HRW Suspends Their Nazi Obsessed Anti-Israel Investigator, Keeps Rest Of Anti-Israel Team Intact (Plus: Entertaining Garlasco-Related Hate Mail)
First thing's first: Elder of Ziyon is the guy who stumbled onto Garlasco's creepy and overly autobiographical Amazon review page. The lump sum of my subsequent work mostly involved the ability to Google "Marc HRW Flak" and take screenshots. I mention this both because Elder's work is consistently on point when it comes to debunking HRW and its ideological ilk - see both the Garlasco debunking that put him on the scent and his initial comments on the Goldstone Report that just dropped - and because that's where you should be directing your hate mail. Simple fairness demands that pearls like this...
What a load of shit you right on your blog. Obviously you don't have too much time for reading and education, twat. Bas Finnis
... and this...
Why not apply your website/blog to sway the Israeli government away from its Nazi-like behaviour?... Or perhaps you support the behaviour of Israel which places you amongst the Nazis .... not against them! Mathematemike
... get spread around evenly. Plus MR has already gotten enough approbation. As Stan texted me at 4:16am, this blog has joined the ranks of venerable right-wing fanatics everywhere:
The group, Human Rights Watch, had initially thrown its full support behind the analyst, Marc Garlasco, when the news of his hobby came out last week. On Monday night, the group shifted course and suspended him with pay, "pending an investigation," said Carroll Bogert, the group's associate director. "We have questions about whether we have learned everything we need to know," she said. ... Yaron Ezrahi, a professor of political science at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, said he did not believe that Mr. Garlasco's interest in memorabilia could support allegations of "premeditated bias." He said, however, that Human Rights Watch's credibility might have been wounded because Mr. Garlasco's hobby "has armed the right-wing fanatics" who "work day and night to demonize any individual or organization that raises questions about the military practices of Israel when they end up even with unintended civilian casualties."
The real question is what Human Rights Watch is investigating. Presumably they're not investigating Garlasco's obsession with Nazism itself, since by their own correct admission there's nothing intrinsically wrong about collecting WWII paraphernalia. And it can't be a process-level investigation about what Garlasco revealed during hiring since I doubt they have a "do you intend to write a detailed 430 page tome on shiny Nazi medals" question on the screener.
Almost by definition the investigation has to be about whether Garlasco's fascination with anti-Jewish genocidal lunatics was the source of his anti-Israel bias. Fair enough. Per this morning's postmortems from Elder and NGO Monitor and David Bernstein, there's plenty of grist for that mill in Garlasco's four Gaza and Lebanon reports.
But if that's the case then Garlasco's motivations should be secondary to the inquiry. To the extent that HRW is investigating the source of his bias, they're already admitting there was bias. Figuring out why their Nazi-obsessed propagandist was indistinguishable from the rest of their propagandists would be interesting. It's what I've consistently said should be their focus. But an investigation into why they're an echo chamber for anti-Israel fabrications in the first place would probably be more to the point.
References:
* HRW's pattern of bias in its "Precisely Wrong" report
* Goldstone report inaccuracies part 1 [Elder]
* Rights Group Assailed for Analyst's Nazi Collection [NYT]
* HRW's Garlasco suspended [Elder]
* Investigating HRW's Credibility in the Wake of the Garlasco Affair [NGO Monitor]
* HRW's Garlasco Suspended: [Volokh]
* Marc Garlasco: Hey, Sorry If You Were Creeped Out By My Nazi Obsession, Which I'm Now Going To Pretend I Was Never Concerned About [MR]
Previously:
* HRW: "No Basis" For Claims That Hezbollah Used Human Shields. MR: What About All The Photos And Videos [Video]
* No, The Stormfront.org Flak88 Guy Is Not Marc Garlasco | Mere Rhetoric
* Marc Garlasco - Is HRW's Anti-Israel Investigator A Nazi-Obsessed Collector?
