July 23, 2009

Human Rights Watch is facing a storm of criticism from some who say a recent fund-raising event in Saudi Arabia confirmed charges of anti-Israel bias at the venerable watchdog group. Writing in The Wall Street Journal, law professor David Bernstein said an HRW delegation was in the kingdom to raise money from wealthy Saudis. According to Bernstein, they did so by highlighting their battles with (quoting the Arab News) “pro-Israel pressure groups in the U.S., the European Union, and the United Nations.”

Refusing to take Bernstein’s op-ed at face value, Atlantic correspondent Jeffrey Goldberg asked Ken Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, if an HRW staff person did indeed “attempt to raise funds in Saudi Arabia by advertising your organization’s opposition to the pro-Israel lobby.” Replied Roth: “That’s certainly part of the story. We report on Israel. Its supporters fight back with lies and deception. It wasn’t a pitch against the Israel lobby per se. Our standard spiel is to describe our work in the region. Telling the Israel story — part of that pitch — is in part telling about the lies and obfuscation that are inevitably thrown our way.”

Well, if that is “part of the story,” it shouldn’t be. Although some are asking whether a human rights group should be raising money among the ruling class of a country with such a sorry human rights record as Saudi Arabia’s, we’ll ask a simpler question: Is it proper to raise money from one group by boasting about the tough way you treat their presumed adversary? Would they raise money among China’s elite by pointing to their tough report on Taiwan or the “lies and obfuscations” of the Tibet lobby? That might suggest to an outsider that HRW would be willing to game its findings to please its biggest donors. At the very least, it creates the appearance of a conflict.

Some of the criticism of HRW in the wake of Bernstein’s op-ed has been overblown, undocumented, and unfair. But you don’t have to be a critic of HRW to appreciate the wrong-headedness of its “standard spiel.”

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