UN-Truth

A very interesting post by Max Blumenthal: “As the anti-Goldstone, human rights-bashing Lawfare Project’s opening event on March 11 wrapped up, I asked its chairman, Columbia University Law School Dean David Schizer, for an interview. Schizer, who had just attacked the Goldstone Report from the podium, pointedly refused to speak to me and looked for the exit … Schizer was understandably nervous about his exposure. After all, he had just presided over a day-long conference during which Israeli human rights workers were labeled as traitors while Judge Richard Goldstone and human rights groups were compared to ‘anti-Semitic street gangs’ … As Scott Horton noticed at Harper’s, the Lawfare Project’s rollout event followed a remarkably similar conference in Jerusalem two weeks earlier. Both conferences followed legislation in the Knesset designed to force NGO’s to disclose their foreign donors so they can be more easily branded as a fifth column and to strangle human rights groups in Israel and occupied Palestine” …

The post by Max Blumenthal on his own blog, which has been picked up by Mondoweiss, also reports that “NGO Monitor legal advisor Anne Herzberg was featured prominently at the conference. During a panel discussion, she accused the European Union of ‘pouring hundreds of millions into these NGO’s…that are actually in favor of a one-state solution’. Without naming those NGO’s or explaining why accepting foreign money was such a crime, Herzberg boasted of suing human rights groups to force them disclose their donors. She accused Israeli NGO’s like B’tselem of causing ‘a breach of sovereignty’ against Israel by contributing data to the Goldstone Report — an insinuation that Israeli human rights workers were traitors … None of the factual documentation these groups released was challenged by the NGO Monitor report or in Herzberg’s presentation. Instead, the groups and their leadership are being targeted with a scattershot of accusations that recall McCarthyism in its crudest form. As a consequence of his zeal, NGO Monitor director Gerald Steinberg was hauled into an Israeli court this month and forced to apologize for claiming a Palestinian human rights group ‘justified violence’. Yossi Alpher, a former advisor to Ehud Barak, has condemned Steinberg’s activities, writing that NGO Monitor ‘seems dead set on eliminating human rights monitoring of Israel entirely and smearing anyone who supports this vital activity’.” The full Max Blumenthal report can be read here.

Filed under: Blogging, Gaza, International Humanitarian Law, International Law, Israel, Palestine & Palestinians