Huamn Rights Watch founder criticises Human Rights Watch

[Clanrickard]

I have been alerted to this article in the New York Times. It should be required reading for anyone with even a passing interest in the furtherance of human rights through out our planet. There are some real nuggets in here to counter the prevailing pc world view which has augmented since Barack Obama *genuflects* has entered the White House.

That is why we sought to draw a sharp line between the democratic and nondemocratic worlds, in an effort to create clarity in human rights. We wanted to prevent the Soviet Union and its followers from playing a moral equivalence game with the West and to encourage liberalization by drawing attention to dissidents like Andrei Sakharov, Natan Sharansky and those in the Soviet gulag — and the millions in China’s laogai, or labor camps.

Well done Mr. Bernstein a timely reminder of the freedoms we have because of democracy and free speech which fundamental to the wealth and health we have today and which are taken for granted at best or at worst seen as just another political philosophy by the left and the Islamists ably assisted by their useful idiots in the media and academia.

read it all.............
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/20/op...atchdog&st=cse

[code twinkle]

I have been alerted to this article in the New York Times. It should be required reading for anyone with even a passing interest in the furtherance of human rights through out our planet. There are some real nuggets in here to counter the prevailing pc world view which has augmented since Barack Obama *genuflects* has entered the White House.

That is why we sought to draw a sharp line between the democratic and nondemocratic worlds, in an effort to create clarity in human rights. We wanted to prevent the Soviet Union and its followers from playing a moral equivalence game with the West and to encourage liberalization by drawing attention to dissidents like Andrei Sakharov, Natan Sharansky and those in the Soviet gulag — and the millions in China’s laogai, or labor camps.

Well done Mr. Bernstein a timely reminder of the freedoms we have because of democracy and free speech which fundamental to the wealth and health we have today and which are taken for granted at best or at worst seen as just another political philosophy by the left and the Islamists ably assisted by their useful idiots in the media and academia.

read it all.............
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/20/op...atchdog&st=cse

While I would not contradict the accuracy of Mr. Bernstein's argument that HRW emerged from the Cold War paradigm, it does seem as if though his intellectual position is stuck in that era. Repeatedly referring to open and closed societies as simply equating with good and bad - insofar as the role of HRW goes - flies in the face of the empirical evidence.

Nobody would argue that Israel, despite its free press etc, nonetheless commits massive human rights abuses. There is therefore, prima facie, a role for HRW to play in attempting to highlight and counter this.

His intellectual premise again seems pretty simplistic when he states that while HRW is highlighting the abuses of the Israeli state... "meanwhile, the Arab and Iranian regimes rule over some 350 million people, and most remain brutal, closed and autocratic, permitting little or no internal dissent."

He argues that "the plight of their citizens who would most benefit from the kind of attention a large and well-financed international human rights organization can provide is being ignored as Human Rights Watch’s Middle East division prepares report after report on Israel" - yet fails completely to comprehend some of the causal connections between Arab authoritarianism and Israeli expansionism.

The article is interesting insofar as a founder member of any organisation critiquing the organisation does give cause to stop and think. However, having read his arguments I'm not convinced.