In 2020, the online news organization The Intercept revealed that HRW’s then-Executive Director, Ken Roth, accepted a $470,000 donation from a Saudi billionaire based on the condition that HRW would not use the money to protect the rights of the persecuted LGBTQ-plus community in the Middle East.
Roth was compelled to return the donation after The Intercept report.
don’t forget silencing hamas rape victims
Okay? So this was revealed in 2020 and the director guy returned the donation. Why is this being written about again 3 years later? Is someone trying to push a narrative in order to deflect from some other subject?
I’m not sure if it’s clear that there was an additional previous incident with HRW accepting money from Saudi Arabia. It’s not a long article, and it’s not behind a paywall. The current issue is potentially much more damning, accepting millions, not just hundreds of thousands, and this time from Qatar, which has an arguably worse human rights record than Saudi Arabia. Remember all those workers (slaves?) who died to build the World Cup facilities?
Always helps to read the article before posting. 😉
They didn’t imply they were for human rights
The sudden media narrative that virtually every NGO operating in the Middle East is secretly anti-Semitic does not make a lot of sense, and has the appearance of a spin campaign.
Yep. To be clear, though, it’s not the reporting of corruption etc. that’s the problem; it’s the timing of the reporting that’s suspicious.
I agree. Any individual story may or may not be accurate but that’s not the point. We’ve seen the very abrupt and simultaneous reporting and discussion on many scandals in a variety of human rights organizations, usually based on innuendo or very shaky evidence. My suspicion would be Israel is behind this but there are many other governments that are hostile to independent NGOs which could be taking advantage of the situation to undermine trust in them.
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/i24-news/
Israeli source slinging mud at a group that is calling them out.
rated least biased. Editorially, they cover both sides of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and cover USA news with impartiality. When reporting on former right-wing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, there is a slightly negative tone
Not that mediabiasfactcheck is infallible, but it seems like if anything they are biased against the Right Wing Israeli government. I’ve heard that MEMRI has problems with translating Arabic in unfavorable ways, so, we will have to wait and see if the leaked documents actually say what they claim.
Eh, it could be but it seems like a stretch. I don’t think it has to do with antisemitism. It’s just kinda like when countries put oil execs in charge of environmental policy. It seems like this has been a problem for a while. People were probably just not paying as much attention in 2020 when that article came out.
Neither i24 nor memri are unbiased sources, but if this is true, it certainly would account for a lot of the anti-Israel bias that has been coming out of human rights watch lately.
It’s them inappropriately defining this as genocide or whatever other buzzwords will generate outrage. This is clearly about defense for Israel and not eliminating an ethnic group.
Religious rhetoric always sounds borderline insane to me so maybe they are secretly peaceful, but the Israeli government is using some pretty violent biblical examples if what they want is peace. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/11/benjamin-netanyahu-amalek-israel-palestine-gaza-saul-samuel-old-testament
Yes, those 5000+ children that Israel has killed were a real risk to Israeli security.
