas A and B) which contain more than 90% of the Arab population. Arabs connected with the corrupt PA have well-paying positions or lucrative business concessions. They live in large villas, much more elaborate than the housing found in Israeli settlements.
Whitson, by the way, refers to the “the 60 percent of the West Bank known as ‘Area C’ where Israel has complete control without mentioning that Area C contains only 4% of the Arab population! The rest is mostly uninhabited desert and mountainous areas, along with the Israeli settlements of course.
In 1967, only 20% of the Arab population in Judea and Samaria was connected to a water system — now 90% are connected to Israel’s national water grid. Even Gaza, ruled by the bellicose Hamas, receives most of its water and electricity from Israel. This leads to ironic situations, such as the time Hamas snipers shot and wounded an Israel Electric Company worker who was climbing a tower near the border. And it is upsetting to know that the factories that make the Qassam rockets fired at Israel are powered by Israeli electricity.
A particularly pernicious accusation is that Israel has built ‘apartheid roads’ on which Arabs are not permitted to drive. What is actually the case is that Jewish residents were subjected to frequent deadly drive-by shooting attacks on certain roads — in August of last year four people were killed in a single incident — and so the Israeli authorities chose to close the off-ramps to the Arab villages in the area. Arabs, both Israeli Arabs and residents of the territories do drive on the roads — again, there is nothing racist involved, unless it is the racist murderers who shoot at vehicles containing Jews.
Israeli hospitals routinely treat patients from the territories and Eastern Jerusalem. During the Gaza war, the Palestinian Authority stopped paying for its patients on the grounds that the Jews were ‘making propaganda’ by treating them. There is no separation between Jewish and Arab patients, and in fact even wounded terrorists are treated.
Whitson goes on:

Israel’s security justifications fall far short of the strict and narrow limits on differential treatment permitted under international law between people of different ethnicities or national origins. A state should never apply such measures categorically against an entire group and must limit them to specific individuals who pose a threat.

One of the security measures that Whitson and others find to be unacceptable profiling are the checkpoints, which do present an inconvenience for the entire Palestinian Arab population. But almost every day, potential terrorists are stopped at the checkpoints with weapons or explosives. How would it be possible to do this without everyone passing through the checkpoint? Should security personnel only check “specific individuals who pose a threat?” How would they know who the are?

The fact is that Israel is at war, and many of those fighting against it are embedded in the Palestinian Arab population. You cannot understand the relationship of Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs outside the context of this war, and you cannot understand the Israeli-Palestinian part of it outside the context of the broader war — whose goal is the elimination of Israel — that has been prosecuted by the Arab world (and now Iran) since the beginning of the state.
.
Pretending that this is a question of civil rights, that there is ‘racial discrimination’, completely falsifies and distorts this reality.
But it’s great for pushing buttons.

via calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com from Fresnozionism.org 17 April '11

EXPOSED:
Sarah Leah Whitson, the head of 'Human Rights Watch

NGO Monitor has called on Sarah Leah Whitson, the head of 'Human Rights Watch's Mideast and North Africa division, to resign, on the grounds that she misled the public regarding the nature of the Gadhafi regime in Libya and the intentions of Gadhafi's son, Seif al-Islam.

Robert Bernstein's new baby

Robert Bernstein attacked Human Rights Watch - an organization that he founded - for going off course in the Middle East.  A lot of people thought that was the end of Bernstein and that he'd never be heard from again. But at 88, Bernstein has the energy of a much younger man. He's starting a new human rights organization that will do it his way.

Soros giving Human Rights Watch $100 million - the Jewish Gold fillings during the Holocaust wasn't enough

Uber-Leftist philanthropist George Soros is donating $100 million to 'Human Rights Watch' so that they can stop embarrassing themselves trying to raise money in Saudi Arabia and get on with the business of undermining the existence of the Jewish State.

Human Rights Watch and the selling of Gaddafi

Gerald Steinberg and Anne Herzberg March 10, 2011 Jerusalem Post

To read the original article, click here.

In 2009, Sarah Leah Whitson, director of the Middle East and North Africa division at Human Rights Watch (HRW), visited Libya, where she claimed to have discovered a “Tripoli spring,” led by Muammar Gaddafi’s son Saif al-Islam. In two articles, she praised him for creating an “expanded space for discussion and debate.”
As a top official of a prominent human rights watchdog, Whitson’s endorsement gave credibility to this fictitious reform movement. Two years later, and weeks after the rebellion began and the Gaddafi regime had killed hundreds, if not thousands, Whitson belatedly reversed course, and in a February 24 Los Angeles Times op-ed acknowledged the façade of Saif’s human rights “reforms.”
In contrast to her earlier praise, Whitson wrote that “most Libyans we spoke with never had much faith that Muammar Gaddafi would learn new tricks, or that the announced reforms were anything more than an endless loop of promises made and broken.”
Clearly, this reversal came far too late to help the Libyans, and reflects the wider moral failure of HRW in the Middle East. In her wildly misnamed “Tripoli Spring,” (Foreign Policy, May 27, 2009), Whitson extolled Saif – who has since vowed to “fight until the last man, the last woman, the last bullet” against the Libyan protesters – as “the real impetus for transformation” via his Gaddafi Foundation and two semi-private papers.
Her embrace continued after a second visit in December 2009, when she referred to Gaddafi’s heir-apparent as one of the “forces of reform,” comparing his foundation to HRW (“Postcard from... Tripoli,” Foreign Policy in Focus, February, 11, 2010). Although HRW officials were placed under constant surveillance, and its press conference was cut short by government agents and ended in “pandemonium,” Whitson still spun her trip in a positive light.
In January 2010, when the regime imposed censorship on the Internet and blocked access to YouTube, Whitson was silent. At the same time, the government established a body to monitor journalists, and closed the two semi-private papers lauded by Whitson in “Tripoli Spring.”
But no correction was issued by HRW.
Whitson’s blindness was further reflected in the case of Fathi Eljahmi, Libya’s most prominent dissident, imprisoned, tortured and killed in 2009. His brother condemned both Amnesty International and HRW for hesitating “to advocate publicly for Fathi’s case” for fear they would “antagonize Gaddafi.”
He reserved special condemnation for Whitson’s reference to Saif ’s charity as a “spring,” observing that the foundation “is actively menacing my brother’s family. Some family members continue to endure interrogation, denial of citizenship papers and passports, round-the- clock surveillance and threats of rape and physical liquidation.”
But Whitson and HRW chose to remain silent.
In contrast to Whitson’s promotion of the “reformer” façade, others were not taken in. Journalist Michael Totten, who also visited Libya, compared the country to North Korea and Turkmenistan, pointedly noting that Saif “is ideologically committed to preserving his father’s prison state system... Gullible diplomats and journalists may sincerely believe he’s a reformer, but a close look at his own statements proves that he’s lying when he passes himself off as moderate.”
Whitson’s endorsement of Gaddafi’s son is not the only example of her cozying up to repressive regimes. In May 2009, Whitson led a fund-raising trip to Saudi Arabia where she marketed HRW’s work combating pro- Israel “pressure groups” to solicit funds from “prominent members of Saudi society” including the ruling Shura Council (the religious police).
In May 2010, Whitson had a meeting with Hamas Minister of Justice Faraj Alghoul. As in the Libyan and Saudi cases, Whitson took the soft approach to massive human-rights violations. Instead, she assured Alghoul that she was visiting Gaza “to listen to all parties directly so she will prepare more objective and impartial reports,” and promised that HRW’s next report would allege Israeli violations of international law.
Beirut was next on Whitson’s itinerary, and during a November 2010 trip she praised “the Lebanese sophistication for human rights.”
In contrast, HRW Lebanon director Nadim Houry condemned the lack of effectual and accountable state institutions, and the absence of political will to implement change. Two months after Whitson’s proclamation of support, Hezbollah took control of the government to block cooperation with the UN tribunal investigating the murder of prime minister Rafik Hariri in 2006.
In each of these cases – Libya, Saudi Arabia, Gaza and Lebanon – Whitson has displayed behavior completely lacking in moral leadership required for any organization claiming to support human rights. In addition, copying the strategy of the Arab dictatorships, year after year HRW has maintained an obsessive focus on allegations directed at Israel. Its website includes only 10 pages on Libya, but more than 40 on Israel.
As HRW founder Robert Bernstein stressed, the “plight of 350 million people” ruled by the most “brutal, closed and autocratic” regimes, “who would most benefit from the kind of attention a large and well-financed international human-rights organization can provide is being ignored as Human Rights Watch’s Middle East division prepares report after report on Israel.”
As long as ideologues like Whitson are responsible for HRW’s agenda in the Middle East, the spin will continue, at the expense of universal human rights.
Gerald Steinberg is on the faculty of Bar-Ilan University and president of NGO Monitor, the Jerusalem-based research organization. Anne Herzberg is NGO Monitor’s legal adviser.

via ngo-monitor.org

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EXPOSED: Sarah Leah Whitson, the head of 'Human Rights Watch

NGO Monitor has called on Sarah Leah Whitson, the head of 'Human Rights Watch's Mideast and North Africa division, to resign, on the grounds that she misled the public regarding the nature of the Gadhafi regime in Libya and the intentions of Gadhafi's son, Seif al-Islam.

Following Human Rights Watch's (HRW) neglect of brutal human rights violations in Libya and false claims and cover-ups about prospects for reforms there, NGO Monitor today called for the immediate resignation of Sarah Leah Whitson, HRW's director of its Middle East and North Africa (MENA) division. HRW's MENA division failed to devote the necessary resources to speaking out against human rights violations by oppressive Middle East regimes, including Saudi Arabia, Hamas, Lebanon, and most notably, Libya. Recent statements by Whitson regarding Seif Islam, a son of Moammar Qaddafi, demonstrate that she consistently whitewashed the reality in Libya and further embarrassed her organization.
"Human Rights Watch, and specifically MENA director Sarah Leah Whitson, has soft-peddled Qaddafi's oppressive acts and offered no help to the Libyan people," says Anne Herzberg, legal advisor for NGO Monitor, a research institution that tracks NGOs. "Whitson was well aware of the atrocities committed by the Qaddafi regime, but she chose to present the façade that Qaddafi's son was prepared to implement 'reforms.' The events in Libya over the past weeks reveal Whitson's gross incompetence. She has failed to retract her previously misleading statements. She cannot continue to head the MENA division, and we call for her immediate resignation."
NGO Monitor notes that Whitson held a press conference last year in Libya that was abruptly halted and ended in "pandemonium." Yet, Whitson spun her trip and the event in a positive light in her 2010 "Postcard from Tripoli," in which she said that Libya had a "moment of opportunity." Even more egregious is Whitson's enthusiastic marketing of the Qaddafi regime from 2009's Tripoli Spring (published in Foreign Policy):

For the first time in memory, change is in the air in Libya. The brittle atmosphere of repression has started to fracture, giving way to expanded space for discussion and debate, proposals for legislative reform, and even financial compensation for families of the hundreds of men killed in a prison riot a decade ago.
Many Libyans say the changes were unavoidable in the face of the open satellite and Internet access of the past decade.

These assessments differ sharply from the Libya Whitson now admits she saw, as part of her attempts to rewrite the record. In contrast to the earlier fiction, she recently wrote "most Libyans we spoke with never had much faith that Moammar Qaddafi would learn new tricks, or that the announced reforms were anything more than an endless loop of promises made and broken."
"What Sarah Leah Whitson admits she knew about the Qaddafi family's fraudulent reform agenda completely contradicts statements during her Tripoli trip," says Prof. Gerald Steinberg, president of NGO Monitor. "Reform was never on the horizon and Seif Islam was simply seeking to validate the eventual transfer of power to his hands, using allies like Whitson. Her attempts to give a facelift to MENA's treatment of Libya is indicative of the division's approach to many of the repressive regimes in the region, including Saudi Arabia, Syria, Hamas, and others."

Maybe Whitson was just trying to raise money from the Libyans. She's really good at that.
Read the whole thing.

via israelmatzav.blogspot.com

Another Feminist BITES THE DUST!

Posted via email from noahdavidsimon's posterous

Out of Context... but that is the point.  EXPOSED in a good way.  NOT in a stinky globalist way image via Daniel Ortega Muñoz

 

HRW appoints PFLP terrorist named Jabarin as an advisor

Shawan Jabarin, director of Al Haq, talks on the phone at his office in Ramallah last March. A grant given to Al Haq has raised ire at Rights & Democracy. (Nasser Shiyoukhi/Associated Press)

via cbc.ca

From The Daily Beast:

A Palestinian whom Israel’s Supreme Court has described as a “Jekyll and Hyde” of international terrorism has been appointed by Human Rights Watch (HRW) to its advisory board that oversees the sensitive reporting on Arab-Israeli affairs.
The man at the center of the dispute, Shawan Jabarin, runs the human rights organization Al Haq in Ramallah on the occupied West Bank. In 1985 he belonged to a Birzeit University student group associated with the PFLP, indicted as a terror group, by 30 countries including the U.S., the European Union, and Canada. He was convicted of recruiting members for terrorist training outside Israel and served nine months of a 24-month jail sentence.

via elderofziyon.blogspot.com

Calls over several days to [HRW's Sarah Leah] Whiston were not returned. In a telephone conversation, [HRW's Ken] Roth at first said it was “not true” that Jabarin had been a member of PFLP, then added: “And if he had been, it’s ancient history.” He would not discuss the Supreme Court judgments. In an email, Roth defended the appointment saying Jabarin had had no association with the PFLP or any other political organization since joining the staff of Al Haq in 1987.

In fact, Jabarin was arrested by Israel in 1994 for heading the PFLP - while he was already working for Al Haq.
And in 2003, Israel allowed Jabarin to travel to Jordan - and Jordan refused to let him in because of his terror record.
Al Haq is hardly an unbiased "human rights" organization either. It engages in "lawfare" against Israel. One of the papers on its website justifies terrorism as legal:

[R]esistance against occupation and its arbitrary practices is legitimate under international law, and these acts are considered a part of the Palestinian people‘s resistance and struggle against occupation in order to achieve their right to liberation and independence, the occupation forces call it “terrorism”...

So not only is HRW trying to appoint a terrorist who has been shown to be a credible current threat by Israel's Supreme Court, but they are using his service to a "human rights" organization that supports terror as their main proof that he is not a terrorist!
No wonder that HRW's founder, Robert Bernstein, said, "I am of course shocked but even more saddened that an organization dedicated to the rule of law seems to be deliberately undermining it."

via elderofziyon.blogspot.com

classy

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