posted June 23, 2005 10:16 PM            

Exhibits a double standard in human rights, condemning the United States for human rights violations around the world
Opposed American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq
"As a strategy, the war on terror is bankrupt of vision and bereft of principle" - Secretary-General Irene Khan

On May 28, 2003 Amnesty International, a purportedly apolitical human rights organization, turned forty years old. On that day it released its annual report on human rights abuses across the globe during the year 2002. For 311 pages, Amnesty documented the horrors of execution, torture, abduction, rape, starvation, repression, and mass murder that darken many corners of the world. In one sad country after another, Amnesty found that mankind was suffering greater abuses in 2002 than they had in 2001, and Amnesty found a culprit to blame for the ever-declining state of human rights in the world: the United States of America.

The Amnesty report stated: "The 'war on terror,' far from making the world a safer place, has made it more dangerous by curtailing human rights, undermining the rule of international law and shielding governments from scrutiny. It has deepened divisions among people of different faiths and origins, sowing the seeds for more conflict. The overwhelming impact of all this is genuine fear - among the affluent as well as the poor." "While claiming to bring justice to victims in Iraq," the report added, "the United States has actively sought to undermine the International Criminal Court, the mechanism for universal justice."

Claiming that America's war on terrorism was the most egregious assault on human rights in half a century, Amnesty's Secretary-General Irene Khan added, "As a strategy, the war on terror is bankrupt of vision and bereft of principle. Sacrificing human rights in the name of national security, turning a blind eye to abuse abroad and using pre-emptive military force where and when the powerful choose to act has damaged justice and freedom, and made the world a more dangerous and divided place."

The Amnesty report condemned the U.S. because "more than eighteen months after the war in Afghanistan ended, millions of Afghans, including returning refugees, face an uncertain and insecure future." And during Operation Iraqi Freedom, Amnesty had sympathetic words for Saddam Hussein's government and criticism of the coalition's efforts to effect a regime change. It went to great lengths, moreover, to remind people that it did not take sides in international conflicts, and that its only concern was for the suffering masses.

In short, Amnesty gives America the lion's share of the blame for the degenerative state of the world. Its report can be accurately described as a lengthy attack on the United States and the Bush administration's war on terror. Indeed the organization recently went so far as to compare President Bush unfavorably to Osama bin Laden and the architect of Cambodian genocide, Pol Pot.

Rather than blame the United Nations for its complicity in human rights deteriorations anywhere on the globe, Amnesty's report excuses the UN of any culpability - because the U.S. war on terror is causing "new resources" to be "directed to security police and 'counter-terrorism' agencies [at the expense of] the UN's human rights machinery which has been grossly under-funded for years."

While the Amnesty document mentions countries such as Cuba and Libya only in the context of their respective reports on human rights abuses, the United States is mentioned countless times across the entire report for alleged complicity in many abuses across the globe. The U.S. is soundly criticized for its stance on the death penalty (part of the "axis of executioners," with China and Iran), for its supposedly poor treatment of the detainees at Guantanamo Bay, and for its opposition to the International Criminal Court. And each time Amnesty mentions one of the above points, it concludes that the behavior of the United States caused the rest of the world to behave abusively.

Amnesty's annual report also impugned Britain, Spain, and France for passing anti-terrorism laws that the group characterizes as "regressive." Ms. Khan said, "There were terrible abuses in the past - Rwanda, Cambodia, in the Balkans. . . . But what we are now seeing is a pervasive culture of abuse that has spread like a cancerous growth, and that is what is so dangerous today."

Local chapters of Amnesty were signatories to a February 20, 2002 document, composed by the radical group Refuse & Resist, condemning military tribunals and the detention of immigrants apprehended in connection with post-9/11 terrorism investigations. Titled "National Day of Solidarity with Muslim, Arab and South Asian Immigrants," the document read, in part, "[T]hey [the U.S. government] are coming for the Arab, Muslim and South Asian immigrants. Based on their racial profile, over 1500 have been rounded up and the government refuses to say who they are, where they are jailed and what the charges are!!! Already, a Pakistani man has died in custody. Who will be next? The recent 'disappearances,' indefinite detention, the round-ups, the secret military tribunals, the denial of legal representation, evidence kept a secret from the accused, the denial of any due process for Arab, Muslim, South Asians and others, have chilling similarities to a police state. We will not allow our grief for the tragedy of September 11 to be used to justify this new repression. We are clear that being an immigrant is not a crime; Muslims, Arabs and South Asians are not terrorists."

Amnesty was also a signatory to a March 17, 2003 letter exhorting members of the U.S. Congress "to oppose the Domestic Security Enhancement Act (DSEA), also known as 'Patriot [Act] II,'" which was then under consideration. These signatories stated that the new legislation "fail[ed] to respect our time-honored liberties," and "contain[ed] a multitude of new and sweeping law enforcement and intelligence gathering powers . . . that would severely dilute, if not undermine, many basic constitutional rights." In addition, Amnesty has given its organizational endorsement to the Community Resolution to Protect Civil Liberties campaign, a project of the California-based Coalition for Civil Liberties (CCL). The CLL tries to influence city councils to pass resolutions creating Civil Liberties Safe Zones; that is, to be non-compliant with the provisions of the Patriot Act.

Amnesty's UCLA chapter endorsed the 2002 Market Workers Justice Campaign of the activist coalition Communities in Solidarity with Immigrant Workers. This campaign called for increased wages and benefits for Korean and Latino immigrant workers, including those living illegally in the United States.

Amnesty's University of Oklahoma chapter endorsed a May 1, 2003 document titled "10 Reasons Environmentalists Oppose an Attack on Iraq," which was published by Environmentalists Against War.

Moreover, Amnesty International endorsed the Civil Liberties Restoration Act (CLRA) of 2004, which was introduced by Democratic Senators Ted Kennedy, Patrick Leahy, Russell Feingold, Richard Durbin, and Jon Corzine, and Democratic Representatives Howard Berman and William Delahunt. The CLRA was designed to roll back, in the name of protecting civil liberties, vital national-security policies that had been adopted after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Amnesty International U.S.A. is a member of OneWorld Network, an umbrella organization of more than 1,500 leftwing groups that, according to the OneWorld website, seek "to promote sustainable development, social justice, and human rights."

Amnesty International U.S.A. was a signatory to a November 1, 2001 document characterizing the 9/11 attacks as a legal matter to be addressed by criminal-justice procedures rather than military means. Ascribing the hijackers' motives to alleged social injustices against which they were protesting, this document explained that "security and justice are mutually reinforcing goals that ultimately depend upon the promotion of all human rights for all people," and called on the United States "to promote fundamental rights around the world."

On May 25, 2005, Amnesty International-USA Director William Schulz announced that his organization "calls on foreign governments to uphold their obligations under international law by investigating all senior U.S. officials involved in the torture scandal [a reference to allegations that War on Terror prisoners being held in Guantanamo Bay have been subjected to abuse by American military personnel]. . . . The apparent high-level architects of torture should think twice before planning their next vacation to places like Acapulco or the French Riveria because they may find themselves under arrest as Augusto Pinochet famously did in London in 1998."

posted June 23, 2005 10:30 PM            

Human rights organization founded in 1978
Has often condemned democratic Israel, while turning a blind eye to the terrorist Palestinian Authority
Opposes capital punishment in all circumstances
Supports International Criminal Court

Human Rights Watch (HRW) was "founded as 'Helsinki Watch' in 1978 to support the citizens' groups that formed, first in Moscow, then throughout the Eastern bloc, to monitor their governments' compliance with the Helsinki Accords," reads the Human Rights Watch web site.

"This international agreement, created in 1975 to encourage cooperation in East-West relations," it continues, "was the first to recognize 'the right of the individual to know and act upon his rights' -- the right, that is, of citizens to monitor the practices of their governments."

"Helsinki Watch," which became the template for Human Rights Watch, was founded by Bob Bernstein, Aryeh Neier, Jeri Laber and Orville Schell.

Bernstein, then CEO of Random House publishers, related that his inspiration for defending human rights came from an evening he spent in Moscow in 1976 with dissident Soviet scientist Andrei Sakharov.

"I've been to Park Avenue dinner parties thrown by the likes of Bob Bernstein, founder of Human Rights Watch," wrote publishing industry veteran Gerard Van der Leun, "where never is heard a conservative word. Don't get me wrong. Bob's a fine fellow, but you'd no more find any other than carefully vetted liberals at his table than you'd find a magic mushroom in the soup course at the White House. And you have to reflect that for decades, Bob was the head of Random House."

Aryeh Neier spent 12 years as executive director of Human Rights Watch, and prior to that 15 years working for the American Civil Liberties Union, eight of them as its national director. Born in Nazi Germany, he became a refugee at any early age. He has been a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books and a columnist for the ultra-Leftist Nation magazine. Neier is currently President of George Soros' Open Society Institute and of the Soros foundations.

Jeri Laber is a dedicated human rights activist in whose honor in 2002 the International Freedom to Publish Committee of the Association of American Publishers named an annual book award for a foreign book publisher who has "demonstrated courage and fortitude in the face of political persecution." She is author of The Courage of Strangers: Coming of Age with the Human Rights Movement. (2002, Public Affairs Press, foreword by Vaclav Havel) and is co-author of A Nation Is Dying: Afghanistan Under the Soviets (1988, Northwestern University Press). Like Neier, she has been a frequent contributor, usually on human rights-related topics, to the Left-of-center New York Review of Books.

Orville Schell, currently Dean of the University of California Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, is author of several books about the Peoples Republic of China and Tibet. During the 1960s he was coordinator of the anti-war Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars and co-director of the Bay Area Institute. In 1970 he founded and until 1971 was Editor-in-Chief of the Left-leaning Pacific News Service. He has been a Commentator on NBC Nightly News, consultant to ABC Nightline and CBS "60 Minutes," and correspondent for the WGBH-TV PBS show "Frontline." Schell has also written mostly for Left-of-center publications such as the New York Review of Books and the Nation.

Schell in 2003 told the San Francisco Chronicle that San Francisco is liberal because "the better educated people are, more often than not, they tend to be more liberal, and I think this is a very well-educated area…. When you live in a beautiful place…that creates a kind of liberal mind-set in an environmental sense and in a larger political sense. There's really something here that is still worth protecting. You can't really say that about Los Angeles or many other cities of America. They're finished. They may have a nice downtown, but, really, nobody's heart beats faster when they see Houston."

David Horowitz, former editor of the radical Bay Area magazine Ramparts and now head of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture in Los Angeles, has described his "old radical friend" Schell as a "Gucci Marxist."

Human Rights Watch (HRW), with a full-time staff of 190 around the world and a budget based entirely on private donations of approximately $22 million per year, describes itself as one of "only two international human rights organizations operating worldwide in most situations of severe repression or abuse," the other being Amnesty International (AI). AI mobilizes its large membership in letter-writing campaigns and usually focuses on issues such as helping specific political prisoners.

HRW writes that its "principle advocacy strategy is to shame offenders by generating press attention and to exert diplomatic and economic pressure on them by enlisting influential governments and institutions" on an ever-widening array of issues.

"With the end of the Cold War," Human Rights Watch acknowledges, "human rights no longer serve the same purpose for governments that they once did, while the influence that governments wield is itself overshadowed by the power of the global economy."

Translation: Human Rights Watch, no longer needed to police the Soviet Union, is looking for new reasons to exist.

"We have increasingly addressed economic, social and cultural rights," writes HRW. "In addition to governments, our work also addresses economic actors such as international financial institutions and multinational corporations," issuing "reports that address economic, social and cultural rights, including the rights to health care, education, and fair conditions of labor."

The group has "added special programs devoted to the rights of women, children, workers, common prisoners, refugees, migrants, academics, gays and lesbians, and people living with HIV/AIDS."

Missing from this list of rights HRW defends are, e.g., the right to own private property, the right to freedom for private enterprise and voluntary free market trade, and the right to be free from oppressive taxation. Property rights are affirmed in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights and, in theory, therefore are protected by the U.N. Human Rights Commission.

Also, HRW despite its commitment to the freedom for "academics" has not yet intervened to defend the rights of American academics harassed or punished for nonconformity with the Leftist Political Correctness that now dominates hundreds of college and university campuses in the United States.

Among many controversial positions taken up by Human Rights Watch in recent years are these:

"Human Rights Watch opposes capital punishment in all circumstances because of its cruel and inhumane nature," the group writes. "The cornerstone of human rights is respect for the inherent dignity of all human beings and the inviolability of the human person. These principles cannot be reconciled with the death penalty, a form of punishment that is unique in its barbarity and finality…. Even when full due process of law is respected, innocent persons may be executed. We work globally in opposing the death penalty, including in the United States, one of the few countries to execute offenders who were under eighteen years of age at the time of their crime."
This position, say critics, implicitly argues that neither a nation nor an individual has any right to kill in self-defense. It suggests that no just war can ever be fought, because war entails killing. It ignores that many U.S. states reduced the age for capital crimes because criminals were hiring 17-year-olds, exempt from execution, as hit men to kill others. It invokes an arbitrary age for criminal punishment when the issue should be the nature of the crime, not the age of the perpetrator.

And HRW gratuitously singles out the United States for criticism when, in fact, Human Rights Watch opposes the death penalty not only for the young but also for those of every age and magnitude of criminal depravity. HRW would oppose the death penalty even for Adolf Hitler.

Human Rights Watch helped found the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL), which was awarded the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize. HRW urged a treaty banning landmines that has been signed, but not necessarily ratified, by 132 governments, "the first time a weapons system in active use has been banned."

Used to target civilian children as the former Soviet Union did in Afghanistan, landmines are a horror. But these weapons, say critics, have legitimate uses, e.g., to create a defensive barrier zone around the U.S. Naval base at Guantanamo Bay in Communist Cuba. The absolute ban against landmines is therefore unwarranted and carries echoes of those who blame the weapon instead of criminals for firearms crime.

Human Rights Watch is among the loudest advocates for an International Criminal Court (ICC), which it argues makes possible the prosecution of evildoers who could escape justice in their country of origin by intimidating witnesses and jurors. HRW "played an active role in the legal action" against former Chilean leader Augusto Pinochet, to make of him an example and create a precedent that could deter human rights violations by those in control of other governments.
"When you take a trial out of the country, you seem to be saying you don't trust that country to be fair or accountable," disagrees former State Department human rights official Catharin Dalpino, now with the Brookings Institution. Her alternative would be trials in the country of the accused but with, e.g., two United Nations judges sitting alongside three local judges in Cambodia to try Khmer Rouge leaders for genocide. Also, argue critics, a national leader might be afraid to punish terrorists or intervene in a nation-crippling labor strike if he thought that years later he could be arrested in another nation and tried capriciously before the ICC. Leftists, e.g., might declare any and every action by an American President a violation of human rights for ideological reasons. Such a court impairs national sovereignty and could be used as an ideological weapon.

"The hallmark and pride of Human Rights Watch is the even-handedness and accuracy of our reporting," writes the group. But, inevitably where different human perceptions are involved, this claim of even-handedness will be questioned.

Critics in 2004 noted that HRW's web site contained nine pages of articles about Israel's alleged human rights violations but only four pages on Sudan, where two million people have been killed. Clearly Sudan has more severe human rights problems than does Israel, so why this imbalance?

Moreover, while Human Rights Watch has been condemnatory of democratic Israel, it has turned a blind eye to the terrorist Palestinian Authority and its campaigns of orchestrated violence aimed at Israeli civilians. Joe Stork, the acting director of HRW's Middle East and Africa Division, was formerly the principle of the Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP), a radical left organization which called for Israel's destruction and published a report lauding terrorist leaders like George Hawatmeh of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). Stork and other activists distributed literature from both the PFLP and Yasser Arafat's Fatah faction. After the murder of several Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympic games in Munich, MERIP issued a flyer that read, "Munich and similar actions cannot create or substitute for a mass revolutionary movement, but we should comprehend the achievement of the Munich action. . . . It has provided an important boost in morale among Palestinians in the camps."

When the BBC in 2001 did a story on HRW's study of torture used by the Palestinian Authority, it reported: "Joe Stork, an official at Human Rights Watch, says these practices are borrowed from Israel. 'Most of the security officers have been in Israeli jails.'" Moreover, reported BBC, "The report blames Israel's severe restrictions on Palestinian freedom of movement, and the destruction of the Palestinian law enforcement infrastructure."

Stork also reported in 2002 about that year's clash between Israeli forces and terrorists at the Jenin Refugee Camp that "it has become pretty clear that the term massacre, as used to apply to say hundreds of civilians in the fighting in Jenin, that those allegations are not substantiated." To its credit, at the very time the world's Leftist press was screaming out accusations of "massacre" against Israel, HRW said that its investigation found no massacre - but "nevertheless," said Stork, "we've found a pattern of very, very serious violations of humanitarian law in some cases requiring criminal investigation."

In today's world, any human rights organization, however sincere, will find it easier to investigate in a modern democracy such as Israel than in an unsafe, hard-to-travel Third World country like Sudan. It will feel more effective by pointing to shortcomings in a nation that respects human rights like Israel than in a nation where human beings are still held as slaves like Sudan. And, say some critics, it will gain more gratification by accusing a nation that is unpopular with the global Left - Israel - than by accusing a nation whose culture and Islamic faith it is politically incorrect to challenge in the eyes of Multiculturalists. All these factors could prompt Human Rights Watch to tilt against Israel - and against the United States, too.

Human Rights Watch has denounced Israel's construction of a security barrier as a violation of human rights. HRW's Joe Stork said it "seriously impedes Palestinian access to essentials of civilian life, such as work, education and medical care." But from the Israeli viewpoint, this barrier by stopping bomb-carrying terrorists preserves the ultimate human right, life.

"Rather than bashing the watchdogs, Israel's supporters should examine themselves," wrote Kenneth Roth in the April 1, 2004, Jerusalem Post. Roth, who has been executive director of Human Rights Watch since 1993, prior to that was an attorney with independent counsel Lawrence Walsh's investigation into Iran-Contra. Walsh, a Democrat, indicted former Republican Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger only days before the 1992 election in an apparent attempt to alienate voters from incumbent President George H.W. Bush. Roth's articles have appeared in the New York Review of Books.

Roth also in 2004 wrote to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to charge that U.S. troops in Iraq had violated the 1949 Geneva Conventions by destroying part of a house and arresting the wife and daughter of an Iraqi General being sought. At the narrow, legalistic level, Roth may have been correct.

But Human Rights Watch documented the disappearance of 290,000 Iraqis during Saddam Hussein's regime. The group had condemned Iraq for storing 150 anti-personnel landmines in a mosque. How could it not know that bringing down Hussein's monstrous dictatorship was more important to human rights than the nitpicking of non-life-threatening behavior by American soldiers?

Roth, says his HRW biography, "was drawn to the human rights cause in part by his father's experience fleeing Nazi Germany in 1938." How would his father have regarded lawyers and activists who followed U.S. troops as they fought Adolf Hitler's troops - and who charged the United States with human rights violations every time an American tank knocked down a fence or bumped into a barn?

This question is neither trivial nor humorous. As U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft pointed out on April 13, 2004 before the special Commission investigating the terrorist attack on 9-11-2001, because of a government policy of petty legalisms implemented by the Clinton Administration, various departments charged with national security were prevented from obtaining and sharing information. By bending over backwards to protect the most trivial legal rights of potential terrorists - including the contents of a laptop computer that was later found to contain planning information about the 9-11 attack - this Clinton Administration policy may have cost the rights and lives of 3,000 Americans.

HRW endorsed the Civil Liberties Restoration Act (CLRA) of 2004, which was introduced by Democratic Senators Ted Kennedy, Patrick Leahy, Russell Feingold, Richard Durbin, and Jon Corzine, and Democratic Representatives Howard Berman and William Delahunt. The CLRA was designed to roll back, in the name of protecting civil liberties, vital national-security policies that had been adopted after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Moreover, HRW was a signatory to a November 1, 2001 was a signatory to a November 1, 2001 document characterizing the 9/11 attacks as a legal matter to be addressed by criminal-justice procedures rather than military means. Ascribing the hijackers' motives to alleged social injustices against which they were protesting, this document explained that "security and justice are mutually reinforcing goals that ultimately depend upon the promotion of all human rights for all people," and called on the United States "to promote fundamental rights around the world." characterizing the 9/11 attacks as a legal matter to be addressed by criminal-justice procedures rather than military means. Ascribing the hijackers' motives to alleged social injustices against which they were protesting, this document explained that "security and justice are mutually reinforcing goals that ultimately depend upon the promotion of all human rights for all people," and called on the United States "to promote fundamental rights around the world."

HRW has received funding from: the Ahmanson Foundation; the Carnegie Corporation of New York; the Ford Foundation; the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation; the John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation; the Open Society Institute; the David and Lucile Packard Foundation; the Righteous Persons Foundation; the Rockefeller Brothers Fund; and the Rockefeller Foundation.

posted June 23, 2005 10:36 PM            

Anti-American activist organization
Is staffed by members of the Workers World Party, a Marxist-Leninist vanguard
Founded by former Attorney General Ramsey Clark, who acted as counsel for North Vietnamese Communist regime and Iran's Islamic dictatorship
Has supported numerous dictators and war criminals whose principal feature in common was their opposition to the United States

The International Action Center (IAC) professes to support "information, activism, and resistance to U.S. militarism, war, . . . corporate greed, [and] struggles against racism and oppression within the United States." One IAC official has written that "no one in the world . . . has a worse human rights record than the United States."

A member organization of the International ANSWER steering committee, the IAC has consistently opposed America's foreign policy since its 1991 founding by former Attorney General Ramsey Clark. Over the years, this organization has supported numerous dictators and war criminals whose principal common feature was their opposition to the United States. Clark, for instance, has met with both Saddam Hussein and Yugoslavia's former president, Slobodan Milosevic, in attempts to prevent their overthrows by the U.S. For further information, see the Salon magazine article, "Ramsey Clark, The War Criminal's Best Friend."

On June 5, 1999, the IAC organized a National March on the Pentagon; this was part of its broader Emergency Mobilization to Stop the War campaign. At issue were the U.S./NATO bombings of Yugoslavia, which were designed to end the rule of the brutal dictator Slobodan Milosevic. Said the IAC call-to-action, "U.S./NATO bombs and cruise missiles are raining down on . . . Yugoslavia. . . . In the name of 'peace,' NATO has killed thousands and destroyed hospitals, homes, schools, universities, bridges, power and water treatment plants, factories, and more. In the name of 'protecting human rights,' the launching of the air war has triggered a refugee crisis displacing hundreds of thousands of people. Now, as the bombing and its terrible toll escalate, the threat of a U.S. invasion of Yugoslavia looms. A ground war will mean the deployment of hundreds of thousands of troops. Now is the time to act! We are urging you to join us in the newly formed Emergency Mobilization to Stop the War. . . . [T]he Pentagon is embarked upon another bloody intervention, in violation of all international law, and against the interests of the people of the Balkans and the people of this country [the U.S.] as well." Among those to formally endorse this IAC statement were Angela Davis; Howard Zinn; Reverend Lucius Walker; Mumia Abu-Jamal, the International Socialist Organization, the Los Angeles Peace Center, Peace Action; Vietnam Veterans Against the War; and the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom.

The IAC was a Cosponsoring Organization of the April 25, 2004 "March for Women's Lives" held in Washington, D.C., a rally that drew more than a million demonstrators advocating that women be granted unrestricted access to taxpayer-funded abortions at any stage of pregnancy.

The IAC also endorsed the 2002 Market Workers Justice Campaign of the activist coalition Communities in Solidarity with Immigrant Workers. This campaign called for increased wages and benefits for Korean and Latino immigrant workers, including those living illegally in the United States.

Furthermore, the IAC was a signatory to a February 20, 2002 document, composed by the radical group Refuse & Resist, condemning military tribunals and the detention of immigrants apprehended in connection with post-9/11 terrorism investigations. Titled "National Day of Solidarity with Muslim, Arab and South Asian Immigrants," the document read, in part, "[T]hey [the U.S. government] are coming for the Arab, Muslim and South Asian immigrants. Based on their racial profile, over 1500 have been rounded up and the government refuses to say who they are, where they are jailed and what the charges are!!! Already, a Pakistani man has died in custody. Who will be next? The recent 'disappearances,' indefinite detention, the round-ups, the secret military tribunals, the denial of legal representation, evidence kept a secret from the accused, the denial of any due process for Arab, Muslim, South Asians and others, have chilling similarities to a police state. We will not allow our grief for the tragedy of September 11 to be used to justify this new repression. We are clear that being an immigrant is not a crime; Muslims, Arabs and South Asians are not terrorists."

posted June 23, 2005 10:39 PM            

Anti-war front group for the Marxist-Leninist Workers World Party
Founded after the 9/11 attacks to oppose the War on Terror
A major organizer of the massive anti-Iraq war rallies of 2002 and 2003
Opposes embargo against Communist Cuba
Supports convicted cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal

International A.N.S.W.E.R. (often, simply ANSWER) is a front group for the Marxist-Leninist Workers World Party (WWP), which uses the anti-war movement as the vehicle by which it promotes Communist ideals and condemns American society, American foreign policy, and capitalism.

Founded in September 2001, shortly after the World Trade Center attack, the group's initial mass demonstration was held on September 29, 2001 in Washington, D.C., to protest the Bush administration's impending war in Afghanistan. In July 2002, ANSWER's focus shifted to preventing a war in Iraq, as the likelihood of a U.S. invasion there grew. ANSWER's protests have been staged in numerous cities not only in the United States, but all over the world. Some of the protests have drawn only a few thousand people, while others have drawn hundreds of thousands. With regard to wars involving nations other than the United States, ANSWER has made no comment.

ANSWER-organized rallies are all conducted similarly. Protestors gather at a mustering ground flanked by information and merchandise tables set up by a variety of politically left-wing and Communist organizations, which have paid ANSWER a fee for permission to distribute literature or sell merchandise. An elevated stage is arranged at the front of the rally site, complete with a massive sound system. After a musical prelude, a number of speeches are delivered - usually, over a dozen. Once this initial round of speeches is completed, the attendees march along a short route to the location of the final rally, where they encounter more literature and merchandise tables, another stage, and another round of speeches. At both rallies and along the course of the march, ANSWER volunteers fundraise by moving through the crowd with large buckets, into which attendees deposit cash donations. At the March 15th, 2003 rally in San Francisco, fundraising rally marshals announced that the cost of conducting that day's festivities exceeded $300,000.

The speakers are generally members or sympathizers of the political far left, including many acknowledged communists, who oppose America's role not only in the current war, but also many additional aspects of its foreign and domestic policies. Such speakers include prominent members or leaders of various activist and Communist organizations; celebrities and entertainers; and politicians - often members of the Democratic Party's Progressive Caucus. When addressing the crowds, they largely echo ANSWER'S positions on myriad issues. For instance, they accuse the US of pursuing ambitions for colonialism, imperialism and world domination. They decry what they call America's current "occupation" of Afghanistan, Iraq, and "Palestine." They oppose the U.S. embargo against Fidel Castro's Cuba. They accuse the Bush administration of threatening the security of many nations around the world - among them Iran, Korea, Liberia, Colombia, the Philippines, Zimbabwe, and Liberia. They maintain that America, more than any other country on earth, constitutes the greatest threat to world peace and humanity's survival. They further allege that America mistreats "political prisoners" like Mumia Abu-Jamal, and they echo ANSWER's stated concern about "the war at home that includes cuts in social programs, police brutality, and attacks on civil rights and civil liberties."

While no speaker at the March 15, 2003 rally was publicly identified as a member of the WWP, at least seven are in fact party members (Brian Becker, Larry Holmes, Teresa Gutierrez, Sarah Sloan, Sara Flounders, Imani Henry, and Judi Cheng). Through these speakers and organizers, the WWP controls the tenor of ANSWER and its message. Thus it is not surprising that ANSWER's politics are broadly anti-capitalist and severely critical of American policies.

An investigation of ANSWER's member organizations and national organizers reveals its close links to the WWP. The initial call to form a new peace coalition, dated September 25, 2001 and located on the WWP Website, is signed by a number of prominent WWP members, including Teresa Gutierrez, Monica Moorehead, Gloria La Riva, Leslie Feinberg, and Deirdre Griswold. The first press releases put out by the coalition, on September 24, 2001, are from Ramsey Clark, Teresa Guiterrez, and Brian Becker.

Since the early 1990s Clark, the former Attorney General under President Lyndon Johnson, has worked closely with the Workers World Party - through the WWP-founded International Action Center (IAC). Guiterrez and Becker are members of the WWP's Secretariat - its highest decision-making body. Monica Moorehead and Deirdre Griswold are also Secretariat members. Typically, IAC staff and volunteers are WWP members. Another key player for ANSWER is founding member (and member of the organization's national steering committee) Richard Becker.

While the composition of ANSWER went unpublished through late 2001 and into 2002, by late February 2002 the organization's press releases began to contain references to a "steering committee" of several organizations. One of the earliest lists can be found in a call to action from February 27, 2002. While this committee has undergone a few changes since 2002, it has, overall, remained relatively stable. As of February 2004, it included the following organizations, all of them on the far left of the political spectrum: the Stalinist International Action Center (IAC) and its two sub-units, the Korea Truth Commission and the Partnership for Civil Justice Legal Defense and Education Fund; Bayan - USA / International; the Free Palestine Alliance; the Middle East Children's Alliance; the Interreligious Foundation for Community Organizing (IFCO) /Pastors for Peace; the Nicaragua Network; the Mexico Solidarity Network; the Kensington Welfare Rights Union; and the Muslim Student Association of the U.S. & Canada.

Notwithstanding the varying degrees of support provided by all the aforementioned groups, ANSWER's closest connections are, by far, with the WWP and the IAC (which is controlled by the WWP). This is clearly evident when one compares the contact information for ANSWER with the contact information for those other organizations. For instance, ANSWER's national office, at 39 W. 14th St., Room 206, New York, NY, is the same as the national office of the IAC. ANSWER's Los Angeles office is at 422 S. Western Ave., the same address as the IAC's Los Angeles office. ANSWER's Washington, D.C. office, at 1247 E Street SE, is the same as the IAC's Washington office; the two organizations also share the same phone and fax numbers. ANSWER's San Francisco office, at 2489 Mission St., room 30, is in the same building as the San Francisco offices of the IAC and WWP, which occupy rooms 24 and 28, respectively.

The contact numbers for ANSWER in Buffalo, Philadelphia, Atlanta, and Boston are the same as the contact numbers for the IAC in those cities. The contact numbers for ANSWER in Cleveland, Seattle, Baltimore, and Detroit are the same as the contact numbers for the WWP in those cities. In other words, when a person calls ANSWER, he is in effect calling the International Action Center and the Workers World Party.

posted June 23, 2005 10:42 PM            

Professes to be an International human rights organization
Soviet front organization during the Cold War
Supports Palestinian Intifada against Israel

A 1978 CIA report declared the International Association of Democratic Lawyers (IADL) to be "one of most useful Communist front organizations at the service of the Soviet Communist Party," noting that "in the 31 years of the IADL's existence, it has so consistently demonstrated its support for Moscow's foreign policy objectives, and is so tied in with other front organizations and the Communist press, that it is difficult for it to pretend that its judgments are fair or relevant to basic legal tenets." The IADL was a relentless foe of the United States' campaign against Communism, regularly railing against alleged American atrocities while maintaining a calculated silence on the well-documented human rights violations of Communist regimes.

The implosion of the Soviet Union has not altered the IADL's views—nor shaken its faith in the promise of Communism. Saying nothing about the Soviet Union's bloody record, the IADL continues to stage perennial campaigns demanding that the U.S. compensate victims of the American intervention in Vietnam, as well as victims of what the IADL calls the American-perpetrated "Holocaust" in Korea. The IADL also remains a steadfast champion of the Castro dictatorship. In October of 2000, the IADL issued a declaration denouncing "the brutal and genocidal economic war that the United States of America has been waging against the Cuban people for forty years, because Cuba has made a Revolution, established an alternative political system, and built a state order of its own invention, creating a true democracy that breaks loose from the dictated paradigms with which they pretend to rule from their power centers, over the life and decisions of the whole universe."

French resistance leader Rene Cassin, who was named the IADL's first president upon the group's founding in 1946, and who drafted the the U.N.'s Universal of Declaration of Human rights, often expressed his wish that the Declaration not be treated as "a purely theoretical instrument." In this respect, the IADL has routinely betrayed Cassin's vision: Although the IADL claims to embrace the Declaration's prescriptions in principle, the organization's long record of selective human rights promotion suggests that it has little reverence for the principles document itself.

In 1999 the IADL joined a battery of leftwing groups in actively campaigning against NATO's efforts to end ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia. "NATO's actions," claimed the IADL, "were totally illegal, and cannot be justified by any humanitarian argument." The IADL's lawyers insisted that military intervention could never be an acceptable response to a humanitarian crisis. "It [military intervention] is first and foremost characterized," said the IADL, "by the violation of the fundamental principles of the United Nations Charter: the banishment of war, freedom from force or the threat of force, the priority of a negotiated solution of disputes and of non-intervention in nation's internal affairs." The IADL further contended that only the United Nations had the right to authorize military action: "The authority for such an intervention is exclusively within the province of the United Nations, and cannot be reconciled as within NATO's authority."

The IADL's professed pacifism has been, in practice, every bit as inconsistent as its stands against human rights violators. As an avowed supporter of the Palestinian Intifada against Israel, the IADL condones violence. An October 2001 IADL mission to the Palestinian territories resulted in an elaborate defense of the Palestinian terrorism campaign. "Palestinians," insisted the IADL, "have been engaged in an anti-colonial rebellion. Equipped with the latest in American-donated fighter-bombers, helicopter gun-ships, tanks and missiles, and a state-of-the-art intelligence service, not to mention its own nuclear weapons, Israel has responded by attacking a dispossessed, essentially unarmed people, with no air force, no artillery, no army."

This anti-Israeli narrative informs numerous legal briefs that the IADL has lodged as part of its ongoing campaign against the Jewish state. Accusing Israel of everything from "crimes of war," to "crimes against humanity," to "ethnic cleansing," the IADL has called on its affiliated lawyer and jurist members worldwide "to urge their governments to suspend any help of any kind to Israel." Jitendra Sharma, the India-based president of the IADL, has gone further still. On June 6, 2002, he mounted a defense of Marwan Barghouti, urging Israeli authorities to accord the imprisoned Fatah terrorist "parliamentary immunity." In justifying the Palestinian intifada, the IADL altogether rejects words like "terrorism," reserving the term exclusively for what it describes as "the State terrorism practiced by the big powers."

posted June 23, 2005 10:45 PM            

Socialist-leaning Austrian NGO that trumps the virtues of the European welfare state
Insists the socialist market economy has outperformed the U.S. model
Blames developed countries for creating "breeding ground" for terrorism
Argues that the U.S. military campaign in Iraq and Afghanistan was engineered by Jewish Lobby

Since its establishment in 1957, the International Institute for Peace (IIP) - a Vienna, Austria-based non-governmental organization (NGO) - has conducted policy research that comports with the leftwing worldview of its members, who include scientists, scholars and government officials from Russia, the European Union (EU), the USA, Croatia and Latin America. Accordingly, the IIP has staked out positions denouncing military action, which its members view as an illegitimate alternative to "political solutions." In addition, the IIP derides trade liberalization as a bane to developing countries. For these efforts, the IIP has been accorded consultative status at ECOSOC (the Economic and Social Council), which coordinates the work of 14 United Nations specialized agencies, and UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization), which describes itself as "a laboratory of ideas and a standard-setter to forge universal agreements on emerging ethical issues."

In recent years, however, the IIP's work has taken a slightly different tack. Mindful of the post-Cold War contest between the American economic model, with its enthusiasm for limited government and free markets, and the traditional European model, with its support for socialized government and its wariness of free trade, the IIP has increasingly positioned itself as a champion of the European welfare state. In a November 2001 policy brief, IIP president Erwin Lanc, a former Austrian minister of foreign affairs and a self-avowed socialist since the age of 16, sought to draw a divide between the economic models of "the US, Canada, and the United Kingdom on the one hand and western Europe on the other." There was little doubt about which side Lanc favored. After lashing out at what he called some EU member countries' approval of "extensive liberalism" and their "dismantling of the obligatory state welfare institutions," Lanc wondered whether there was any future for the socialized European state, a question that figures prominently in the work of the IIP. "Are the global players in our economy the rulers, or is there still space left for political regulation — more than just to supply the companies with basic trade laws?" Lanc asked.

That same month, an answer was provided by the IIP's vice president, Dr. Klaus von Dohnanyi, who since 1957 has been a member of Germany's left-of-center Social Democratic Party. While Dohnanyi allowed that, "We live in increasing international competition-a competition that crosses borders with growing intensity, which means that the classic notion of the state as protector of its inhabitants loses ground," he nevertheless contended that this competition already had a decisive winner. In Dohnanyi's view, this was the western European welfare state, which, he insisted, was patently superior to the American "Anglo-Saxon" model: "I would say in the 20th century, the continental model was unquestionably the victor over the Anglo-Saxon model. The European model was eventually more successful if you look what remains, as we say, 'unter dem Strich,' (on balance) between economic performance and social performance at the same time." Dohnanyi adduced no evidence for his conclusion, which informs many of the IIP's publications. In fact, Dohnanyi ignored substantial evidence suggesting that precisely the opposite is true: By practically every indicator of economic performance, including growth rates of the gross domestic product, levels of unemployment, and productivity, the U.S. economic model has proven demonstrably superior to its European counterpart. Dohnanyi himself seemed unwittingly to acknowledge this fact when, in the same paper, he called for Europeans to imitate the American model. "If we take a next big step in that direction with decentralisation, self-responsibility, etc. but nevertheless solidarity, then Europe will be above American performance," Dohnanyi wrote.

Less prone to reconsideration is the IIP's longstanding rejection of military intervention. Staunchly opposed to any such intervention, the IIP instead touts what it calls an "alternative understanding of security." Exactly what is meant by this "understanding" was made clear on March 17, 2004, when the IIP convened an International Symposium on the International Legal Order. Though the anti-war symposium failed in its mission to "replace the old-fashioned idea that security can only be achieved by arms," Erwin Lanc's account of the causes of war offered a glimpse into the mentality of the IIP. Retailing arguments that military interventions, specifically by developed countries, serve to embolden terrorism, Lanc mused, "Isn't it an encouragement, or even a confirmation, to fundamentalists that there are no limits to their acts of violence as long as states develop their means of offensive and defensive warfare without international legal restrictions?" Lanc further claimed that the very fact that Western countries possessed technological and industrial development made them the targets of terrorism. "The different positions taken by Third World countries have one thing in common; they feel powerless. Some of them, even those with an income that ordinary people in the United States or in Europe can only dream of, feel their pride hurt by what they call the West. This is the breeding-ground for Bin Ladens."

Positions like these have attracted the notice of leftwing individuals such as the anti-nuclear activist David Krieger, today a member of the IIP's advisory board. Another is Norman Birnbaum, a socialist professor at Georgetown University who, in addition to chairing the IIP's advisory board, serves as an advisor to the socialist-leaning Progressive Caucus of the U.S. Congress. It is Birnbaum who repeatedly espouses what may be described as the IIP's unofficial agenda: its hostility to Israel. In a June 2004 article published on the IIP's Web site, Birnbaum claimed that the Iraq war was orchestrated by a pro-Israel Jewish lobby. He contended that even in the absence of a scheming Jewish lobby, opponents of the U.S. military effort should raise the specter of Jewish treachery. Reasoned Birnbaum, "The difficulty is, even if there were no Israel lobby, the imperial party in the U.S. would remain in command. Indeed, that party could at any time disembarrass itself of the Israel lobby by raising the issue of the dual loyalty of American Jews—forcing the supporters of Israel on the defensive." In a foaming 2003 missive titled "Open Letter to the British, Czech, Danish, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Portuguese and Spanish Prime Ministers," Birnbaum singled out for opprobrium those countries that backed the U.S. military campaign, berating their governments for failing appreciate the real danger to world peace, which he described as "the threats to world security entailed in the increasing brutality of Israeli rule in Palestine."

That Birnbaum's anti-Jewish and anti-Israel views are hardly heterodox within the IIP is evidenced by the writings of Erwin Lanc. In an article on the IIP's Website called "The Palestinian Cause: How to Achieve Peace," Lanc has attacked the United States for accepting Israel's right to exist. "Unfortunately," wrote Lanc, "the U.S. has accepted in practice a concept of Erez Israel." More extreme still was Lanc's account of the founding of the Jewish state. "The most important and unique motivation for a Jewish state," he wrote, "were the violent persecutions (pogroms) of Jews in former czarist Russia, Poland and other east European states. Other motivations have included the rejection of Jewish endeavors at assimilation all over Europe, growing nationalism such as the unification of the German states, claims for ethnically-based nation-states among practically all nationalities in the former Austro-Hungarian Monarchy with the deliberate ostracizing of Zionism, etc." Conspicuously absent from Lanc's history was any mention of the Holocaust.

To spread its message, the IIP sponsors symposiums where issues of world peace and economics are discussed. Moreover, it publishes books, papers, and a quarterly journal titled Peace and Security. Among the IIP's book titles are: The Market Shock: An Agenda for the Economic and Social Reconstruction of Central and Eastern Europe (1992); After the Market Shock: Central and East-European Economies in Transition (1994); and Agenda for Change - New Tasks for the United Nations (1995). Among the papers it has published are: The Future of Civilization: Options and Danger; and Vulnerability of Modern Industrial Societies - A Challenge for a Demilitarisation of Security Policy.

posted June 23, 2005 10:48 PM            

Anti-American, anti-capitalist Communist organization
Present on many American campuses
Opposes the Patriot Act and the War on Terror

Evoking the Communist tradition of Karl Marx, Leon Trotsky and Vladimir Lenin, the Chicago-based International Socialist Organization (ISO) aspires to "organize activists in workplaces and communities and on campuses in order to mobilize opposition to all forms of oppression and exploitation." With capitalism its avowed enemy, the ISO places the blame for the world's social ills on America, and more specifically the Republican Party, calling President Bush the "bigot-in-chief," and describing the "dynasty" of the Bush family as a "virus."

Founded in 1977, the ISO traces its intellectual antecedents to Trotskyism, and to a rejection of Shachtmanism, so named after Max Shachtman, the onetime head of the Socialist Workers Party; Shachtman and his followers generally supported the hard-line Cold War-era stance against Communist expansionism, which it correctly recognized as a more violent and vile exploitation of people than anything capitalism has yet designed. Still, the ISO does reject the state-sponsored Communism found in China, Cuba, and the old USSR, on the grounds that those states merely create structures to alienate workers from their labor and the sources of capital in the same way that the Western democracies do.

The ISO claims the need for permanent workers' revolutions on an ongoing basis, in the tradition of Trotsky and his denunciation of the Stalinist state. The ISO maintains an educational program calling for socialist workers revolutions at a variety of venues, including work places and college campuses. It claims that all the evils of the world, including poverty, environmental issues, war, and famine, are the direct result of capitalism.

Intellectually, the ISO bases its contentions on analyses of Eastern-bloc economies that critiqued the state-sponsored capital systems of those countries and called for a strenuous rejection of the state model; maintained that Western prosperity in the Cold War era was largely maintained only by massive defense spending; and accepted the theory of deflected permanent revolution to account for workers' failures to take over Third World countries (fundamentally, an absence of an intelligentsia capable of sustaining the bourgeoisie democratic stage of revolution).

The ISO website maintains links to the websites of numerous socialist groups in France, Australia, and Ireland. The organization's announced plan of action is decidedly international in scope. In 2000, the ISO attracted a large number of new members when it by worked for the presidential campaign of the Green Party's Ralph Nader. The following year, a small group of ISO members broke away from the group and created a new organization called Left Turn. Currently, the ISO claims a membership of approximately 1,000 and publishes the weekly newspaper Socialist Worker, whose articles condemn capitalism and imperialism, and whose editorials call for "militant workers" to form a "revolutionary socialist party." It also publishes the journal Socialist Review. In addition to its national office in Chicago, the ISO maintains six regional branches.

Among the ISO's official policies are a rejection of U.S. intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan, an effort to inspire anti-war sentiment on college campuses (particularly by creating fears of a renewed draft), pushing for greater rights for illegal immigrants and completely open borders, and the condemnation of capital punishment.

Despite an ostensibly bold "Who We Are" link, the ISO website discloses no names of the group's leadership. The links to the regional leadership web addresses reveal only a list of aliases and non-entities.

The ISO is a member organization of the United for Peace and Justice anti-war coalition. It disparages the Patriot Act and other government efforts to strengthen national security as malicious assaults on civil liberties.

The ISO views terrorism against U.S. targets and those of America's allies (most notably Israel) as the desperate actions of people who have been treated unjustly for too long by those nations. Regarding the 9/11 hijackers and Palestinian suicide bombers, for instance, the ISO asserts, "They weren't born wanting to become suicide bombers. But their lifetimes of humiliation . . . made them open to terrorism as a means to avenge their oppression."

The ISO endorsed the 2002 Market Workers Justice Campaign of the activist coalition Communities in Solidarity with Immigrant Workers. This campaign called for increased wages and benefits for Korean and Latino immigrant workers, including those living illegally in the United States.

posted June 23, 2005 10:51 PM              

By Dana Milbank

Sunday, June 5, 2005; Page A04

The folks at Amnesty International are practically begging for a one-way ticket to Gitmo. After the human rights group issued a report late last month calling the U.S. detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, "the gulag of our times," top officials raced to condemn Amnesty.

President Bush: "It's absurd. It's an absurd allegation."

Vice President Cheney: "I don't take them seriously. . . . Frankly, I was offended by it."

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld: "Reprehensible . . . cannot be excused."

Funny -- these officials had a different view of Amnesty when it was criticizing other countries.

Rumsfeld repeatedly cited Amnesty when he was making the case against Saddam Hussein, urging "a careful reading of Amnesty International" and saying that according to "Amnesty International's description of what they know has gone on, it's not a happy picture."

The White House often cited Amnesty to make the case for war in Iraq, using the group's allegations that Iraq executed dozens of women accused of prostitution, decapitated victims and displayed their heads, tortured political opponents and raped detainees' relatives, gouged out eyes, and used electric shocks.

Regarding Fidel Castro's Cuba, meanwhile, the White House joined Amnesty and other groups in condemning Castro's "callous disregard for due process."

And the State Department's most recent annual report on worldwide human rights abuses cites Amnesty's findings dozens of times.

"This administration eagerly cites Amnesty International research when we criticize Cuba and extensively quoted our criticism of the violations in Iraq under Saddam Hussein in the run-up to the war," protested William F. Schulz, executive director of Amnesty International USA.

posted June 24, 2005 10:27 PM              

What This Site Is About

The resources on this page are devoted to defining the left, which is one of the purposes of this website.

Welcome to DiscoverTheNetwork. This site is a "Guide to the Political Left." It identifies the individuals and organizations that make up the left and also the institutions that fund and sustain it; it maps the paths through which the left exerts its influence on the larger body politic; it defines the left's (often hidden) programmatic agendas and it provides an understanding of its history and ideas.

By browsing this database, and familiarizing oneself with the agendas of the individuals and organizations it contains, with the scope of their activities and with the tens of millions of dollars available to support them, a user of this base will find ample evidence for the existence of this left and for the fact that it is a major player in the political destinies of the nation. (See in particular the organizations and individuals associated with ANTI-WAR groups and The Shadow Party.)

The movement to protest the war in Iraq reconfigured the presidential campaign of 2004 and has affected American policy not only in Iraq but in the War on Terror generally. It has changed the face of the Democratic Party and of American politics in general. What is the nature of this "anti-war" movement, who are its leaders, and what are its agendas? The scope and features of this database allow for definitive answers to these questions.

posted June 26, 2005 03:35 PM              

Have you atleast improved the qaulity of your simple and sorry life by catogorising every little thing as either leftys or rightys ?

Does it help you to ignore the actual realitys going on in the world around you ?

posted June 26, 2005 08:34 PM            

Anti-capitalist group that denounces "corporate greed" as the source of most societal ills
Supports Palestinian "right of return"

Left Turn is an organization of self-proclaimed "anti-capitalists" united in the belief that "corporate greed is the driving force behind all of society's problems." The group is currently "involved in [the] struggles against globalization, imperialism and war" in such places as Israel, Iraq and Venezuela. Left turn is based in New York, with contacts in a half-dozen other major American cities.

"The human misery that corporate greed leaves in its wake," says the Left Turn website, "is not only caused by the destructive policies of the IMF, World Trade Organization, and the World Bank. These bodies were created to maintain the smooth functioning of capitalism - a system that puts profit before people's needs and the health of the planet. The continuation of this destructive system is defended by the state, which uses the police and army to attack any opposition to its inhumane policies. Ultimately, Left Turn believes that justice can only be achieved through the revolutionary reconstruction of society."

Bilal El-Amine is the editor of Left Turn Magazine. In September of 2001, El-Amine was a contact for the Global Justice Intifada, a coalition of leftwing groups that was created, in part, to celebrate the anniversary of the September 2000 Al Aqsa intifada against Israel. El-Amine is also a member of the Palestine Activist Forum of New York, a group that has featured Hamas slogans at its rallies, and he is a founding member of Stop U.S. Tax-funded Aid to Israel Now (SUSTAIN). Moreover, El-Amine is affiliated with Al-Awda, an Islamist organization that pushes for the "Right of Return" of Palestinians who purportedly lost their homes at the time of the creation of Israel in 1948.

The aforementioned "Right of Return" is in fact a veiled attempt to destroy the state of Israel. Palestinian authorities place the number of Arabs who ought to be granted a "right of return" to Israel at 5 million. This is more than ten times the number of Arabs who actually left the Jewish portions of the British Mandate in 1948, most of whom are now deceased. In addition to its absurdity, the "right of return" is itself a calculated mockery of the primary reason for Israel's existence - the fact that no country would provide a refuge for Jews fleeing Hitler's extermination program during World War II. It is only because the world turned its back on the Jews when their survival was at stake that the state of Israel grants a "right of return" to every Jew who asks for it. But there is no genocidal threat to Arabs, no lack of international support militarily and economically, and no Palestinian "diaspora" (although the Palestinians have cynically appropriated the very term to describe their self-inflicted quandary). The fact that many Arabs, including the Palestinian spiritual leader -- the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem -- supported Hitler's "Final Solution" only serves to compound the insult. It is even further compounded by the fact that more than 90 percent of the Palestinians now in the West Bank and Gaza have never lived a day of their lives in territorial Israel. The claim of a "right of return" is thus little more than a brazen expression of contempt for the Jews, and for their historic suffering. More importantly, it is an expression of contempt for the very idea of a Jewish state. The incorporation of five million Arabs into Israel would render the Jews a permanent minority in their own country, and would thus spell the end of Israel. The Arabs fully understand this, and that is why they have made it a fundamental demand.

According to Left Turn, to get ready for the 2004 Republican Convention, the group had been working with other anti-American protest groups and "had been organizing for well over a year." At the protests that took place, thousands of arrests were made.

posted June 26, 2005 08:39 PM            

Pro-Palestinian militant organization that openly calls for the destruction of Israel
Spokesperson is Communist Party member Charlotte Kates
"We are opposed to the existence of the apartheid colonial settler state of Israel, as it is based on the racist ideology of Zionism"

Openly calling for the destruction of Israel, New Jersey Solidarity (NJS) describes itself as an organization of "activists for the liberation of Palestine." Its self-proclaimed "mission" is to "liberate all of historic Palestine," that is, the area comprising modern Israel, the West Bank and Gaza.

In the Fall of 2003, NJS hosted a conference at Rutgers University promoting divestment from Israel and the "celebrat[ion] [of] Palestinian resistance." Among the organizations to endorse this conference were: International ANSWER, Al-Awda, the Al-Bireh Palestine Society, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, Amnesty International, the Free Palestine Alliance, the International Action Center, the International Socialist Organization, the Islamic Association for Palestine, Jews for a Free Palestine, the Korea Truth Commission, La Raza Unida Party, the Middle East Children's Alliance, the Muslim Student Association, the National Lawyers Guild, the Nicaragua Network, the Palestine Children's Welfare Fund, the Palestine Solidarity Group, Students for Justice in Palestine, SUSTAIN, Women Against War, and the Workers World Party.

NJS reports that it has a particularly close working relationship with the International Action Center, and International ANSWER; and Al-Awda deems NJS to be a "Coalition Committee Member."

The media's first reports on NJS cast the group as mainstream and benign, even though it candidly asserts on its website: "We are opposed to the existence of the apartheid colonial settler state of Israel, as it is based on the racist ideology of Zionism. . . . we stand for the total liberation of all historic Palestine." NJS also "unconditionally support[s] Palestinians' human right to resist occupation and oppression by any means necessary."

Charlotte Kates, spokesperson for the group, wrote an op-ed bluntly entitled "Israel has no 'Right to Exist'" for the Rutgers University newspaper, the Daily Targum, but editors retitled her piece with a far less aggressive and incendiary message -- "Palestine roots in land proven through history." NJS embraces the slogan, "From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be Free!" "From the River to the Sea," or from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, is all the territory of the state of Israel. Kates, incidentally, joined the Communist Party at age 13, and her favorite book is The State and Revolution by Lenin.

In a December 4, 2002 article for CounterPunch, entitled "Tension on Campus," Kates wrote, "We have no desire to create an environment where racists may feel comfortable and secure in their racism; we very much want . . . to create an environment where it is, indeed, uncomfortable to declare oneself an unequivocal supporter of an oppressive, racist state. It should be uncomfortable. . . . There is nothing making Jewish students afraid to be Jewish on campus; nothing that is, except for those whose Jewish identity leads them to condemn the racist practices of the state of Israel. . . . May the tension continue to escalate."

NJS's message is also marked by an uncompromising support of "the right of return for Palestinian refugees to their homes and their homeland." Endorsing the so-called "right of return" is tantamount to calling for the destruction of the Jewish state. Palestinian authorities place the number of Arabs who ought to be granted a "right of return" to Israel at 5 million. This is more than ten times the number of Arabs who actually left the Jewish portions of the British Mandate in 1948, most of whom are now deceased. The incorporation of five million Arabs into Israel would render Jews a permanent minority in their own country, and would thus spell the end of Israel. The Arabs fully understand this, and that is why they have made it a fundamental demand.
http://www.discoverthenetwork.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=6337

posted June 26, 2005 08:42 PM            

Anti-war NGO founded in 2001 which sends members to areas of conflict to disrupt military actions
In 2004, founder David Hartsough asked members to disrupt U.S. terrorist-targeted operations in Najaf, Iraq
Member organizations include such anti-American, anti-Israel organizations as the Holy Land Trust and the International Solidarity Movement

The Nonviolent Peaceforce (NP) is a non-governmental organization (NGO) founded in 2001 by Mel Duncan and David Hartsough. Hartsough is also the founder of Peaceworkers, a similar anti-war effort. The NP states that its mission is "to build a trained, international civilian nonviolent peace force" that "will be sent to conflict areas to prevent death and destruction and protect human rights, thus creating the space for local groups to struggle nonviolently, enter into dialogue, and seek peaceful resolution." Members of this unarmed peace force would enter nations by which they are invited to help nonviolent factions therein perform acts of civil disobedience and disrupt military actions. The group's first campaign was an unsuccessful effort to end civil tensions in Sri Lanka.

In April 2004, Hartsough asked members of the NP and Peaceworkers to disrupt American operations in Najaf, Iraq, where terrorists were overrunning the streets. A Peaceworkers statement reported, "The Najaf Emergency Peace Team, 'Peace Between Peoples,' [which consists of] a handful of determined volunteers from several well-established peace/global justice/human rights and religious organizations, has now arrived in the area, to place themselves 'nonviolently, symbolically and physically' between the U.S. armed forces massed nearby and the civilian population of the ancient holy city - in the way of any American military assault."

Member organizations of the NP include several anti-American, anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian militant organizations such as Pax Christi-U.S.A., Global Exchange, September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, the International Peace Bureau, the Holy Land Trust, the Palestinian Center for Rapproachement Between People, the International Solidarity Movement, and Grassroots International.
In July 2002, the NP's European Coordinator Rachel Julian explained that her organization planned to achieve its objectives by "chang[ing] the attitude and/or the behavior of one or all of the conflict parties (e.g. by conflict resolution workshops or by sanctions against a government)"; "chang[ing] the means by which the conflict is carried out (e.g. by giving training in nonviolent resistance techniques)"; and "protect[ing] human rights" (e.g. by building international public pressure like Amnesty International does).

posted June 26, 2005 08:44 PM            

Oxfam UK Targets Israel's Right to Self Defense
By NGO Monitor
May 15, 2004

Israeli goods produced in the Occupied Territories: The position of Oxfam-Solidarity in Belgium
By NGO Monitor
August 4, 2003

Oxfam's Infamy
By David Meir-Levy
July 25, 2003

Oxfam Belgium Produces Political Poster
By NGO Monitor
June 24, 2003
Oxfam Supporter Services
Oxfam House
274 Banbury Road
Oxford
OX2 7DZ
Phone :0870 333 2700
URL : http://www.oxfam.org.uk/

International relief organization that condemns Israeli defense actions against terrorism
Presents unbalanced picture of Arab-Israeli conflict and displays a large degree of selective morality
Has demonstrated a tendency towards silence on human rights abuses committed by Palestinians, including the use of children for acts of terror
Has called for boycotts of Israeli products

Oxfam International describes itself as "a confederation of 12 organizations working together in more than 100 countries to find lasting solutions to poverty, suffering, and injustice." "We seek to help people organize so that they might gain better access to the opportunities they need to improve their livelihoods and govern their own lives," says Oxfam. "We also work with people affected by humanitarian disasters, with preventive measures, preparedness, as well as emergency relief." Oxfam further professes its commitment to "ensur[ing] that poor people have the rights, opportunities, and resources they need to improve and control their lives."

In practice, however, Oxfam is a highly politicized organization. Operating with an annual budget of over $300 million, Oxfam has made many political condemnations of Israel, while remaining silent about Palestinian-perpetrated human rights abuses - including suicide bombings and the use of children to carry out acts of terror. The British branch of Oxfam has expanded this political campaign to include also condemnations of Israeli security policies against terror attacks.

Oxfam Belgium recently produced a poster, in both Flemish and French, calling on Belgian consumers to boycott Israeli products; the poster declared that "Israeli fruits have a bitter taste," and featured blood dripping from an Israeli fruit.

Oxfam was a signatory to a petition of so-called "civil society" organizations that opposed globalization, big business in general, and "any effort to expand the powers of the World Trade Organization (WTO) through a new comprehensive round of trade liberalization." Members affiliated with some of the signatories actively participated in the November 1999 riots in which some 50,000 protesters did millions of dollars worth of property damage in their effort to shut down the WTO Conference in Seattle. In fact, Medea Benjamin - the leader of Global Exchange, which was another signatory to the petition - is widely credited as having been a chief organizing force behind the riots. Oxfam also endorsed a recent "Our World is Not for Sale" campaign similarly condemning the WTO.

Oxfam America was a signatory to a November 1, 2001 document characterizing the 9/11 attacks as a legal matter to be addressed by criminal-justice procedures rather than military means. Ascribing the hijackers' motives to alleged social injustices against which they were protesting, this document explained that "security and justice are mutually reinforcing goals that ultimately depend upon the promotion of all human rights for all people," and called on the United States "to promote fundamental rights around the world."

Oxfam is a member of OneWorld Network, an umbrella organization of more than 1,500 leftwing groups that, according to the OneWorld website, seek "to promote sustainable development, social justice, and human rights."

Oxfam has received funding from: the Ford Foundation; the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; the John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation; the Minneapolis Foundation; the Public Welfare Foundation; and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.

posted June 26, 2005 08:51 PM            

Organization that seeks to institute "peace studies" programs at all levels of education (from kindergarten through graduate school)
Blames America and Israel for most international crises in which they are involved

The San Francisco-based Peace and Justice Studies Association (PJSA) is the product of the 2001 merger of two previous "peace studies" organizations: the Consortium On Peace Research Education and Development (COPRED) and the Peace Studies Association (PSA). According to the mission statement posted on its homepage, PJSA aims "to create a just and peaceful world" by instituting "peace studies" programs at all levels of education (from kindergarten through graduate school); by "the forging of alliances among educators, students, activists, and other peace practitioners [sic]"; and through the "creation and nurturing of alternatives" to injustice, violence, and inequality.

Not indicated in PJSA's mission statement, however, is its virulently anti-American bias, characterized by a propensity to cast the United States as the villain in any and all international conflicts. According to PJSA secretary Lester Edwin J. Ruiz, for instance, the current War on Terror "has its roots in our [Americans'] refusal to be an equal part of the world community," and results from "our having taken a fragment of life and turned it into the only way of life decreed by God, Capital, or Phallus."

According to the summer 2003 issue of the Peace and Justice Studies Association's Peace Chronicle newsletter, the launching of Operation Desert Storm in 1991 to liberate Kuwait from Saddam Hussein's occupation was "a day of infamy" in an American "war of aggression" that was "no different from all the wars and attacks against the U.S. that our leaders called infamous."

The leader of PJSA is the anti-Israel activist Simona Sharoni. A native of Israel and the daughter of a Holocaust survivor from Romania, Sharoni is a founding member of "Women In Black," a group of Israeli women who sided with the Palestinian terrorists during the first Intifada. "Women in Black" members were nicknamed "the black witches" by Israeli soldiers, for their disruption of counter-terrorism activities and their harassment of Israeli security personnel at roadblocks and checkpoints.

Simona Sharoni has devoted her adult life to anti-Israel and anti-American activism. After leaving Israel in the 1990s, she taught at the American University in Washington, D.C., and is now a visiting professor at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, where COPRED-PSA/PJSA was based before moving to San Francisco. (Evergreen is also where Rachel Corrie was recruited to help the International Solidarity Movement obstruct Israeli Defense Forces in their war against Palestinian terrorists.)

In an interview with Georgetown University's campus newspaper, Sharoni denounced her Israeli Jewish parents and said she was "overwhelmed by the ease of the racist comments in the home I grew up in." She also compared Palestinian suicide bombers to anorexic girls and "gay teens who have to commit suicide because of rampant homophobia." Professor Sharoni believes that suicide bombings are not a crime against humanity but merely the manifestations of a psychological disorder brought about by the actions of the Israeli government.

Sharoni has chosen to prevent her four-year-old daughter from learning Hebrew, in order to "deprive her of her connection to a culture which has been problematic." She has condemned America's "dehumanized" Jews for their refusal to call the security fence in Judea and Samaria an "apartheid wall." And she has likened the residents of Palestinian refugee camps (who were put there and have been left there by their fellow Arabs) to inmates of Nazi death camps, quipping, "people [i.e., Israeli Jews] who lived in concentration camps should be able to understand what it is like to live in a refugee camp."

The summer 2003 issue of Peace Chronicle contained an article by PJSA member and Georgetown philosophy professor Mark Lance. Titled "Transfer By Siege," this piece provides a distorted analysis of the Security Fence in Judea and Samaria, comparing it to the Berlin Wall and depicting democratic Israel - rather than the forces seeking to destroy Israel - as a totalitarian presence in the Middle East. Lance describes the wall as a destructive barrier that divides Palestinian villages and makes it nearly impossible for Palestinians to earn a living or get to a hospital when necessary. To Mark Lance and the PJSA, the Security Fence is built not to protect innocent Israelis from suicide bombers and terrorist gangs, but rather is an "apartheid wall" designed to facilitate the "ethnic cleansing" of Palestinians. In his conclusion, Lance calls for a "massive international campaign to force Israel to end all aspects of the occupation."

Other articles in Peace Chronicle consist of long diatribes against the actions of the United States. Even in the wake of the September 11th atrocities, Lance warned that the "military police action" against the al Qaeda-sheltering Taliban was an "attack on an already devastated populace" that will bring about "massive death from starvation and malnutrition" of many Afghans. In a column in the Fall/Winter 2001 issue of Peace Chronicle, written in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Lance stated, "Both on the domestic and on the international fronts, the 'war' on terror promises to be a major step forward for the forces of totalitarianism and imperialism."

PJSA deploys its members—many of whom are teachers and professors—to recruit students for its anti-Israel, anti-America campaigns. PJSA co-chair (and New York City Department of Education employee) Matt Meyer, for instance, organized demonstrations outside New York Senator Chuck Schumer's Brooklyn residence after Schumer had supported the overthrow of Saddam Hussein's regime. The other PJSA co-chair, Nancy Hanawi, is a professor at UC-Berkeley; and the aforementioned PJSA secretary Lester Edwin J. Ruiz teaches at New York Theological Seminary. Most of the other PJSA board members are also educators who teach in the U.S. and Great Britain.

posted June 26, 2005 08:54 PM            

Israeli healthcare organization
Consistently condemns Israeli military reprisals against terrorists, but does not denounce the Palestinian terrorist attacks

According to its promotional material, Physicians for Human Rights - Israel (PHR-I) "was established in 1988 as a non-partisan, non-profit organization dedicated to promoting and protecting the right to health care in Israel and in territories under Israel's effective control . . . and opposes the subjugation of medical care to political considerations of any kind." But in actuality, PHR-I exploits claims of Israeli human rights violations for political purposes, and has adopted a biased and unbalanced stance that is in clear contradiction to its mission statement. PHR-I's blatant demonization of Israel resulted in the Israel Medical Association's decision to sever all ties with this organization. Nevertheless, PHR-I continues to receive funding from the European Union, the New Israel Fund, the Finnish Embassy, church organizations, and private donations.

PHR-I regularly condemns "the Israeli Occupation," drawing no moral distinction between Palestinian terrorist attacks targeting civilians, and Israeli military reprisals targeting those terrorists. The organization further believes that "the State of Israel has no authority to erect checkpoints or roadblocks as a form of total control of the movement of Palestinian residents within the West Bank and Gaza Strip"; such a position ignores the reasons behind the need for Israeli security measures to prevent Palestinian terrorists from acting with impunity and carrying out suicide bombings and other acts of terror against Israeli civilians.

Like most NGOs operating in the region, PHR-I has also taken an overtly political stance over the issue of Israel's security fence, being constructed for the purpose of preventing Palestinian terrorists from reaching Israeli population centers. On January 29, 2004, PHR-I took part in a demonstration "tour" in the area of Abu Dis, East Jerusalem, organized by a group known as Ta'ayush, which also included a number of speakers on the subject of the security fence. Ta'ayush advocates "concrete, daily actions of solidarity to end the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories," and has embarked on a campaign to bring down what it terms "the Apartheid Wall." According to PHR-I's press release of February 1, 2004, (provocatively entitled "PHR-Israel tour of the Jerusalem Stranglehold"), the organization "emphasized that the wall is just the latest step in Israel's policy of separating the East Jerusalem hospitals from the communities they serve" - an entirely unsubstantiated and highly politicized claim that ignores the context of terrorism.

PHR-I literature also implies that Israeli soldiers deliberately shoot at Palestinian civilians despite the clear existence of rules governing the use of live fire and a well-defined legal system to deal with any such abuses of those regulations.

PHR was a signatory to a November 1, 2001 document characterizing the 9/11 attacks as a legal matter to be addressed by criminal-justice procedures rather than military means. Ascribing the hijackers' motives to alleged social injustices against which they were protesting, this document explained that "security and justice are mutually reinforcing goals that ultimately depend upon the promotion of all human rights for all people," and called on the United States "to promote fundamental rights around the world."
http://www.discoverthenetwork.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=6582

posted June 26, 2005 08:58 PM            

Save the Children Educational resource center for teachers of Middle East affairs
Holds strong pro-Palestinian militant, anti-Israel bias

The Save the Children Fund (SCF) UK, along with the International SCF Alliance, have an annual income of almost $700 million and are active in over 100 countries, including the Palestinian Authority.

The SCF movement promotes itself as an educational resource center for teachers and educators who often lack an in-depth knowledge of Middle East affairs. The SCF is heavily funded by American Express, from whose card members the former has received more than $1 million. Other global partners include Serco Group, the Boston Consulting Group, Ikea, Diner's Club, Royal Doulton, and the SAS group. A single project in Afghanistan loosely linked to the SCF was supported by the Edmond J Safra Philanthropic Foundation. The rest of the SCF's funding comes from appeals and donations, legacies, volunteer branches, retail income, and trusts and legacies.

The SCF runs a number of politically charged projects involving Palestinians in Gaza, including a very biased version of the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The SCF has also failed to condemn the Palestinian exploitation of children for use in suicide terror attacks, and is conducting a major campaign to demonize Israeli defenses against terrorism (such as the security fence construction) - including a presentation at the Geneva-based session of the United Nations Human Rights Commission in 2004.

posted June 26, 2005 09:02 PM            

Views the United States and Israel as the world's primary perpetrators of evil
Opposes U.S. aid to Israel
Deems the 9/11 attacks criminal actions rather than acts of war
Opposes U.S. military response to 9/11

Based in Washington, D.C. and presiding over more than a dozen additional chapters throughout the United States, the group Stop US Tax-funded Aid to Israel Now (SUSTAIN) was established in late 2000. It views the United States and Israel as the primary perpetrators of evil in the modern world. This organization emphatically states, "We are committed to building a campaign against US military and economic aid to Israel." SUSTAIN's campaigns, as listed on its website, consist of: educating the public about U.S. financial support of Israel on federal Tax-Day; taking action against the CATERPILLAR bulldozer company (to protest the Israeli Defense Force's use of that company's equipment in the demolition of Palestinian terrorists' homes); denouncing the construction of Israel's security fence; and divestment from Israeli interests and corporations.

Just two weeks after the 9/11 attacks, SUSTAIN organized a Global Justice Intifada in Washington, D.C. The event condemned what it called "US imperialism," and made a call for justice on behalf of "Palestinians resisting Israeli occupation" and "Iraqis fighting genocidal sanctions." Refusing to characterize the 9/11 attacks as acts of war against the United States, SUSTAIN describes them instead as "criminal attacks" warranting a legal rather than a military response.

Mark Lance, a professor at Georgetown University, is a founding member of SUSTAIN and is the group's principal contact. Lance refers to the 1948 creation of Israel as "the Nakba," which Palestinians translate as "the Catastrophe." In the Spring of 2002, Lance wrote an article titled, 'Imperialism and Anti-authoritarian resistance after 9-11: Some Crucial Questions,' in which he discussed his desire to organize "solidarity" groups within the Palestinian territories and Lebanon, while at the same time working with the terrorist organizations Hamas and Hezbollah. These groups, wrote Lance, "though easy to criticize from a non-authoritarian perspective, must be understood in terms of the role [they play]. Hamas provides the majority of social services to the people of this oppressed and overpopulated strip of land. Brutalized by Israel, and neglected by the PNA, Hamas has been the only group to take up the slack. Thus, organizing that rejects them out of hand or in all respects is simply impossible. This applies even more to the role of Hezbollah in the south of Lebanon."

posted June 26, 2005 09:04 PM              

There is definitely something there.

posted June 26, 2005 09:07 PM            

Agency of the United Nations that was ostensibly created to assist Arab refugees
Works to perpetuate indefinitely the "refugee" status of Palestinians
Supports Palestinian "Right of Return," which would effectively destroy Israel
Promotes a false image of Palestinian oppression under Israel

"The Greatest Obstacle to Peace in the Middle East," it turns out, is not Jewish "settlements," but the United Nations, and specifically one of its agencies, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). This was the conclusion of experts at the November 2004 Jerusalem Summit, an annual conference that brings together important thinkers from around the world on issues relating to Israel.

Established shortly after the Israeli-Arab armistice in 1950 to assist Arab refugees exclusively, UNRWA's mandate was specifically designed to perpetuate their status as refugees in order to further the Arab agenda of destroying Israel.

For half a century UNRWA has funneled billions of dollars to perpetuate the status of "Palestinians as refugees." But unlike all other refugees in the world, Palestinian refugees, according to UNRWA's definition include not only those who became refugees, but all of their descendents as well.

UNRWA also includes anyone who applied for relief, regardless of when they arrived or where they came from. Even when they move out of the "camps" (actually neighborhoods and towns) and/or become citizens of another country (as in the case of Jordan), they still retain their status as "Palestinian refugees."

This explains why the number of refugees in other countries and areas of the world eventually dissipates, while for Palestinians, it amplifies.

According to Daniel Pipes, director of the Middle East Forum, Arab refugees numbered around 700,000 at most in 1948. Over the years that should have diminished to around 200,000. Instead, being a "Palestinian refugee" is passed down from one generation to the next. Today there are an estimated four million (although no one really knows, because of UNRWA's faulty records) - and the number is growing.

Terrorism prevents any progress towards peace. The "Palestinian Right of Return" (to Israel) -- a basic, non-negotiable demand -- encourages the refusal to accept Israel's existence and fuels Palestinian terrorism. It reinforces Palestinians' belief in their innocence and victimization, promoting a culture of denial and self-pity, sabotaging any hope for change.

A main perpetrator of this policy is UNWRA, which not only provides food, educational and medical assistance to generations of "Palestinians," but insists that they not be repatriated into their host countries - like all other refugees around the world. For "Palestinian refugees," their children and their great-grand children, UNWRA insists, their only home is "Israeli-occupied Palestine."

Not that these "refugees" have a choice. Martin Sherman, Professor of Political Science at Tel Aviv University presented recent polls which indicated that most Palestinians, given the opportunity, would prefer some form of compensation and the opportunity to move to another country and get on with their lives. They cannot. The UN, UNRWA and the Arab countries won't allow it.

No Arab country except Jordan -- where they now constitute more than two-thirds of the population -- accepted Palestinians as citizens. Saudi Arabia, for example, recently passed a law allowing all foreigner workers in the country to apply for Saudi citizenship in 2005 - except Palestinians.

In Lebanon, Pipes pointed out, where more than 400,000 "Palestinian refugees" live in UNWRA-supported "camps," residents cannot work or even go to school outside their designated areas. Ditto for Syria.

"UNRWA has outlived its utility and should be dismantled," Pipes suggested. Since more than a third of the funds for UNRWA come from the United States, he urged an immediate end to this policy. (Saudi Arabia and the oil-rich Gulf states contribute about 2 percent of UNRWA's budget; the EU countries and Canada make up the rest.)

Dore Gold, Israel's former Ambassador to the United Nations and now head of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs and legal expert and Columbia University Professor Anne Bayefsky, characterized the UN as a total failure. Gold's recently published Tower of Babble (Crown, 2004) effectively documents the case.

A major source of anti-Semitic and anti-Israel sentiment, the UN has contributed to wholesale massacres and terrorism around the world in places like Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur. Its refusal to condemn Islamic-based terrorism against Israel has encouraged this scourge.

According to Bayefsky, nearly a third of the resolutions of the Committee on Human Rights condemn Israel; no resolutions are submitted against two-thirds of the rest of the countries in the world (including Sudan and North Korea). Official UN events supporting the "inalienable rights of the Palestinian refugees" are part of the demonization of Israel and encourage a hard-line stance that undermines any progress towards peace. The effect, she said is lethal.

The Organization of Islamic Conferences (OIC) dominates much of what goes on in the General Assembly, Bayefsky said, and prevents even a definition of terrorism. The 56 members of the OIC are also part of the 115-member Non-Aligned Movement which constitutes an automatic majority in the 191-member U.N.

Dr. Avi Beker, professor at Tel Aviv University's School of Government, called for UNRWA's elimination and the creation of a new mechanism to resettle and rehabilitate the refugees. This, he emphasized, is a prerequisite to any peace process.

Of the 4 million "Palestinian refugees," listed by UNRWA for Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, West Bank and Gaza in 2002, about 1,250,000 reside in the areas controlled by UNRWA. The rest live comfortably -- sometimes luxuriously -- outside, often in nearby villages and towns. In addition to the free assistance and services they receive, as "refugees" they pay no taxes.

In Jordan, Syria, and the West Bank, only about 18 percent live in UNRWA-administered areas; in Lebanon and Gaza that figure rises to more than half. The most violent and volatile areas are those with the highest number living under UNRWA.

Nearly all teachers in UNRWA schools belong to unions affiliated with terrorist organizations, like Hamas. Schools, textbooks, religious institutions and Palestinian media teach hatred of Jews and Israelis and glorify homicide bombing ("martyrdom"). This has been documented by Palestinian Media Watch (PMW), Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), and Center for Monitoring the Impact of Peace.

Recent revelations have shown that UNRWA receives funding from terrorist organizations (including some with al Qaeda connections), and that "refugee camps" for which UNRWA is responsible are major centers of terrorism. Nearly all the missile attacks from Gaza into Israel originate from UNRWA-administered territory. In Jenin, the UNRWA-run camp is called "the terrorist capital of the world." Except by UNRWA.

posted July 02, 2005 09:04 PM            

quote:

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Jwhop, are there any human rights organizations you do support? Or are they pretty much all vile, filthy scum?

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Sorry, I've been pretty busy TINK.

I don't give a tinkers damn about any NGO whose thrust is political whether they be so called human rights or relief organizations.

I have the utmost respect for those organizations which see a problem, spend the funds of their organization and their own time attacking the problem...instead of attempting to get face time in front of TV cameras to bash governments which are not the problem. I utterly abhor Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch for their political hectoring and now that I know who is at the top of these organizations and their political associations, I know why the focus of their attacks are on the US.

There are some real human rights violators in the world. Saddam Hussein was one, Kim Jong-il is another. The negative comments about these governments were mild compared to what these bas*ards said about the US.

Prisoner abuse at Gitmo!!! Give me a break. Were it up to me, I would revoke their charter, cut off any US government funding, specify to the UN that no US funds are to go to their support, revoke their tax exempt status and usher any non-citizens to the nearest airport for deportation.

Up theirs.

Hope that answers your question!

Now, these are the same 2 organizations I sent email to about the Shiavo case...a woman being starved and dehydrated to death. If the right to life isn't a human right, then nothing is....but they were not to be found on the issue. These 2 are gold plated phonies...which is what I told them.

posted July 02, 2005 09:43 PM              

Well, I don't know much about Human Rights Watch, but I can recall writing letters to Saddam on Amnesty's behalf back when I was a teenager. Waaaaaaay back. (Also, to the late King Hussein of Jordon. Odd. The Leftists tend to like him) I don't remember hearing anything much from them about American iniquities, except for the Leonard Peltier case and the death penalty in general. I agree with them 100% on the latter and feel they have a valid point regarding the former.

"I have the utmost respect for those organizations which see a problem, spend the funds of their organization and their own time attacking the problem ..."

Name one please. (in case I'd like to send my money to someone besides Greenpeace this week. )

Gitmo doesn't worry you at all? All that power, with no restraining influence? Something bad was/is bound to happen. Don't you think that in times of war human rights are cast aside, at least to some degree? I mean really, who has the time for that stuff?

posted July 02, 2005 10:21 PM              

quote:

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I mean really, who has the time for that stuff?

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