Apparently my opinion that anti-Semitism is not caused by the action of Jews, rather it is an irrational hatred, is shared by some journalists including Jeff Goldberg. We must not cut the Jew hater any slack for his hatred because it comes from a place which is not rational and it consumes them.
http://www.israelmatzav.blogspot.com/2014/09/jeffrey-goldberg-blasts-human-rights.html
Jeffrey Goldberg blasts Human Rights Watch's Ken Roth
Jeffrey Goldberg has blasted 'human rights watch' director Ken Roth for blaming Jews for anti-Semitism.
A few days ago, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, Kenneth Roth, tweeted the following statement: “Germans rally against anti-Semitism that flared in Europe in response to Israel’s conduct in Gaza war. Merkel joins.” Roth provided a link to a New York Times article about the rally, which took place in Berlin.
Roth’s framing of this issue is very odd and obtuse. Anti-Semitism in Europe did not flare “in response to Israel’s conduct in Gaza,” or anywhere else. Anti-Semitic violence and invective are not responses to events in the Middle East, just as anti-Semitism does not erupt “in response” to the policies of banks owned by Jews, or in response to editorial positions taken by The New York Times. This is for the simple reason that Jews do not cause anti-Semitism. It is a universal and immutable rule that the targets of prejudice are not the cause of prejudice.
Just as Jews (or Jewish organizations, or the Jewish state) do not cause anti-Semitism to flare, or intensify, or even to exist, neither do black people cause racism, nor gay people homophobia, nor Muslims Islamophobia. Like all prejudices, anti-Semitism is not a rational response to observable events; it is a manifestation of irrational hatred. Its proponents justify their anti-Semitism by pointing to the (putatively offensive or repulsive) behavior of their targets, but this does not mean that major figures in the world of human-rights advocacy should accept these pathetic excuses as legitimate.
A question: If a mosque in Europe or in the U.S. were to be attacked (God forbid) by Islamophobic arsonists, would Ken Roth describe such an attack as a manifestation of “anti-Muslim hatred that flared in response to the conduct of Muslim groups in the Middle East?”
...
I don’t know what motivated Ken Roth to blame the Jewish state for the violent acts of anti-Semites. I do hope that he reconsiders his position on the root cause of anti-Jewish prejudice.
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/09/does-human-rights-watchs-kenneth-roth-understand-the-nature-of-prejudice/380556/
Ken Roth has a irrational hatred toward fellew Jews.He is in cahoots with Sarah Whitson who goes on all fours for saudi muslim money
Saudi Arabia fundraiser
Reporting in May 2009 on a dinner given in Riyadh to host Whitson and other HRW officials, the Saudi Press indicated that HRW had “presented a documentary and spoke on the report they compiled on Israel violating human rights and international law during its war on Gaza earlier this year” and quoted Whitson as telling the Saudi audience that HRW had “provided the international community with evidence of Israel using white phosphorus and launching systematic destructive attacks on civilian targets. Pro-Israel pressure groups in the US, the European Union and the United Nations have strongly resisted the report and tried to discredit it.”[138]
Citing that dinner, which was an effort to raise funds, NGO Monitor accused Whitson of “exploiting the specter of 'pro-Israel pressure groups' to solicit funds from 'prominent members of Saudi society.'”[139] David Bernstein, a law professor at George Mason University, also criticized the Saudi Arabia fundraiser, expressing concern in the Wall Street Journal that Whitson had gone to Saudi Arabia not to study that country's abuse of women, its death penalty for homosexuality, or its lack of religious freedom, but “to raise money from wealthy Saudis by highlighting HRW's demonization of Israel.”[140] Bernstein accused HRW of seeking “to raise money from wealthy Saudis by highlighting HRW's demonization of Israel.” Noting that Whitson had “found no time to criticize Saudi Arabia's abysmal human rights record,” Bernstein argued that “there is something wrong when a human rights organization goes to one of the worst countries in the world for human rights to raise money to wage lawfare against Israel, and says not a word during the trip about the status of human rights in that country.”[141] HRW, Bernstein stated flatly, should not “raise money in a totalitarian country” such as Saudi Arabia.[142]
Responding to Bernstein's Wall Street Journal article, Whitson wrote “believe it or not, some Arabs believe in human rights too.” Bernstein protested in reply that “NOTHING in my piece suggested or implied that no Arabs believe in human rights, or, for that matter, that Arabs are inherently less likely to believe in human rights than anyone else.”[142]
After attending a 2009 videotaped presentation by Whitson in New York about human rights in the Middle East, Bernstein wrote that she had spent “approximately three minutes and thirty-five seconds describing Israel's alleged violations of international law and human rights” in an extremely “tendentious” manner, accusing Israel of apartheid and war crimes and calling the wars in Lebanon and Gaza “Israel's wars,” and then spent “approximately twelve seconds on Hamas and Hezbollah.” Noting that “this was a speech to an American audience,” Bernstein commented: “God knows what she said in Saudi Arabia. And God knows what she thinks privately, as opposed to what she reveals publicly.”[143]
Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic complained that Whitson had sought “to raise funds from Saudis, including a member of the Shura Council (which oversees, on behalf of the Saudi monarchy, the imposition in the Kingdom of the strict Wahhabi interpretation of Islamic law) in part by highlighting her organization's investigations of Israel, and its war with Israel's 'supporters,' who are liars and deceivers.” He suggested that “Human Rights Watch, in the pursuit of dollars, has compromised its integrity.”[144] Apropos of Whitson's reported reference at her Saudi Arabian fundraiser to the “pro-Israel lobby,” Goldberg expressed alarm that “Whitson, if the allegation against her is to be believed, trafficked in a toxic stereotype about Jews in a country that bans most Jews from even crossing its borders....The term pro-Israel lobby, of course, means something very different on the Arabian peninsula than it does here....In much of the Arab world, 'pro-Israel pressure group' suggests a global conspiracy by Jews to dominate the world politically, culturally and economically.”[145]
NGO Monitor noted that “the major reason for holding this Saudi fundraiser” was that HRW was “facing a shortage of funds because of the global financial crisis and the work on Israel and Gaza, which depleted HRW’s budget for the region.”[146]
HRW called these allegations false and unsubstantiated. According to HRW, the organization has never tried to raise funds from any government or government official, including any member of the Saudi Shura Council, and HRW never described a “war with Israel’s supporters” or used the words “liars and deceivers” at any point. HRW noted that staffers had made two presentations in Saudi Arabia in May 2009. Among an estimated 50 guests at a reception in Riyadh, three had governmental affiliations, "the spokesperson for the Ministry of Interior; the deputy head of the Human Rights Commission, a governmental organization; and a member of the Shura Council, a government-appointed consultative body."[147] According to HRW, none of those individuals were solicited for funds and HRW never accepts funds from government officials in any country.[148] HRW stated that there is no reason why Saudi citizens cannot legitimately want to support human rights.
Whitson also maintained that “Human Rights Watch in recent years has published more reports and press releases on a variety of rights problems in Saudi Arabia than any other human rights organization in the world.” She rejected the notion “that efforts to raise support among Saudis are unseemly because, well, if they live in a totalitarian country, they must be bad people too,” saying that “Human Rights Watch accepts funding from private individuals and foundations the world over, which we never allow to affect the independence of our work....Believe it or not, some Arabs believe in human rights too.”[149] Whitson characterized David Bernstein’s criticism of her Saudi Arabia fundraiser as “fundamentally...racist,” saying that donors' “ethnic background...is irrelevant....Should people be criticising us for the fact that much of our support base is made up of Jews?”[150] In response, David Bernstein accused Whitson of “play[ing] the racism card” and said that her racism accusation “just shows how low Whitson will go, and how desperate she has become.” He said that “her claim that the issue I raised is the 'ethnic background' of HRW's donors is egregiously dishonest.” The problem, he argued, was that “HRW went to the elites of a totalitarian nation, with some representatives of the government in the audience (!) to ask for money to help it combat the controversial policies of a liberal democracy.”[142]
Bernstein further charged that Whitson would not “release a video or transcript of her remarks at the Saudi fundraising dinner.” He also criticized the fact that Whitson “as the representative of an allegedly non-partisan human rights group...hires Palestinian political activists with a long record of hostility to Israel as her 'neutral' researchers.” Nor, he complained, had Whitson ever “acknowledged Human Rights Watch's various errors in its reporting on Israel.”[142]
Daniel Levy, an Israeli political analyst, argued that “To accuse Whitson of being soft on the Saudis or somehow singling out Israel for criticism is quite astonishing....these attacks on HRW demonstrate no such objectivity or credibility -- they come from a narrow and misguided right-wing Israel advocacy agenda.” While Whitson did not criticize Saudi Arabia at her fundraiser there, argued Levy, she did criticize it at an event in the U.S. a few days earlier, saying for example that when it came to women's rights, “Saudi Arabia is the absolute worst.” Levy claimed that the attacks on Whitson were being made by people who do not want to see Israel criticized.[151]
Law professor Abraham Bell criticized Whitson in a March 2012 article for emphasizing HRW's clashes with “pro-Israel pressure groups in the US, the European Union, and the United Nations” when courting potential donors in Saudi Arabia.[15][1
Whitson, wrote Benjamin Weinthal in the Jerusalem Post in 2011, “has long been a controversial figure within human rights circles.” A former board member of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, she has been widely criticized for praising, or soft-pedaling criticism of, Arab countries while disproportionately targeting Israel for censure. Whitson's argument that Muammar Qaddafi's son Said al-Islam represented a major force for reform in Libya was widely disparaged, as were her remarks about the “pro-Israel lobby” at a HRW fundraising dinner in Saudi Arabia.[108]
George Mason University law professor David Bernstein has noted that Whitson's official biography at HRW's website omits her active membership in the New York chapter of the American-Arab Antidiscrimination Committee, where she had served on the Steering Committee before joining the Board of Directors. Bernstein claimed that the Committee actively supports “the Arab and Palestinian cause against Israel,” with local chapters, such as New York's, often being “more active on foreign policy issues than is the national organization.” Whitson, wrote Bernstein, had helped set up a meeting with then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan and was also actively engaged in “Palestinian activism.” Therefore, argued Bernstein, “when HRW hired Ms. Whitson to be its Middle East director, it was hiring someone that was in the middle of serving what amounted to a second term on the Board of Directors of an organization that was firmly and openly on the Arab side in the Arab-Israeli conflict. And she had personally engaged in pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel activism while serving in that position....it should hardly come as a surprise that one of her first acts at Human Rights Watch was to involve the organization in political action, supporting the campaign to get Caterpillar to stop selling tractors to the Israeli Army.”[13]
“Instead of confronting human rights violators,” Anne Herzberg of NGO Monitor has charged, “the MENA division under Whitson has helped sustain their power.”[109] Law professor Abraham Bell has argued that “the mistakes by HRW's MENA division under Whitson's inept command are the rule rather than the exception. Whitson's division has consistently ignored human rights abuses, lent credibility to their perpetrators, and hijacked the rhetoric of rights to prosecute a political agenda against a democracy.”[14][109]
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http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/09/does-human-rights-watchs-kenneth-roth-understand-the-nature-of-prejudice/380556/
Topic: Is "Dirty Jew" Lois Lerner Causing Anti Semitism? (Read 2606 times)