Konflikten i Syrien

/.../You say, “It is important to nurture the rights-respecting elements of political Islam while standing firm against repression in its name,” but you fail to call for the most basic guarantee of rights—the separation of religion from the state. Salafi mobs have caned women in Tunisian cafes and Egyptian shops; attacked churches in Egypt; taken over whole villages in Tunisia and shut down Manouba University for two months in an effort to exert social pressure on veiling. And while “moderate Islamist” leaders say they will protect the rights of women (if not gays), they have done very little to bring these mobs under control. You, however, are so unconcerned with the rights of women, gays, and religious minorities that you mention them only once, as follows: “Many Islamic parties have indeed embraced disturbing positions that would subjugate the rights of women and restrict religious, personal, and political freedoms. But so have many of the autocratic regimes that the West props up.” Are we really going to set the bar that low? This is the voice of an apologist, not a senior human rights advocate.

/…/The problem is this: Roth has been unable to separate political advocacy from human rights research. When the two come into conflict, he favors the former. The reason for writing the piece at Commentary was yesterday’s terrorist attack in Jerusalem in which a Palestinian Hamas activist drove at high speed into a crowd at a Jerusalem train station, injuring both Israelis and Americans, and killing a three-month-old girl. Even though Hamas claimed responsibility for the attack, Roth was unwilling to call it a terrorist attack, and instead implied it was an unfortunate accident.
That’s just the tip of the iceberg. In early September, I showed that Roth basically made up numbers when he tweeted with regard to a massacre last year in Egypt, arbitrarily upping the figures he used when he felt insulted by the Egyptian government.
Then, of course, there has been HRW’s partnership with Al-Karama, an organization whose head ended up being designated an Al Qaeda financier by the US Treasury Department. That should have cast doubt immediately upon the information HRW accepted from Al-Karama to incorporate into HRW reports. Perhaps HRW might not have known that its partner was, in effect, propagandizing for the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda against states like the United Arab Emirates against whom Al-Karama had a beef. But at the very least, this should have been cause to rescind and reinvestigate absent the corrupted information. Roth, however, chose to do nothing, in effect endorsing Al-Karama’s shoddy scholarship.
A colleague points out that I missed one of Roth’s most egregious statements. Here’s Ken Roth carrying water for the Islamic State and that group’s ‘respect’ for human rights: “ISIS in #Iraq reportedly tried not to alienate local population, unlike PM Maliki & his violent, sectarian repression. http://trib.al/LqfFrjZ ”