HRW’s Joe Stork hates Israel and wants it eliminated!

At least that’s what Israeli journalist Ben-Dror Yemini would like everyone to believe. This article originally appeared in Maariv on the 16th of August, and zealoted ’supporters’ of Israel have gone into a flurry adding it to their bulging repertoire of supposed proof that internationally respected human rights groups like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International are biased and hate Israel. The article is a rehashing of unsupported accusations that have already been doing the rounds of conservative ‘pro-Israel’ sites, and the timing of this article looks very much like it’s been timed as part of the vitriolic campaign that has been attacking HRW recently. The one quote in the article where the author gives even a vague idea of where it’s come from is one the author claims shows that Joe Stork was voicing explicit support for the murder of Israeli athletes at Munich. Only problem is on reading the quote, it shows nothing of the sort. The quote is broken up with a series of dots that shows it all didn’t run together, and the surrounding context isn’t given, but even with what is quoted in the article, it’s clear that the person quoted was talking about the effect Munich had on the morale of Palestinians. What’s also unclear is whether that quote is from Joe Stork, as it comes from an analysis that has no listed author.

The article claims that Stork is ‘a veteran supporter of Palestinian terrorism’.  A clearly false claim, as Stork has this to say about attacks on civilians by Palestinian groups:

‘Each of these four groups has attacked civilians repeatedly. The scale and systematic nature of these attacks in 2001 and 2002 meet the definition of a crime against humanity. When these suicide bombings take place in the context of violence that amounts to armed conflict, they are also war crimes. Human Rights Watch unreservedly condemns these atrocities.’

Towards the end of the article Ben-Dror Yemini cites very partisan ‘pro-Israel’ advocates CAMERA and Gerald Steinberg as ‘have revealed worrying data’ about Stork. What’s funny is that this ‘worrying data’ is the same unsupported attacks as Ben-Dror Yemeni rehashes in his article, and that a search of Google shows that the only places this ‘worrying data’ appears is related ‘pro-Israel’ advocacy sites, and that the claims on all these sites lead back to NGO Monitor, a very partisan and biased group that accuses any NGO that either assists Palestinian civilians or criticises Israel for its treatment of Palestinians of hating Israel.

If the day ever comes when the NGO Monitors and Ben-Dror Yemeni’s of this world cotton on to the idea of dropping the attempts at character assassination and dealing with the issue they’re objecting to, which in this case is the request that the IDF investigate the  killing of civilians waving white flags during Operation Cast Lead, I’ll be willing to listen to everything ever done by the Backstreet Boys in one marathon session with no breaks!