Yesterday Andrew Sullivan defended Human Rights Watch from a growing chorus of critics including HRW’s founder, who took to the op-ed page of the New York Times this week to castigate the organization for its obsession with Israel at the expense of real human rights abusers in the Middle East like Saudi Arabia. Sullivan also attacked UN Watch, an NGO that does exactly what its name implies and which organized a speech by Colonel Richard Kemp, the former commander of British forces in Afghanistan, at the UN Human Rights Council last week. Kemp rebuked the UN and Richard Goldstone for their biased and inaccurate report alleging Israeli war crimes in Gaza. But Sullivan wasn’t impressed. “For a little background on this neutral observer,” Sullivan snipped, “here’s the Wikipedia entry on UN Watch, the hard neocon group Kemp is representing.” UN Watch executive director Hillel Neuer responds:
To disparage last week’s compelling UN testimony of British hero and military expert Col. Richard Kemp (the speech now ranked as YouTube’s 25th Top Rated News Video of the week), Sullivan tries to discredit us – the Geneva non-governmental organization that sponsored the officer’s address – as being a “hard Neocon group.” Sullivan’s inexplicable slur fails even in its intended ad hominem effect given that the former commander of British forces in Afghanistan already made the same remarks on the BBC during the war in January. If Sullivan disagrees with the content, it’s neither here nor there that we invited the British hero to repeat his words before the Goldstone-loving despots in Geneva. The slur is also nothing shy of incoherent. If we are to believe Andrew Sullivan, UN Watch would become the first “hard neocon” group in history to be chaired by a former Carter Administration official who actively campaigned for Barack Obama’s election to the presidency, to lobby for gay rights, featuring as a leading spokesman the father of Canada’s gay marriage bill, and to actively welcome the U.S. decision to join the UN Human Rights Council. Sullivan has his sources, though: he relies on the universally respected scholarly authority of… anonymous Wikipedia users.
