Jonathan S. Tobin
JNS, Apr. 24, 2025
“… these bureaus have acted as a powerful check on the ability of any president to advance the U.S.-Israel relationship as well as to promote a malicious and false narrative that, like those spewing from Amnesty and Human Rights Watch, seeks to demonize Israel and any other targets of the political left.”
For decades, a group of so-called “human rights” organizations—in particular, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch—have been waging war on the State of Israel. As NGO Monitor, the authoritative source on the subject, has documented, these groups have conducted a multifaceted campaign involving support for boycotts across the board, smearing it as an “apartheid” state, and promoting its isolation and prosecution on the international stage.
In doing so, these non-governmental organizations and the liberal publications that continue to treat them as credible sources have succeeded in transforming human rights from a righteous cause into a movement that is a politically powerful, thinly veiled engine of 21st-century antisemitism.
Those who follow U.S. foreign policy have become all too aware of this development, especially since the Hamas-led Palestinian terrorist attacks and atrocities in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Since then, this bogus “human rights” lobby has stepped up its efforts to delegitimize Israel’s efforts to defend itself and acted as tacit advocates for Hamas in falsely depicting the war in Gaza and against other Iranian proxies in Lebanon and Yemen as acts of “genocide.”
Most Americans have been largely unaware that a band of activists with similar goals and beliefs to those at Human Rights Watch and Amnesty have been operating from a base inside the U.S. government. Thanks to a reorganization of the U.S. State Department, announced this week by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, that may now be coming to an end. ….SOURCE