Human Rights Watch and the Nazis

Conrad Black
Monday, April 26, 2010

One of the largely unforeseen results of the great democratic and capitalist victory in the Cold War is the success the discredited Left has enjoyed as it scattered to fallback trenches after the rout it suffered at the front lines. The Stiglitz-Krugman economic Left, heavy-laden with Nobel prizes as are their political champions Jimmy Carter, Al Gore, and President Obama, have danced themselves into exhaustion on what they took to be the graves of Thatcherism and Reaganomics.

The Green movement, which had been an informal bucolic confederation of Sierra lovers of the wilderness, Greenpeace opponents of nuclear testing, and amiable eccentrics in hiking boots and pith helmets, brandishing butterfly nets and festooned with binoculars, became a rampart of the Left. Like the rural Communist guerrillas of the Colombian FARC, overwhelmed by the influx of massively armed and armored drug lords, the old agitators for cleaner air and water and pretty lepidoptera were inundated by the advocates of deindustrialization, abandonment of the automobile, and Churchillian resolution in the face of untrammeled cow flatulence. The genuine environmentalists were a perfect front for the beaten army of malcontents, radicals, and dull foot-soldiers who crowded like the grim wreckage of Napoleon’s Grande Armée at Smolensk in 1812 into this incongruous political ecosystem.

Now that it has been established that Al Gore’s infamous “settled science” is really such pungent intellectual ordure that it, too, could damage the ozone layer, and that the water levels and world temperature are not rising, the glaciers are not melting, and much of the alarmist data is false, the Left is scrambling for more reliable places to exercise its imperishable purchase on events.

Utterly debunked though their strategic and economic notions were, the social-market Left had learned rigorously the art of the chameleon. Of course the USSR was not really a threat, and the victory in an unnecessary Cold War was hollow, Pyrrhic, illusory, whatever. Academe welcomed and sheltered its defeated and bedraggled warriors and stirring requiems were thundered out in the usual vaulted cathedrals of the liberal media.

But perhaps the most stentorian Te Deum has come from the human-rights organizations. Human Rights Watch was founded by distinguished rights champion and publisher Robert Bernstein, who is still active but long gone from HRW. As the leftist infantry was put to flight, HRW became a clinic for the shell-shocked, who, assisted by the balm of the inevitable George Soros funding, have transformed it into yet another Israel-bashing operation.

Human Rights Watch was set up to rival the British Amnesty International, with a distinctly American flavor. Where Amnesty drew upon a wide membership-contributor base, HRW was and is sustained by large contributors. Where Amnesty had modest offices and made low-key representations to human-rights offenders, HRW produces scores of glossy reports and hundreds of newsletters annually, and operates very conspicuously from luxurious Manhattan offices.

Amnesty International was always suspect, and was led for many years by avowed Sinn Fein terrorist and Lenin (as well, of course, as Nobel) Prize-winner Seán MacBride. Its views were historically clouded by its underlying premise that apparently unjust measures could be taken to promote the defeat of institutionalized injustice, which can be true, but is also the traditional matrix for totalitarian and terrorist conduct.

Thus, when the director of Amnesty’s gender program, Gita Sahgal, publicly complained that Amnesty was being too cozy with and supportive of radical Islam, she was suspended, and HRW gloated. Salman Rushdie and others have attacked the mistreatment of Ms. Sahgal. But the field of competition between Amnesty and HRW has shifted from the identification and championship of the oppressed to hell-for-leather combat in gymnastic hypocrisy. It is all becoming absurdly complicated. The HRW gender-program director attacked British rights advocate Peter Tatchell in 2006 for “Islamophobia, racism, and colonialism” when Tatchell criticized Iran’s summary execution of a large number of homosexuals, just because of their orientation. This complaint, said HRW, was “a Western social-constructionist trope,” and nothing to concern people whose raison d’être is human rights.

As Robert Bernstein attacked his old organization for ignoring repressive societies to blast democracies (especially Israel), and his successors sniveled back (all in the New York Times, of course) that their founder was trying to immunize democracies from accountability, HRW’s military expert blew up like an exploding Christmas tree. Marc Garlasco was already controversial for declaring that Israeli fire had killed seven Arab civilians in Gaza in 2006, then gamely acknowledging to the Jerusalem Post that he had been mistaken and that it was Hamas that was responsible, and then being muzzled as HRW withdrew his retraction directly from the Post. Garlasco told Der Spiegel that he had been responsible, as a civilian Pentagon official, for ordering an air strike on Basra in the 2003 war that killed 17 civilians. There followed, from Mr. Garlasco, serial media confessions that he had caused 50 different air strikes that had killed hundreds of people, but none of his assigned targets, and that these experiences drove him to join HRW.

The Garlasco plot thickened quickly when it emerged that he was a Nazi-memorabilia collector who mused on his Internet site (as “Flak88”) that if his HRW mates knew of his Nazi-memorabilia interest, “I might lose my job.” He was a frequent contributor to such sites as “Wehrmachtawards.com”: “The leather SS jacket makes my blood go cold; it is so cool.” HRW piously defended Garlasco as a distinguished collector for a while, as it tried to blame the attacks on him on Jewish belligerence and intolerance. At the same time, it was having some difficulty defending itself for holding fundraising dinners in Saudi Arabia while denouncing Israel in terms that were agreeable to the Saudis, one of the world’s most primitive regimes in human-rights terms. But when a blogger asked if Garlasco’s love of Nazi insignia and costumes was connected to his Israelophobia, HRW “suspended” Garlasco with pay and a confidentiality agreement that remains in force. He is no longer at HRW, and can effuse full-time on Third Reich paraphernalia (a legitimate interest and design genre, but getting so cyber-excited over an SS leather jacket and wearing an iron cross on a T-shirt in a photo of himself he posted on his own website is pushing the OKW dispatch case a bit).

The formerly overindulgent media unearthed the fact that one of HRW’s latest Middle East experts is a veteran of the rabidly anti-Israel Internet publication The Electronic Intifada, and that the deputy head of HRW’s Middle East operations, Joe Stork, was a notoriously radical anti-Israeli commentator who had noisily approved the Palestinian murder of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972.

In this incomprehensible free-for-all, it would make more sense for the human-rights-industry leaders, given their irrational animus against Israel, to become the target for the Nazi-hunting organizations, who are now down to the grotesque pursuit of the likes of John Demjanjuk, who has been prosecuted relentlessly for 30 years, unsuccessfully by Israel (to that country’s great credit) as a Treblinka death-camp guard, and now by Germany, at age 90 and confined to a stretcher (but not a leather jacket), as an alleged Sobibor death-camp guard. In Elie Wiesel and his colleagues, HRW and Amnesty would meet a very formidable adversary.