HRW Founder: “Little Has Changed” With Group’s Bias
Last year we drew attention to a remarkable Op-Ed by Robert Bernstein, in which the Human Rights Watch founder and former chairman publicly dissociated himself from the NGO’s anti-Israel agenda.
At the end of our article, CAMERA senior analyst Ricki Hollander asked:
Now that Mr. Bernstein has issued a public disavowal of HRW for violating its own principles, will the organization continue to promote the biased and error-riddled Goldstone Report and to assault Israel with its one-sided criticism or will it return to its original purpose of seeking to alleviate oppression of peoples living under undemocratic, totalitarian and repressive regimes?
We now have an answer. Last month, speaking at the University of Nebraska, Bernstein noted: “It has been over one year since the op-ed appeared. Little has changed.”
You can, and should, read his explanation, and the entire lecture, here. Meanwhile, we’ll highlight one other important passage from the speech:
On Thursday, November 4, a report came out that Fathi Hamad, the Hamas administration’s Interior Minister, revealed that as many as 700 Hamas military-security operatives were killed during Operation Cast Lead. The number, consistent with Israel’s examination, is significantly higher than the numbers given by Hamas and used by the Goldstone Report. It would indicate that about 60 percent of those killed in the war were actively engaged and not civilians – despite Hamas’s tactic of embedding itself in the civilian population of Gaza. If this report holds up, it will be interesting to see if the Goldstone Report and Human Rights Watch reports are reevaluated by them – all of which took the Palestinians’ figures as fact.
One month after the lecture, there has been no such reevaluation.
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