Prepared for the Conference of the Global Forum for Combating Antisemitism, Jerusalem, February 2007. All of the examples cited are based on research published on www.ngo-monitor.org, including NGO Monitors Submission to the British Parliamentary Committee Against Antisemitism (PCAA)...
As important is the vertical shift, from states to non-state actors, often empowered by new technologies. International terrorist networks are one obvious example, using new technologies both of destruction and communication (as in web jihadism). But there are many others. International NGOs like Oxfam, Human Rights Watch, Transparency International and George Soros's Open Society network have the power to change agendas. The big corporations heavily represented here in Davos are more powerful than most smaller states. (Would you rather be president of Citigroup or Mali?) International organisations, communities and networks, from the UN and the EU to the World Bank and the International Criminal Court, all take their slice of the power cake.
"Rabbis for Human Rights Israel (RHRI) is at odds with its sister organization in North America ...During a board meeting ...some leading members of RHRI strongly criticized Rabbis for Human Rights North America (RHR-NA) for honoring a New York-based legal advocacy group that sued two senior Israeli security officials for perpetrating "war crimes." On December 11, RHR-NA honored the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) ...CCR is the same organization that issued class action suits on behalf of Palestinians and Lebanese against Avi Dichter... and Lt. Gen. (ret.) Moshe Ya'alon, former head of the Intelligence Branch and former chief of General Staff of the IDF. One board member of RHRI said he and other board members were appalled by the decision to honor the CCR. "This incident demonstrates the ideological rift that exists between us and our sister organization in North America," said the rabbi.
Forty years after Israels occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, including east Jerusalem, and almost 60 years after the Palestinian Nakba (catastrophe) ...
"The Israeli Committee against House Demolitions (ICAHD) has opened a campaign to censor on-line retailer Amazon.com following the posting of a critical review of former US president Jimmy Carters book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. ... In a March 2005 brief, NGO Monitor, part of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, described the Committee against House Demolitions [funded by the European Union] as "a well-funded, blatantly political and ideological one-man NGO, which couches its radical anti-Israel agenda and demonization in the rhetoric of human rights." The brief continues: ICAHD coordinator Jeff "Halper routinely uses terms such as apartheid and war crimes to refer to Israeli policy against Palestinian terror, supports a one state solution, and advocates sanctions and boycotts."
Like death and taxes, BTselems end-of-the-year publication of Palestinian and Israeli fatalities is a guaranteed affair, as is the accompanying press release. And, inevitably, journalists will dutifully report BTselems findings, sometimes inaccurately, sometimes not. And while the publication of the statistics is a sure thing, its accuracy and the underlying methodology is most definitely not. We have yet, however, to see a mainstream journalist challenge BTselems figures.
"Much of this anti-Israeli rhetoric originates in a small institution with little influence in Israel or Palestinian society: the Sabeel Center for (Christian) Liberation Theology in Jerusalem. Many think the entire divestment campaign emanated from that one small building in Jerusalem, and spread like wildfire throughout Europe and the United States. In the Palestinian community-Christian and Muslim-Sabeel is almost unknown.."
On August 23, 2006, the popular weblog, zombietime.com, published a detailed essay disputing media and NGO claims that Israel had intentionally targeted two Red Cross ambulances in Qana, Lebanon, on July 23, 2006. Human Rights Watch responded with a report entitled, "The Hoax That Wasnt," on December 19, 2006, that claimed to debunk zombietimes report. Here is zombietimes reply to HRWs report.
The recent call by John Berger and others to boycott Israel is banal, gestural, and morally compromised. For those properly passionate about promoting the interests of Palestinians, there is much scope for morally uncompromised action. Edward Said, who in retrospect seems one of Israel's better enemies, understood this clearly enough, and understood also how self-defeating boycotts can be...
Public Committee Against Torture receives a negative response from the Supreme Court to the question of whether all targeted killings are illegal.
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