“Obama and Human Rights in the Middle East: Suggestions for Act Two” appeared in the January 2010 issue of the Carnegie Endowment’s Arab Reform Bulletin (and the Beirut Daily Star). Its author, Joe Stork, is deputy director of Human Rights Watch’s Middle East and North Africa division. Stork’s extensively documented anti-Israel ideology and activism is clearly evident in this article’s numerous tendentious allegations and biased statements.

  • Stork focuses disproportionately on Israeli responses to terror attacks and reserves his harshest language for describing them.  Although he briefly mentions abuses in Morocco, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia (closed regimes with extensive records of human rights abuse), he accuses Israel of “collective punishment” and “impunity” and calls on the Obama administration to impose sanctions against Israel. 
  • Stork states that “the Obama administration’s promotion of human rights with abusive Middle Eastern governments … has been ambiguous and, in some cases, negligent, raising concern that the United States is still operating in a universe of double standards when it comes to confronting serious human rights violations by important allies.”  This critique could be aptly applied to HRW’s own Middle East agenda. Nearly 30% of HRW’s 2009 output related to Israel; the organization issued more reports on Israel than on Saudi Arabia, Syria, Morocco, Libya, and Egypt combined (see chart below).
  • Stork erases the context of the conflict, ignoring rocket attacks against Israeli civilians. He does not even mention that Iran and Syria’s arming of Hamas and Hezbollah directly resulted in those rocket attacks.
  • Stork reinforces HRW’s ongoing campaign advancing the Goldstone report, and criticizes the Obama administration for failing to endorse the report’s condemnation of Israeli responses to rocket attacks as “war crimes.” HRW’s statements promoting Goldstone exceeded the number of its 2009 publications on every human rights issue in the Middle East, with the exception of the Gaza war.  Stork also fails to mention that the Goldstone mission was initiated and financed by the Arab League, and that Goldstone was on the HRW board. 
  • Stork repeatedly and falsely accuses Israel of “collective punishment.” This allegation exploits and misuses a clearly defined legal term referring to criminal penalties, not economic sanctions. Under international law, sanctions are entirely legal. Stork also accuses Israel of “wholesale restrictions on the movement of goods and people” when, in fact, Israel provides thousands of tons of humanitarian aid to Gaza each week —  far above any legal obligation. (See http://eu.mfa.gov.il/mfm/web/main/Print.asp?DocumentID=165518.)