How Israelis help to demonize Israel
To read the original letter, click here.
[Excerpts:]
"As our publications demonstrate, NGO Monitor views critical discourse on human rights as both necessary and as a hallmark of Israel’s vigorous democracy. The problem with the powerful network of Israeli NGOs, led by groups such as Yesh Din and B’Tselem, is their selective use of human rights rhetoric to promote partisan political objectives.
For both groups, the steady condemnation of Israeli policies is merely a means to the main political goal: ending the occupation and returning to the 1949 armistice lines. In this context, the selective coopting of human rights values which erases the context of Palestinian terror damages the universality of these fundamental principles.
These NGOs, moreover, increasingly use funds provided by European governments and the New Israel Fund to campaign in international forums such as the UN. B’Tselem recently opened a lobbying office in Washington DC; and Yesh Din’s highly misleading "statistics" are headlined by the media as evidence of ‘war crimes.’"