"State Department Parroting NGOs"

By Yaakov Lapin, Ynetnews

The recent report released by the US State Department – which contains criticism of Israel’s treatment of Palestinian security prisoners – merely parrots allegations made by biased non-governmental organizations (NGOs) ….  Professor Gerald Stenberg, Executive Director of NGO Monitor , said in a statement that "many of the claims in the chapters on and the Palestinian Authority in the 2006 State Department Human Rights Report simply repeat the allegations made by politicized NGOs, ignoring their lack of credibility and double standards."  "NGOs such as Adallah, Moussawa, Physicians for Human Rights-Israel and B’tselem (all of which receive funding from European governments) provide the bulk of the ‘evidence’ for the discussions on Israeli restrictions on Palestinian movement in this report. However, as NGO Monitor analyses have shown, these groups distort the facts and systematically erase the context of terror in order to promote their political goals," Steinberg said.   He challenged a number of key allegations in the report, saying they were "not supported by the evidence."  "This systematic lack of credibility was highlighted during the 2006 war in ," Steinberg added, calling attention to Human Rights Watch, which "falsely stated that there was no Hizbullah presence in many locations from which rocket attacks were launched against ."

"In another example, the authors of the State Department report reflect sympathy with atomic spy Mordechai Vanunnu, by incorrectly referring to him as a ‘whistleblower’ – adopting the term used by Amnesty International and other political NGOs. A ‘whistleblower’ reveals illegal behavior by an organization, whilst Vannunu violated Israeli law and endangered national security." Steinberg said.   "The US State Department does not consider such illegal actions by American citizens against the to be admirable. This is one of many examples reflecting the double standards applied to that have been copied from the NGOs without effective independent analyses," he added.

 

 

"US human rights report slams Teheran"

By Hilary Leila Krieger, Jerusalem Post

"While not referring to the specific charges of torture, Gerald Steinberg of the Jerusalem-based NGO Monitor criticized the report for accepting such charges "without additional attempts to verify the accuracy" of the information.

He also attacked the report for not considering the "context of terrorism" for some of the Israeli government decisions noted in the document, such as the law prohibiting Palestinians from joining their spouses in ."