A little known fact about the New York-based group Human Rights Watch is that it had its origins in the Cold War, in a group called Helsinki Watch set up as part of the effort to monitor the Soviet Union’s compliance with the Helsinki Accord of 1975. A pioneer of the Helsinki Watch effort in Russia was a young Jew named Anatoly Scharansky, who worked with Yuri Orlov and Andrei Sakharov and a few courageous others to shine a light on the crimes of the Soviet Communists. He was punished by spending nearly a decade in Soviet prisons.

Mr. Scharansky — now the Israeli member of parliament Natan Sharansky — was in New York City yesterday to address a conference convened by the Hudson Institute. And he went out of his way to make the point that what has become of Helsinki Watch — “Human Rights Watch here in New York,” Mr. Sharansky called it — has become what he called a “very big problem.”

Well more than 200 of New York’s business and intellectual leaders, not to mention two American senators and Ambassador Bolton, crowded the Union League Club for yesterday’s event, and in the question and answer session, one member of the audience — not a representative of the New York Sun — questioned Mr. Sharansky about how this could have happened, about what was motivating Human Rights Watch in its one-sided condemnations of Israel.

“Human Rights Watch was born as Helsinki Watch,” Mr. Sharansky said. “We were arrested for this.” He mentioned the founding chairman of Human Rights Watch, Robert Bernstein. “Then it had clear moral standards,” Mr. Sharansky said. But lately, after Mr. Bernstein’s retirement as chairman, the organization has taken a turn in the wrong direction. “I spoke with the new head,” Mr. Sharansky said. “There is a clear lack of moral criteria.”

Mr. Sharansky spoke of Human Rights Watch’s condemnation of Israel for deliberately targeting Lebanese civilians — “slaughter,” Human Rights Watch’s executive director, Kenneth Roth, called it in a letter to the editor of the New York Sun. The Israeli politician said that Hezbollah terrorists were using “all Southern Lebanon as one big human shield.” In the face of such a Hezbollah atrocity, in this battle, Human Rights Watch “accuses Israel of war crimes.”

Mr. Sharansky is correct to call this a “very big problem.” It extends beyond Israel to Human Rights Watch’s approach to the wider war on terror. Mr. Roth marked the fifth anniversary of September 11 by issuing a statement denouncing not the terror-sponsors in Tehran and Damascus but rather the Bush administration, which according to Mr. Roth is responsible for America’s “loss of the moral high ground.” Mr. Roth wrote that the “The Bush administration still subscribes to the view that it is engaged in a ‘global’ war,” a theory Mr. Roth wrote “threatens the basic rights of us all.”

Truth is — as Mr. Sharansky recognizes — it is not America or Israel that has lost the moral high ground in the war on Islamic fascists, but Human Rights Watch itself that has lost its moral bearings. A sad fate to befall an organization for whose founding ideals Mr. Sharansky spent so many years in the gulag archipelago.