Augean Stables

One of the remarkable aspects of journalism that I’ve noticed in my decade-long acquaintance with their dealing with criticism comes down to the old saying, “they can dish it out, but they can’t take it.” Remember that journalism’s job in a civil society is to serve as a watchdog of those in power, as a warning bell that, as inevitably will happen among human beings, power gets abused. That’s why news media are specifically given a level of independence and freedom unprecedented for any institution with access to the public sphere in the history of mankind. Their freedom supposedly permits them to flag the violators and arouse the public to defend the principles of a civil polity: a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.

The obvious question arises, “who criticizes the news media?” The normal answer is that with the a wide variety of publications one can expect in any free society, the mainstream news media (MSNM) would police itself. And yet, as anyone who thinks about it for even a few moments will realize, self criticism is a very difficult thing to engage in, especially when public. And what we find forming around journalists (as around any “profession,” like doctors or police), is a corporate sense of solidarity that brings them all too often to circle the wagons around a vulnerable colleague rather than treat him as they would any other member of a powerful group — criticize him when he or she is wrong.

The astonishing level of corporatism (we medievalist’s call it the “guild mentality”), of us-them thinking about Charles Enderlin and the Al Durah case, drew back the veil on this corporatism in France (and by extension the rest of the MSNM in the West and Israel which chose not to discuss these revelations).

Having spoken with many journalists who agree Enderlin’s wrong, but that it’s not worth saying it publicly, I’d venture to say that there’s a double piece of self-interest at work here: On the one hand, protecting a colleague should, in principle, mean that one will be protected in a similar situation. The whole idea behind guild or corporatism is that it’s my side right or wrong, which explains why so many people signed the petition for Charles without even looking at the evidence.

On the other, a blow to someone like Charles Enderlin, major player in much of the coverage of the Middle East for the last two decades (not just, by far, the most senior journalist, but also author of multiple books and documentaries), would be a blow to the credibility of the profession, a blow to the corporate identity of journalists as — above all — reliable sources of relevant information about the subject they cover, here, the Middle East.

Now, it seems, we find a similar problem among the “human rights” NGOs, who for the first two decades of their prominence — and they’ve played a very prominent role, especially among journalists, in the discussion of the Middle East — enjoyed the “halo effect,” of having the public view them as genuinely sincere defenders of human rights, and therefore not subject to the scrutiny that one normally applies to self-interested groups.

But as power abhors a vacuum, the influence — and enormous funding — that organizations like HRW and Amnesty International amassed attracted people with more specific agendas, especially a crew of ideologically-driven post-colonialists who had modern Western societies in the cross-hairs more than the authoritarian patriarchal societies that an organization like HRW was first established to monitor. And their target of choice in this politically-driven agenda, was Israel.

People began to wake up to the problem over the course of the first decade of the 21st century, especially Israelis and and anyone who supported Israel, who began to see, especially in the wake of the demopathic Durban travesty, that the NGOs, with HRW in the lead, were involved in a campaign of assault on Israel that had no precedent among respectable organizations, and violated every principle of HRW’s self-proclaimed mission of defending human rights.

HRW does not like either being criticized, or self-criticizing. Their response has been consistent. Dismiss the criticisms as ad hominem, ignore the substance, and now, cry “right-wing conspiracy.” This last is especially revealing of the mentality. There’s no conspiracy here, it’s a group of loosely associated people, some of whom only know each other because they read each others’ blogs, who have begun to hit back… with substance. One of the groups of bloggers is listed at the about us page of Understanding the Goldstone Report.

This isn’t a conspiracy, it’s a concerted effort to make a dent on people who prefer to ignore anything that comes from the mirror other than, “you’re the fairest of them all.” That HRW would consider this a conspiracy is particularly interesting then for two reasons (at least). 1) When they feel they’re being ganged up on it, they cry “no fair,” like a playground bully taken by surprise with a punch to the nose. And 2) they immediately assume it’s unjustified and part of a cabal of secret and nefarious forces. I’ve written extensively about conspiracy theories, how dangerous they are to the social fabric, and how widely they’ve spread on the “left” since 9-11. This ready resort to conspiracy suggests precisely the presence of this kind of self-indulgent thinking.

Chris McGreal has written a piece presenting the complaints of Iain Levine of HRW about the conspiratorial attack on their legitimate criticism of Israel. McGreal is himself a major player in the advocacy journalist’s effort to smear Israel with accusations of apartheid (critiqued for its dishonesty and distortion by CAMERA), and back in 2006, came to the defense of HRW’s military “expert” Mark Garlasco in the Gaza Beach tragedy. HRW eventually had to back down from their Garlasco-framed claims, but McGreal did not see fit to correct his work.

Even the editor of the Guardian found it necessary to apologize for McGreal’s exuberant advocacy. Does McGreal doing a puff piece on HRW constitute a “conspiracy”?

Memo to NGOs on handling criticism: when you get to the bottom of the hole you’re digging, dig deeper.

Israel ‘personally attacking human rights group’ after Gaza war criticism
Human Rights Watch denies having political agenda or seeking funds from Saudi Arabia

Who’s responsible for this sub-headline? HRW does not deny seeking funds from Saudi Arabia, just from the government.

Chris McGreal in Washington
guardian.co.uk, Friday 13 November 2009 15.53 GMT

The Goldstone report, which HRW supported, accused Israel of a disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorise a civilian population.

America’s leading human rights organisation has accused Israel and its supporters of an “organised campaign” of false allegations and misinformation, including “extremely personal attacks” on its staff, in an attempt to discredit the group over its reports of war crimes in Gaza.

False allegations? Name one about Garlasco, Stork, or Whitson.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) ties the campaign – which has included accusations that the group’s reports on the Jewish state are written by “anti-Israel ideologues” and that it has sought funds from Saudi Arabia – to a statement by a senior official in the Israeli prime minister’s office in June pledging to “dedicate time and manpower to combating” human rights organisations.

The criticism began with Israeli pressure groups and rightwing blogs, but in recent weeks it has drawn the support of influential individuals such as Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust survivor and Nobel peace prize winner, and HRW’s own founder, Robert Bernstein, who said the organisation’s reports were “helping those who wish to turn Israel into a pariah state”. He called on HRW to focus more on abuses by Arab governments.

Iain Levine, HRW’s programme director, said that while the organisation had long attracted criticism, in recent months there had been significant attempts to intimidate and discredit it.

Again interesting. They view criticism as an attempt to intimidate. This is exactly the language of Enderlin and his friends: these critics (like Karsenty), are making our life difficult. We have lost the right to say whatever we want about Israel. They seem to have no idea that criticism is a legitimate form of restraint exercised on someone or corporate body that has exceeded its bounds.

“I really hesitate to use words like conspiracy, but there is a feeling that there is an organised campaign, and we’re seeing from different places what would appear to be co-ordinated attacks … from some of the language and arguments used it would seem as if there has been discussion,” he said.”We are having to spend a lot of time repudiating the lies, the falsehoods, the misinformation.”

This is especially interesting since they have spent exactly no (visible) time repudiating anything. As opposed to the extensive, highly detailed, carefully reasoned critiques of HRW’s astonishingly shoddy reports — Gaza Beach Tragedy, White Flags and White Phosporous, to name three — there is not one press release, much less report from HRW tackling the criticism. On the contrary, their idea of handling these critiques is much what Iain Levine has done here — name-calling… “lies, falsehoods, and information.”

HRW, please, where’s the refutation of these. Or do you live in a magical universe where performative utterances determine reality?

Spearheading some of the criticism is NGO Monitor in Jerusalem, an Israeli group funded by wealthy US donors [unlike HRW], which includes Wiesel on its advisory board. It has accused HRW staff of having a “political agenda” to attack Israel.

Criticism has particularly focused on the director of HRW’s Middle East division, Sarah Leah Whitson, over a visit to Saudi Arabia.

NGO Monitor accused Whitson of attempting to raise money from Saudi officials by highlighting HRW’s criticism of Israel, a charge also made in a comment piece for the Wall Street Journal online that was subsequently widely distributed by the most powerful of the pro-Israel lobby groups, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac). Shortly afterwards, the director of policy planning in the Israeli prime minister’s office, Ron Dermer, denounced Human Rights Watch.

“We are going to dedicate time and manpower to combating these groups; we are not going to be sitting ducks in a pond for the human rights groups to shoot at us with impunity,” he said.

Levine cites this as if it were an illegitimate sentiment. And yet Dermer is doing nothing less (and a good deal more, since his counter-attack is substantive), than defending an entity — in this case, the state of Israel — that has been the subject of a nasty campaign of “lies, falsehoods and misinformation.” Again, in the world of HRW, they can attack with whatever they feel like saying, but they can’t be criticized.

Levine said that Whitson’s visit to Saudi Arabia was similar to trips by other HRW officials to Tokyo, Johannesburg and Tel Aviv to win the support of individuals interested in supporting human rights in their own countries and abroad.

When they go to these places, do they raise money for self-critical donors who are interested in improving their own country, or from wealthy donors who want to demonize their enemies? Arab News reported that HRW specifically presented their work criticizing Israel for the Gaza war: HRW lauded for work in Gaza.

“This idea that somehow the Saudi government is going to be able to influence us is nonsense. It’s a cardinal principle of the organisation that we don’t take government money,” he said.

This is an amazing statement, and shows how little HRW either understands what’s going on in a country like Saudi Arabia, or, more likely, shows how shallow their “defenses” are. This is not about the government, it’s about a culture of solidarity. (For a survey of the criticism of the Saudi fund-raising junket, see here.)

But Levine added that Dermer’s threat marked the escalation of the campaign against HRW.

“It was clear that you had a new government in Israel under Binyamin Netanyahu with a harder right approach. He certainly recognised that the criticisms of Israeli conduct in Gaza from a humanitarian law perspective was extremely politically damaging,” he said.

… and extremely unfair. And HRW has yet to defend itself on the charges. It’s just smearing the opposition.

Levine said he believes many of the attacks were aimed at distracting attention from the report of the UN investigator, Richard Goldstone, which was highly critical of Israel’s killing of civilians in its three-week attack on Gaza that started last December. Goldstone is a former member of the HRW board and the group has strongly backed his report.

I wouldn’t say “distracting…” On the contrary, I’d say drawing attention to the illegitimate nature of the criticism of Israel — it’s empirical lack of foundation (to be kind) — of HRW, and the way that Goldstone recycled the same stuff.

“We have been under enormous pressure and tremendous attacks, some of them very personal, as have been the attacks against Richard Goldstone with really vituperative language used to describe him: obsequious Jew, self-loathing Jew and all the rest of it,” said Levine.

This argument ad hominem is double-edged in multiple ways. You’ve used the positive ad hominem about Goldstone — his credentials are impeccable, so how can you criticize him — as well as an ad hominem about criticism — our critics use lies and falsehoods.

HRW came under renewed criticism last month from its founder, Robert Bernstein, in an opinion article in the New York Times in which he accused it of criticising Israel more than undemocratic governments in the rest of the Middle East.

“Human Rights Watch has lost critical perspective on a conflict in which Israel has been repeatedly attacked by Hamas and Hezbollah, organisations that go after Israeli citizens and use their own people as human shields,” he wrote.

Bernstein accused HRW of basing its accusations against Israel on the testimony of Palestinian “witnesses whose stories cannot be verified and who may testify for political advantage or because they fear retaliation from their own rulers”.

Levine said that Bernstein went public only after the HRW board rejected his call for a change in direction.

A few days later, Wiesel and others published a letter in the Guardian drawing attention to Bernstein’s article, accusing HRW of playing a “destructive role” and calling for a review by the organisation’s board.

In September, HRW was shaken by accusations that its military expert and collector of war memorabilia, Marc Garlasco, is a Nazi sympathiser after describing an SS jacket as “so cool” in comments on a blog. Both he and HRW vigorously deny the charge, but Garlasco has been suspended pending an investigation.

I don’t understand. Was anything false in the material on Marc Garlasco? Misinformation? please, what are you talking about? And where, in all of their press releases, have HRW denied these observations?

At the time, Levine called the attacks on Garlasco the latest salvo in the Israeli government’s campaign “to eliminate the space for legitimate criticism” of the Israeli military

What makes the astonishingly shoddy work of Garlasco, criticized long before the Nazi memorabilia hobby came out, “legitimate criticism of Israel”? What does Levine consider illegitimate criticism of Israel? Or is that a category whose existence HRW’s Middle East division has yet to discover?

Democracy: Enjoy it responsibly. Please.

UPDATE: Amnesty International and post-colonialism

Nick Cohen

FURTHER UPDATE: Elder of Ziyon has just revealed the conspiracy. Damn!