A few weeks ago Human Rights Watch made news when it was revealed in the Wall Street Journal that the group had sent representatives to Saudi Arabia to tout HRW’s battles with “pro-Israel pressure groups in the US, the European Union and the United Nations” as part of a fund-raising pitch to wealthy Saudi donors, including one member of the royal family’s Shura council. The deputy director of HRW’s Middle East section, Joe Stork, has a long history of doing battle with pro-Israel groups of all kinds. As this magazine pointed out at the time, Stork “attended a conference on ‘Zionism and Racism’ in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. There he made a presentation that lamented the ‘devastating defeat’ of the Six Day War, which he attributed to ‘imperialist collusion that lay behind the Israeli blitzkrieg.’ A decade later, Stork was still railing against ‘the pernicious influence of the Zionist lobby.'” Well, apparently that was only the tip of the iceberg. According to the Israeli paper Ma’ariv (via Commentary‘s Noah Pollak), Stork once praised the “achievement” that was the murder of eleven Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympic Games in 1972:

These are the words of the second in command for the Middle East section at an organization that routinely condemns Israel for violating the laws of war, as Human Rights Watch did last week when it accused Israel of targeting civilians waving white flags based on nothing more than the testimony of a few Palestinian “witnesses.” The IDF shot back with video showing a Hamas terrorist planting a roadside bomb before trying to flee Israeli forces disguised as a white flag-waving civilian. There is a pattern here — biased staffers with radical views making allegations without any evidence and paying no price for doing it. And it’s a pattern that is being played out in other parts of the world where HRW maintains a presence.