SATISH SHARMA - not just Rotigraphy.: OOPS! Human Rights Watch's long-held cover story just got blown.

https://x.com/NuryVittachi/status/2018904250366283880

Nury Vittachi

BREAKING NEWS: OOPS! Human Rights Watch's long-held cover story just got blown. The staff on the Palestine/ Israel desk of the ferociously anti-Chinese New York organization are stepping down. They are angry after their leaders blocked their report that said Israel’s denial of Palestinian refugees’ right of return was a “crime against humanity”. . AWKWARD This is awkward. For decades, Human Rights Watch simply hired staff directly from the US government and replicated US foreign policy against China, Russia, Iran, and others, while pretending to be an independent global pressure group. When anyone tried to point out the problem, staff pointed to the fact that HRW regularly criticized Israel, saying that this proved it was not aligned to the US government. And that’s why the loss of the Palestine/ Israel desk this week is extremely awkward. . NOT MEANT TO BE FAIR Enthusiastically pro-Israel founder Bob Bernstein never wanted the group to be "fair" to everyone. He believed HRW, which came together from a cluster of smaller organizations in 1988, was not intended to be evenhanded, but should serve the US and the “free world” in the west against societies which chose a more “closed” path, mostly in the east. So, except for the Israel thing, Bernstein was happy with the way it worked. Washington DC thinks the Iranians are bad guys? So does HRW. Washington DC makes a ridiculous claim that China has genocided one of its minority groups? HRW will provide an “independent” view that Washington got it right, as usual. By 2000, a pattern had formed. The US government would criticize Russia or some other “adversary” and the western mainstream media would “independently confirm” the allegation with a statement by a Human Rights Watch staffer—while conveniently forgetting to mention that this source was a US government employee until ten days or ten minutes earlier. HRW rarely criticized Washington, so the distortions built up. . CASE STUDIES Example 1: When shocking news broke out in the early 2000s that the US had for years been the global master of illegal cross-border kidnapping (hidden under euphemisms such as “extrajudicial” or “extraordinary” “rendition”), HRW chose not to criticize them. Examples 2 and 3: When the US was accused of involvement in a coup in Haiti in 2004, and when the American military was involved in a highly controversial operation of destruction in Libya in 2011, HRW looked the other way, whistling. Example 4: Looking at the 2009 Ethiopia case in more detail is instructive. That year, Human Rights Watch echoed the US government in painting a horrific picture of apparent war crimes committed by Ethiopian authorities trying to clamp down on subversion. Stung by the unfairness of this, Ethiopian civil servants organized an investigation into the HRW claims. They produced a new set of findings which were summarized by the Economist: “The government report found ‘no trace’ of serious human-rights violations. People reported to have been killed or tortured were said to have been found alive and well. Villages marked down as torched were said to be unscathed.” But who believed them? The western mainstream media (including the Economist) were dismissive of the new findings, because they came from government claims, while HRW was not a government body but “a pressure group”. (It's easy to fool the western mainstream media, because they so desperately want to be fooled, and have a self-imposed news blackout on mentioning CIA or NED funding). . REAL HUMAN RIGHTS CAMPAIGNERS COMPLAIN By 2012, the absurd claim that HRW was independent of Washington had become so patently ridiculous that people (outside the media) started to complain. In 2014, two winners of the Nobel Peace Prize, Adolfo Perez Esquivel and Mairead Maguire, wrote a letter pointing out how unfair HRW was to the world outside the west. It was signed by 100 genuine human rights activists, plus academics specializing in international relations. A global human rights organization could not be the real thing if it had “revolving-door hiring practices” with the US government, the critics said. But HRW rolled out its defence: Look! We criticize Israel, even defying our founder to do so! (Bernstein had retired by that time, and died in 2019.) (Another criticism came from a different angle: HRW was supposedly a humanitarian, charity organization—but it paid fat salaries. Records examined in 2024 show that compensation and other payments for the executive director were in excess of US$600,000 a year.) . CHINA DESK ISSUES The China desk remained a problem over the years. A key player was Minky Worden, who tried to spoil the Beijing winter Olympics by dubbing it the “genocide Olympics”. She also worked for years with NED-financed groups in Hong Kong to polarize residents against mainland China. More recently, she is listed as also working as chairwoman of the Center for Human Rights in Iran, a group pushing wild tales that Iran massacred tens of thousands of peaceful protesters, widely seen as a ruse to provide US President Donald Trump with an excuse to launch an attack on the country. Just like the Ethiopians in 2009, the world is fighting back. Today, China has solid evidence that the Uyghur Chinese have grown in number, in real terms and in relative terms, compared to the Han Chinese. This week, Iranian civil servants printed the names of the 3,000 who lost their lives on all sides in the protests—while the US-sponsored groups have been unable to produce the names of the imaginary 30,000+ it claimed were killed. . YELLOWFACE HOAXER Another HRW China desk participant works under the name of “Maya Wang”: her former contacts in Hong Kong say she is really Mrs Brian Kern – in other words, the wife of the notorious “yellowface hoaxer” of the Hong Kong 2019 protests. Hong Kongers have uploaded this claim to social media, and Ms “Wang” has not responded. For years, the China-hostile Hong Kong Free Press showcased the writings of a claimed "Hong Kong-born Chinese man" called “Kong Tsung-gan”. “Kong” gave quotes to many of the world’s largest mainstream media groups (including the Washington Post, the UK Guardian, France24, the New York Times, Deutsche Welle, and others). He presented a woefully misleading picture of the Hong Kong public—who in reality strongly oppose any notion of independence from mainland China. “Kong” was eventually exposed as Brian P Kern, who was not a Hong Kong Chinese. He was a fair-haired Caucasian “human rights activist” from Louisiana in the United States, happy to use deception to create problems for Hong Kong and mainland China. . ON SHAKY GROUND After the latest news about the loss of the Palestine/ Israel desk, HRW is on shaky ground. Until now, it could justify its work amplifying US criticisms against China and Iran and Russia by pointing to the fact that it ALSO criticized Israel. But now that has changed. And their shield against criticism has been dropped at the same time that the entire world (including the citizens of the US) have started pointing out that the United States is clearly the world’s most dangerous rogue nation, not China. This is, theoretically, an even bigger issue for HRW, which, by rights, should be moving to China and pouring out a string of criticisms against Washington DC. . BUT DOES IT MATTER? Does any of this matter? Won’t the mainstream media ignore this and keep quoting HRW as if it was an independent pressure group? Probably. But then that would be one more nail in the coffin of western corporate media credibility. And there’s already a LOT of nails there. It would be smarter for the western mainstream media to drop HRW as a source, and start being genuinely evenhanded to China, Russia and Iran. THAT would be interesting.

3:27 PM · Feb 4, 2026