Jonathan Cook, Electronic Lebanon, 25 September 2006
In a recent article on this site criticising Human Rights Watch for singling out Hizbullah rather than Israel for harsher condemnation of its military actions during the Lebanon war, I made sure to quote the organisation fairly and accurately before seeking to refute its arguments. Unfortunately, in a response published on Counterpunch by HRW’s Middle East policy director, Sarah Leah Whitson, did not return the favour. Possibly realising that her case was weak, she decided to paraphrase my argument instead, misrepresenting it, and only then try to rebut it.
According to Whitson, I claim to know that Hizbullah was trying to hit military rather than civilian targets in Israel during this summer’s war because on several occasions its rockets actually did strike military targets. If only, for her sake, that were my argument. As she points out, it is easy to discredit such reasoning: if Hizbullah’s rockets were entirely random, they might still have hit an Israeli military site or two by chance.
By misrepresenting my position, Whitson benefits in two ways. First, she is able to suggest that I am an apologist, naive or mischievious, for Hizbullah’s war crimes. I am either a dupe or a dissembler. And second, she enjoys the satisfaction of asserting that she and her organisation are facing down the extremists on both sides: apologists for Hizbullah’s war crimes like me on the one hand, and the supporters of pre-emptive wars and torture like Alan Dershowitz on the other. Whitson can then smugly claim to be occupying the sensible centre.
If this is how one of the directors of HRW distorts my arguments and evidence when I carefully set out my case in black and white on the page, one has to wonder how faithfully she and her organisation sift the evidence in the far trickier cases relating to human rights, where things are rarely so black and white. [More]