Marc Garlasco, Human Rights Watch’s senior military analyst, is shaking things up in the human rights community. It wasn’t always cool to wear Nazi insignia while drinking beers with your fellow anti-Israel activists. Some in the human rights community even frowned on that kind of behavior. But not anymore. HRW is standing by Garlasco, and Garlasco has come out swinging against his critics who, because they “aren’t fascinated by military history,” assume that his hobby of collecting, photographing, caring for, and even wearing Nazi memorabilia is “weird” and even a tad inappropriate. Garlasco, though, does make some small concession to reality::
Just to be clear: nobody got upset because Garlasco was excited about an American pilot’s uniform. People were upset because Garlasco was gushing with praise about a leather SS jacket being shown off by a man who was almost certainly a neo-Nazi and who closed his note with Nazi slogans — in the original German. Human Rights Watch can do whatever it wants — but unfortunately for Garlasco, news of his Nazi fetish comes in the midst of a series of shocking revelations about the HRW Middle East team. There’s the director who went to Saudi Arabia to raise money from regime officials by pandering to anti-Israel sentiment. There’s the deputy director who, it was recently reported, put his name to a statement celebrating the “achievement” of the Munich massacre in which eleven Israeli athletes were murdered by Palestinian terrorists during the 1972 Olympic Games. And now there’s Garlasco. This is the troika that sits in judgment of Israel — a wanna-be Nazi, a terrorist sympathizer, and a Saudi supplicant. In refusing to take any action in the face of such devastating reports, HRW proves what many Americans have long suspected — that this kind of fringe, radical, anti-Israel politics is representative of the human rights community at large. HRW has become the Van Jones of human rights groups, confirming all our worst suspicions, providing endless entertainment, serving to discredit everything they touch. If only the Obama administration had been so arrogant and stubborn as HRW.
