The Credibility Watch

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun
NY Sun
NEW YORK SUN CONTRIBUTOR

The latest institution to buy into the notion that it has become impossible in America to criticize Israel without getting set down as an anti-Semite is none other than the New York Review of Books. It has just published an article to that effect by a former executive director of Human Rights Watch, Arieh Neier, who seeks to defend his former employer’s criticism of Israel in the recent conflict in Lebanon. The account is so riddled with error and falsehood, however, that it will only compound the problems at Human Rights Watch and leave people wondering what the New York Review of Books had in mind.

The errors start with the first sentence: “On August 3 — three weeks after a Lebanese Hezbollah raid into Israel set off a war that lasted until August 14 — Human Rights Watch published a report, ‘Fatal Strikes: Israel’s Indiscriminate Attacks Against Civilians in Lebanon,’ that inspired a series of vitriolic attacks on the organization’s credibility.” It turns out that Mr. Neier has the chronology backwards.By the time August 3 rolled around, The New York Sun had already published an editorial and two op-ed pieces criticizing Human Rights Watch’s statements about Israel’s efforts to defend itself from Hezbollah. The report did not inspire the criticism of Human Rights Watch; the criticism preceded the report’s appearance.

The article goes on to claim that Human Rights Watch’s finding on Hezbollah’s use against Israel of rockets packed with ball bearings “was the first disclosure of this practice.” Yet the first Human Rights Watch statement on the ball bearings is dated July 18. Fox News, Canadian television, Chicago Tribune, Israel Radio, and Agence France Presse all reported the news on July 16. The AFP dispatch of July 16 attributed the news to an Israeli cabinet member, Shaul Mofaz, who spoke to reporters while “holding up ball bearings found inside one of the rockets.”

“I may have missed something,” conceded Mr. Neier, when we asked him in a phone call Monday about his errors. His article also defended Human Rights Watch against those who fault it for failing to criticize Iran and Hezbollah for violating the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. He claims that Human Rights Watch “is sparing in its use of the term” genocide. “There has been no situation in the past decade that Human Rights Watch has labeled a genocide,” he writes. Yet Human Rights Watch’s London director, Steve Crawshaw, wrote an article in 2004 about the Darfur crisis in Sudan, likening it to the genocide in Rwanda. The article appeared in the Financial Times, and on Human Rights Watch’s own Web site, under the headline, “Genocide, What Genocide?”

The executive director of Human Rights Watch, Kenneth Roth, wrote in the Asian Wall Street Journal in 2005, “Washington has described the atrocities in Darfur as genocide.” Human Rights Watch’s spokeswoman, Minky Worden, wrote in The New York Sun in 2004, “U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan recently drew parallels between the situation before the Rwandan genocide and the current bloodshed in Darfur.” She wrote, “‘never again’ is looking like ‘once again’ in Africa.” Messrs. Crawshaw and Roth and Ms. Worden invoked the term genocide not to criticize its use in this decade in respect of Darfur but to bolster their own arguments.

These kinds of factual errors in the New York Review of Books piece are dwarfed by a larger falsehood — that here in America an atmosphere obtains in which, as Mr. Neier puts it, “rational discussion is precluded by charges of anti-Semitism against anyone with the temerity to criticize Israeli policy or practice.” In fact, America is echoing with critics of Israel and has been for years.To propagate a theory of an all-powerful Israel lobby Professors Walt and Mearsheimer are given tenured positions at Harvard and the University of Chicago, a podium at the National Press Club and Cooper Union, and a book contract at Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Their discussion mightn’t be rational, but it’s hard to say it has been precluded.

Few would know this better than the editors of the New York Review of Books, which has published some of the most hysterical criticisms of Israel, most notably Tony Judt’s call for a bi-national state. His criticism is hostile to the Jewish state, because bi-nationalism means precisely the end of the Jewish state. But he and the New York Review of Books have managed to get it about so widely that Leon Wieseltier writes in the latest number of the New Republic, “If there is life on Mars, it knows what he thinks.”

Where Mr. Roth got into particular trouble lately was when he did something that the New York Review of Books conveniently ignores. Mr. Roth accused Israel of engaging, “whether by design or callous indifference,” in “slaughter” and of adhering to “an eye for an eye,” “the morality of some more primitive moment.” It’s an accusation for which he has offered neither an apology nor a correction. Mr. Neier suggested to us that Mr. Roth was accusing Israel of obeying not the Jewish Bible but rather Hammurabi’s Code. What does one make of it, that Mr. Roth is biased against Babylonians?

Mr. Neier is putting it out that Human Rights Watch’s “credibility in speaking out about abuses would vanish if it were to take sides.” Hogwash. What has destroyed Human Rights Watch’s credibility is the fact that it has clung to its neutrality while Israel has been attacked by an enemy that seeks to destroy human rights, kill the Jews, and impose on America and the world an extreme version of Islamic law. The leader of Iran’s proxy in Lebanon, Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah, has stated that if the Jews “all gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide,” and said, “it is an open war until the elimination of Israel and until the death of the last Jew on earth.” The nuclear-bomb-building president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has called the Holocaust a “myth.”

The tragedy of Human Rights Watch is all the more remarkable in an organization founded, funded, and run by a number of individuals who survived or whose parents survived the Holocaust. Mr. Roth’s online biography at Human Rights Watch says that “Mr. Roth was drawn to the human rights cause in part by his father’s experience fleeing Nazi Germany in 1938.” Mr. Neier’s biography at the Open Society Institute says that Mr. Neier “was born in Nazi Germany and became a refugee at an early age.”

What a shame that those who were — or whose ancestors were — fortunate enough to escape the last Holocaust think that it is necessary for their “credibility” not to take sides as the forces gather to attempt a new one.

NY Sun
NEW YORK SUN CONTRIBUTOR

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.


The New York Sun

© 2025 The New York Sun Company, LLC. All rights reserved.

Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. The material on this site is protected by copyright law and may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used.

The New York Sun

Sign in or  Create a free account

or
By continuing you agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use