Mick Hartley

NGOs [non-governmental organisations] like Amnesty, Human Rights Watch or Doctors Without Borders have an image as impartial organisations fighting for justice and freedom on behalf of suffering humanity. We take their motives as noble, and their words as truth, against the lies and prevarications of power-hungry regimes worldwide. More importantly perhaps, so does the press – no need to check the sources: these people are obviously on the side of the angels.

All that may have been true in the past, but it certainly isn’t true now. This Quillette interview with Gerald Steinberg, NGO Monitor founder, shows how comprehensively human rights have been sold out. It’s a long piece, so here are some extracts to give a flavour:

NGOs hold real power, and they dominate political discussion in areas like human rights, humanitarian aid, and even who gets to define democracy. So when an NGO talks about the suffering of Iranians, or American aggression, the NGO world has largely conquered that space. Take Ken Roth, who led Human Rights Watch for almost thirty years from 1993 — its founder, Robert Bernstein, told me that appointing Roth was the biggest mistake he ever made. Roth is now hugely powerful as an individual, with fellowships at Harvard and Princeton, holding forth on human rights, very much from a post-colonial, anti-Western, personally anti-Zionist and anti-Israel position…..

When a government or NGO stands up at the UN and raises Chinese or Communist Party human rights violations, or political prisoners, very often someone with NGO status — Chinese, but essentially a government or Party mouthpiece — will stand up and say that’s not correct, here’s the correct line. That’s quite common, because there’s a lot of trade-off involved: the Chinese get support from, say, Muslim-majority countries in the Islamic Cooperation framework, and the Russians too — you vote for our people, we vote for yours; you let us speak on our issues, we’ll let you speak on yours. That’s very characteristic of how things work, not just at the UN but once it’s picked up and amplified by the media. Many journalists, many liberal media platforms — the ones we all know, and don’t always love — will take these reports and statements and give them headline status, perhaps adding a sentence or two of criticism buried in two thousand words that mostly cite the organisation and its work. One example, in a strange way: Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times wrote what was billed as an investigation, even though he’s an opinion writer, claiming Israel used dogs to rape Palestinian prisoners. The only source was an obscure NGO called Euromed Human Rights Monitor, registered with the Swiss government at what may be no more than a post office box in Geneva, which led Kristof by the nose, piece by piece. They’re effectively an operating arm of Hamas, and the people running it have very clear Hamas links — you can find this, as we and others do, through social media, tracing the connection between the group’s leadership and Hamas figures. Kristof described them simply as “an NGO based in Geneva critical of Israeli policy.” But they fed him the whole story and orchestrated the process. NGOs have that kind of power — journalists amplify it — and you end up creating fake facts that influence the political process at very low cost. That’s really what this whole objective is about, in many ways…..

I use the term “halo effect” — to a large degree, with some important exceptions, journalists view these NGOs through the same saintly light they were expected to embody back in the fifties and sixties: altruistic, non-political. They almost never investigate them. Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Doctors Without Borders are routinely described as “highly respected,” and when someone like Kristof cites them, it’s without any real investigation into who’s actually running these organisations, who funds them, or why. Are they being funded by Qatar? That’s an open question. Human Rights Watch stopped publishing its full donor list back in 2009 — for a while you could only get it by request, and even then they’d refuse.

Board members apparently had it. Ten years later it emerged that Ken Roth and Sarah Leah Whitson had solicited and accepted a large donation from a corrupt Saudi businessman the organisation had criticised the year before for human rights violations. That was hidden for a decade. What else is hidden? Whitson, hired by Roth as Middle East director, went to Libya in 2009 to raise funds and declared the Gaddafi family “human rights reformers.” The absurdity speaks for itself….

Human Rights Watch set the model that everyone else adopted. In December 2024, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty, and Doctors Without Borders all issued reports within a couple of weeks of each other declaring that Israel was committing genocide — three of the most influential, best-resourced organisations in the world, all making the same declaration. Amnesty’s report ran over two hundred pages, Human Rights Watch’s was similarly long, Doctors Without Borders included a lot of graphics. But when you actually read the details — and we do — you find they’re stuffed with footnotes to create a pseudo-academic appearance, and then you look at where those footnotes actually lead. Very often it’s self-citation — Amnesty citing an earlier Amnesty report, or an Oxfam report….

Or they cite the United Nations, which itself cites Amnesty. Or they cite Euromed, or Al-Haq — another major Palestinian organisation with completely opaque finances. It’s a shell game. When our staff, and others, actually read these reports, we find they’re a house of cards, a castle built on air, with no substantive foundation that can be independently verified…

The UN has been hijacked, the NGO industry has been hijacked, and the question is whether it can be fixed, or has to be deconstructed and rebuilt from scratch. I don’t have a good answer, but I do think using money as leverage is extremely important. The UN is about to choose a new Secretary-General — the current one, Guterres, has been a disaster, essentially a rubber stamp for the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation and figures like the Special Rapporteur on Palestinian issues, Francesca Albanese, who’s been viciously anti-Semitic, and others, like Reem Alsalem — who essentially denied the rape and sexual mistreatment of Israeli victims, and was confronted with survivors of that just a few days ago.

And the focus on Israel:

It’s demonisation, and it’s been an undercurrent for a long time. Human Rights Watch, Ken Roth, Amnesty, and others have long pushed the idea that Israel stole Palestinian land, that Israel was “created in sin,” that Zionism is a form of racism — this goes back to a whole Soviet campaign, “Zionism is racism.” The modern, post-Soviet inheritors of that are people like Ken Roth and organisations like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty, now using language like the “right of return” for Palestinians, which in practice means no Israel — or “this is all Palestine,” “from the river to the sea,” however you phrase it — that’s where it’s heading. It is a form of demonisation of Israel’s very existence.