On Monday, the founder of the non-government organization Human Rights Watch issued a scathing editorial condemning the organization for its recent support of a U.N. resolution that accused Israel of war crimes.
"HRW has lost critical perspective on a conflict in which Israel has been repeatedly attacked by Hamas and Hezbollah, organizations that go after Israeli citizens and use their own people as human shields," wrote Robert Bernstein, the chairman of Human Rights Watch from 1978 to 1998, in the New York Times.
His criticism echoes longtime critics of the organization who accused it of selectively prosecuting war crimes to suit liberal international agendas.
On Friday, HRW had pushed through a U.N. vote asserting that Israel had committed war crimes earlier this year as part of Operation Cast Lead. In that operation, Israel took to the offensive to stop thousands of Palestinian rockets from entering its southern border.
Bernstein's editorial didn't mention the recent vote. But the timing of the editorial and the vote seemed to indicate that it was the final straw for a long-frustrated founder.
Bernstein specifically mentioned the inability of the HRW to distinguish between "open" and "closed" societies, something Robert P. Barnidge, Jr., a professor at Reading law school, said reflected a longstanding institutional problem within the organization. Bernstein seemed to condemn the conflagration of liberal democracies and illiberal autocracies.
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