...The answer is, apparently, "at least somewhat longer." Consider how Yglesias starts his piece yesterday on R. Bernstein: "It's certainly news that Human Rights Watch's critics were able to get a former HRW chairman to slam the organization for having the temerity to hold Israel to the same standards of international humanitarian law to which it holds every other country."

Yglesias provides no evidence that HRW's critics "got" R. Bernstein to do anything. HRW's harshest and most persistent critics are a motley collection of bloggers and tiny NGOs like CAMERA and NGO Monitor, who are in no position to influence a person of R. Bernstein's stature in any way, except of course through the force of their critiques. It seems beyond Yglesias to acknowledge that R. Bernstein is simply a long-time human rights activist who is sincerely troubled by the sharp left-wing, anti-Israel turn HRW has taken...

Andrew Sullivan, now a leading spokesman for the UN Human Rights Council approach to Israel, lists as his quote of the day the following inanity from the Bobby Bigwheel of the Juicebox Mafia, Matt Yglesias:

"If people want to say that the whole quest to articulate objective human rights standards and international humanitarian law is inherently futile or misguided, then fine. But an awful lot of people who claim not to believe that seem to want to turn around and reject the underlying premises of the endeavor when it turns out that Israel -- like its adversaries -- sometimes violates those standards," - Matt Yglesias.

It turns out that Hamas and Hezbollah sometimes violate human rights standards? The self-declared purpose of these groups is to destroy Israel and murder Jews everywhere through the use of terrorism. They sometimes violate human rights standards? Every moment of their existence is a violation of human rights standards.

This is where the Juiceboxers and their new playground chaperone repudiate one of the most important tenets of international legal and humanitarian traditions: the concept of jus ad bellum, which asks the question of whether instigating hostilities is legitimate. To put it simply, this is the moral distinction between killing an intruder who seeks to murder your family and being the intruder himself. In the former case, you have a right to open fire. In the latter case, you have no right to expect not to be on the receiving end of open fire.

Yet Yglesias and Sullivan do not acknowledge any such distinction. To them, there appears to be little or no moral difference between the al-Qassam Brigades and the Israeli army, because the intentions of these two fighting forces count for nothing...

...On the question of whether HRW focuses grossly disproportionate resources to target Israel, "helping those who wish to turn Israel into a pariah state", simply counting publications from the Middle East division is very misleading. Some HRW statements are "fire and forget", while others (mainly when Israel is the target) are accompanied by major marketing campaigns. HRW issued four lengthy and largely fictitious "research reports" condemning Israel in six months -- each with a press conference at the American Colony Hotel (the hub of the Palestinian media campaign) in Jerusalem, numerous one-on-one press interviews, and meetings with diplomats. In contrast, most of the statements on the Saudi, Egypt, etc. are quickly buried, with no UN investigations , sanctions or ICC action. The token report on Hamas rocket attacks (HRW's artificial "balance" and involving no research) appeared six months after the war ended, with no mention of Iranian support and weapons. A week later, HRW held another press conference which generated far more attention via the sensational (and fabricated) charge that the IDF killed Palestinian civilians waving white flags. The Hamas rocket report, like HRW's criticism of Hezbollah in 2006, was immediately forgotten.

None of this means that violations by Israel and other democratic societies involved in dirty asymmetric warfare should be ignored. But this is far from the grossly disproportionate targeting of Israel by HRW's biased Middle East division, which, among other damage, is responsible for the total devaluation of universal human rights norms.

...Nowhere did Bernstein argue that open societies should not be subject to scrutiny. What he said is that the amount of attention HRW pays to Israel is wildly out of proportion to Israel's violations, especially when Israel is compared with the Middle East's dozens of dictatorships. Misrepresenting the plain meaning of Bernstein's argument allows HRW to rebut an accusation that he never made...

...Perhaps HRW is trying to win over its prospective Saudi patrons who have routinely backed the Sudanese government led by ICC fugitive Omar al-Bashir. In addition to Saudi Arabia, HRW's support of Goldstone aligns it with such human rights stalwarts as Cuba, Libya, Iran, Malaysia, Venezuela, Egypt and Hamas, which have all vigorously advocated for Goldstone's adoption. In contrast, democratic countries like Canada, the US, Italy, Hungary and the Netherlands all refused to endorse the mission's mandate or its findings.

HRW's overzealous promotion of Goldstone and its siding with the world's worst regimes are further examples of why Elie Wiesel has called for a full and complete investigation of HRW, Irwin Cotler (former Canadian justice minister and attorney for Nelson Mandela) has remarked that Ken "Roth writes not like a lawyer - let alone a human rights lawyer - but as a propagandist," and now its own founder believes the group needs to "resurrect itself" and return to its "spirit of humility."...