Rights Groups Irritated That Iran Taking Their Focus Off Israel

“I daresay that’s a major passion of nearly every international rights group: singling out Israel for vitriol at the drop of a hat.”

New York, February 15 – NGOs working to highlight abuses and hold repressive regimes to account voiced their frustration today with the government of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, whose murderous crackdown on months-long protests against mandated head-garb for women, among other severe denials of liberty, has attracted international attention that the organizations much prefer to direct at every move by the world’s only Jewish State, and to call those moves war crimes.

Current and former representatives of Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and several other organizations and individual activists stated today that they find annoying and counterproductive the ongoing unrest in Iran because the need to deflect charges of hypocrisy demands that they address the Tehran regime’s brutality with sufficient rigor and detail, when all they really want to do, their raison d’être, really, is denounce Israel for every conceivable offense, at the slightest pretext.

“At the moment I feel stymied, thwarted,” admitted Sari Bashi, until recently of Human Rights Watch. “You can’t just ignore what’s going on in Iran, just as you can’t just ignore what’s going in in Ukraine – though we’ve tried, believe me. In this industry you know there’s a certain minimum number of lines in a report, or tweets to put out, whatever, to forestall anyone calling you biased or tendentious. Some do anyway, of course, but we try to maintain a certain threshold of plausible deniability. For example, I had one tweet in the last eight years about Israelis being held hostage in Gaza, as opposed to a storm of criticism I leveled at Israel for every imaginable violation, real or imagined. Because that’s where my passion is, and I daresay that’s a major passion of nearly every international rights group: singling out Israel for vitriol at the drop of a hat.”

Amnesty International Director Agnes Callamard expressed similar sentiments. “There is only so much an organization can do to maintain its credibility as a human rights defender if it fails to produce at least the minimum condemnation of rampant abuser regimes,” she explained. “We have flirted with that line repeatedly over the years: China, Arab states, Russia, Turkey – you will find them all mentioned in our reports, but only insofar as necessary to return to the subject we all truly love, which is finding reasons to criticize Israel. We reject the notion that we and our allies level disproportionate criticism at Israel, because otherwise Qatari or Saudi funding will not be as forthcoming, and we cannot function without such revenue. Human rights demand it.”

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