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Tue, Dec 21, 2010 | By Crethi Plethi

The Hijacking of NGO’s by the Anti-Israel Movement

The recent publication by the Human Rights Watch about Israel’s alleged “discrimination” against Palestinians puts the role of HRW in the anti-Israel movement back in the spotlight. [See here and here]

The criticism that HRW received, given the strong anti-Israeli tenor of its reports, is not new. Robert L. Bernstein (founder of Human Rights Watch) criticized it’s anti-Israel agenda last year in the article “Rights Watchdog, Lost in the Mideast” (New York Times, October 19, 2009) and during the Shirley and Leonard Goldstein Lecture on Human Rights, University of Nebraska at Omaha (November 10, 2010).

Another example of the hijacking of human rights principles for demonizing Israel is the presenting of the “distinguished graduate award” by the NUI Galway’s Irish Centre for Human Rights to Shawan Jabarin, an alleged senior activist in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) terrorist organization.

Shawan Jabarin has studied international human rights law from 2004 to 2005 at the NUI Galway’s Irish Centre for Human Rights, according to the Irish Times. He is also head of Al-Haq, a Palestinian human rights organization. Al-Haq was an active participant in the World Conference against Racism held in Durban in 2001 which was also hijacked by the anti-Israel movement and subsequently turned into an anti-semitic event. The connection between Irish and Palestinian ‘human rights activism’ is well-documented in our June 24 article, “the Irish-Palestinian Connection”, which was a closer look into the Gaza Freedom Flotilla movement.

“In addition to his suspected ties to the PFLP, Mr. Jabarin leads Al Haq, a Palestinian non-governmental organization (NGO) that participates in the de-legitimization of Israel and brings ‘lawfare’ cases against Israeli officials and those who do business with Israel,” says Prof. Gerald Steinberg, president of NGO Monitor. “The Irish Centre for Human Rights is making a mockery of human rights values by presenting Mr. Jabarin with this award. This completely devalues the work of individuals throughout the world who fight for these rights.”

Under Jabarin’s leadership, Al Haq also has labeled terror attacks against Israeli civilians as “resistance.” Such rhetoric exposes Jabarin’s ideological agenda and stands in stark contrast to the tenets of the UN Declaration of Human Rights Defenders, which requires that one “must accept the universality of human rights as defined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. A person cannot deny some human rights and yet claim to be a human rights defender because he or she is an advocate for others.” [NGO Monitor, November 18, 2010]

But this award was not the first: In 1989, Shawan Jabarin, was nominated to the Reebok Human Rights Award, given to young people who have contributed to freedom of expression and human rights. And Jabarin’s Al-Haq organization was co-recipient of the Carter-Menil Human Rights Prize (founded by Jimmy Carter and Dominique de Menil) in December 1989, and of the Geuzenpenning in March 2009, a prestigious Dutch human rights prize presented by the Geuzen Resistance 1940-1945 Foundation (to commemorate the Dutch resistance during World War II). All this when the Israeli Supreme Court referred to Jabarin as a “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” in a June 2007 court decision (a human rights worker by day and a terrorist by night).

Jabarin was also Amnesty International’s first Palestinian Prisoner of Conscience, a term coined by the human rights group Amnesty International in the early 1960s. It refers to anyone imprisoned “because of their race, religion, color, language, sexual orientation, belief, lifestyle or non-violent expression of their conscientiously-held beliefs so long as they have not used or advocated violence.” This clearly contradicts human rights principles when Al-Haq labels terror attacks against Israeli civilians as “resistance.”

And Daled Amos notes how Tomas Sandell, founder and director of the European Coalition for Israel, believes that the founder of the Red Cross, Henri Dunant, would feel itself very uncomfortable with the Red Cross’ cozy relationships with Israel’s enemies:

Last week marked the 100th anniversary of the death of Henri Dunant—the Red Cross founder who brought humanitarian laws to the battlefield. It is doubtful, though, whether the world’s first Nobel Peace prize recipient would today still feel at home in his organization, or in similar human-rights bodies for that matter.

But what would make Dunant really suspect in the eyes of modern human-rights activists is the fact that he was a Zionist. Already in 1867, almost 30 years before Theodor Herzl published “Der Judenstaat,” his vision of a Jewish state, Dunant backed Jewish immigration to their ancestral homeland in Palestine. Dunant was one of only a few gentiles to attend the first Zionist congress in Basel in 1897. As was the case with other past Christian social reformers, like William Wilberforce 100 years before him and Martin Luther King 100 years after him, Dunant’s support for the revival of the Jewish state went hand in hand with his work for other social causes.

What a paradox that Dunant’s Red Cross would later develop cozy relationships with Israel’s enemies. The Red Cross has hosted Hamas activists at their base in Jerusalem instead of clearly distancing itself from their murderous policies. Not until 2006 did Israel’s Magen David Adom (Red Star of David) enjoy full membership, and that was only after the U.S. threatened to pull out of the world organization. Even now, Israeli rescue teams abroad would still need the host country’s permission to wear the Red Star of David. [Wall Street Journal, November 09, 2010]

Caroline Glick recently wrote a piece, “The WikiLeaks challenge”, about the WikiLeaks’ information warfare against the US and make a link to the hijacking of NGO’s by human rights activists with an anti-Israel agenda:

THE FINAL irony of the WikiLeaks scandal is the cowardice of WikiLeaks that stands at the foundation of the story. Founded in 2006, Wikileaks was supposed to serve the cause of freedom. It claimed that it would defend dissidents in China, the former Soviet Union and other places where human rights remains an empty term. But then China made life difficult for WikiLeaks and so four years later, Assange and his colleagues declared war on the US, rightly assuming that unlike China, the US would take their attacks lying down. Why take risks to defend dissidents in a police state when it’s so much easier and so much more rewarding to attempt to destroy free societies?

Assange and company are hardly the first to take this course. Human Rights Watch, created to fight for those crushed under the Soviet jackboot, now spends its millions of George Soros dollars to help terrorists in their war against the US and Israel. Amnesty International forgot long ago that it was founded to help prisoners of police states and instead devotes itself to attacking the imaginary evils of the Jewish state and Western democracies.

And that brings us to the real question raised by the WikiLeaks assault on America. Can democracies today protect themselves? In the era of leftist political correctness with its founding principle that Western power is evil and that the freedom to harm democracies is inviolate, can democracies defend their security and national interests?

Read full article here.

When NGO’s such as the HRW are filling its staff with former radical political activists such as Marc Garlasco (a collector of Nazi memorabilia who resigned from Human Rights Watch in February 2010) and Sarah Leah Whitson, democracies are not only attacked from within, but also by those who supposed to defend the values of democracy against radical and totalitarian ideologies.