Tuesday, October 25, 2011

25-Oct-11: So where exactly were the human rights groups till now?

Source
From an op ed in today's Jerusalem Post (we added the hyperlinks):
Releasing more than 1,000 terrorists and murderers may be a necessary evil, but it is an evil, nonetheless. Unfortunately, human rights NGOs have refused to speak out against it... At the center of the five-year ordeal to free Schalit was an abject failure of justice and international law. The hundreds of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that operate in this region – and claim in some manner to promote human rights – never adopted the Schalit cause as a raison d’etre. On the contrary, since his captivity began, organizations such as Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Euro- Mediterranean Human Rights Network (EMHRN), B’Tselem, Physicians for Human Rights-Israel, Gisha, and Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) did not conduct sustained, coordinated campaigns on his behalf. Gilad Schalit was simply not a priority for these NGOs... Gisha, for example, wrote: “We join in the sigh of relief that is palpable today throughout Israel and of course the relief felt by the Schalit family and the families of the prisoners who will be released.” ... Did Gisha feel relief for the release of Ahlam Tamimi, who drove the suicide bomber and the bomb to the Sbarro pizzeria in the center of Jerusalem in 2001 and waited calmly for the explosion that murdered 16, including many children? Tamimi is a cold-blooded mass murderer by any definition, who boasted and laughed about her “accomplishments” in television interviews from an Israeli jail after she was caught, tried and sentenced. Yet none of these self-proclaimed human rights organizations condemned her or her release...
The whole article, "Not Just Any Celebration" by Jason Edelstein and Naftali Balanson of NGO Monitor, is here and worth passing along to friends. The shabby hypocrisy of organizations that presume to take money from donors to support self-proclaimed human rights activities needs exposing - and ending.

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