A Story You Won't Find In The MSM

For the past few weeks over at the Volokh Conspiracy (http://www.volokh.com/), Professor David Bernstein of the George Mason University School of Law has been following the story of how Human Rights Watch has raised funds in Saudi Arabia by essentially appealing to the need to combat "pro-Israel forces." The bottom line is, as always, that Israel alone is singled out for criticism. But read Professor Bernstein's posts and you can see the lengths to which HRW has gone in order to defend its actions and accuse Israel's supporters of engaging in lies and deceptions. Professor Bernstein has done an outstanding job of following through on this story and deserves our thanks.

Here is a snippet from his latest post. "And after Whitson's several minute-long exhaustive survey of Israel's alleged sins, she spends all of approximately twelve seconds on Hamas and Hezbollah, and this is the total of what she said: "of course there are also violations of international humanitarian law by the armed groups that are fighting Israel, namely Hamas and Hezbollah, but of course there are armed groups that have been in conflict with them [sorry this isn't coherent--ed.]. And that's something Human Rights Watch has documented." That's it.

After the exhaustive list of Israel's alleged crimes, no mention of

Hamas's suicide murders
Hezbollah and Hamas's indiscriminate (really indiscriminate) lobbing of missiles into Israel
H & H's use of human shields, use of civilian establishments for military purposes, and failure to wear military uniforms
the kidnapping and murder of Israeli soldiers
Hamas's reign of terror against Christian Palestinians
Hezbollah's threat to democracy in Lebanon
Syrian and Iranian state sponsorship of terrorism
Hamas's murder of Fatah supporters

and so forth and so on."

Here are a few links to read more on this story.

Prof. Bernstein's Op-Ed piece in the Wall Street Journal. (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124528343805525561.html).

Jeffrey Goldenberg in the Atlantic (http://jeffreygoldberg.theatlantic.com/archives/2009/07/fundraising_corruption_at_huma.php)

JTA article about this story
(http://blogs.jta.org/politics/article/2009/07/21/1006677/daniel-levy-apologizes-for-hrw).