Dear editor:
Rarely for over a decade does a month go by without a card carrying member of the main stream media printing an op ed by Kenneth Roth in which he alleges that the democratically elected government of Israel is an apartheid genocidal state. His presidency of Human Rights Watch from 1993-2022 enthralls the media as to Roth’s alleged human rights concerns.
The reality is that Roth has demonstrated that he has no concern for the human rights of the Jewish people of Israel.
The founder and former president of Human Rights Watch, Robert L. Bernstein, declared in a lengthy and famous Op Ed in The New York Times in 2009, that Human Rights Watch had devolved into an anti Israel organization (“Rights Watchers, Lost in the Mideast”, October 19, 2009).
Mr. Bernstein (Harvard 1944) wrote:
“Human Rights Watch has lost critical perspective on a conflict in which Israel has been repeatedly attacked by Hamas and Hezbollah, organizations that go after Israeli citizens and use their own people as human shields….Yet, Israel, the repeated victim of aggression, faces the brunt of Human Right Watch’s criticism…
“Only by returning to its founding mission and the spirit of humility that animated it can Human Rights Watch resurrect itself as a moral force in the Middle East and throughout the world. If it fails to do that, its credibility will be seriously undermined and its important role in the world significantly diminished.” (Robert L. Bernstein, New York Times, 10/19/09)
Also, on December 5, 2022 Steven Postal in the Jewish News Service wrote that “NGO Monitor finds over 300 flaws with Human Rights Watch report on Israel’s ‘apartheid.'”
Now the media is stumbling all over each other to print the fact that Kenneth Roth has embraced the International Criminal Court’s calumny that Israel has committed genocide notwithstanding that the United Nations and the International Court of Justice has FIRED their Special Advisor on the Prevention of Genocide, Kenyan Alice Wairimu Nderitu, because she refused to accuse Israel of intentionally committing mass murder.
Alice Wairimu Nderitu said “her prevention mandate does not allow her to express a position on whether the crime of genocide or any specific other international crime has been committed, which can only be determined by a competent, independent and impartial court of law.”
Her firing makes it obvious to anyone who is not an antisemite that there is not a scintilla of difference between the virulent antisemitism of United Nations’ Secretary General Antonio Guterres and the UN’s International Court of Justice, and Roland Freisler and the Nazi People’s Court, the “Volksgerichtshof.”
The record is clear notwithstanding how many times the mainstream media promotes Kenneth Roth’s thirty year documented intense animus towards the democratically elected government of Israel — an animus that Robert L. Bernstein made clear in 2009 — arrest warrants from the International Criminal Court for genocide are as imbued with antisemitism and as specious as arrest warrants from the Nazi People’s Court and Roland Freisler.
Richard Sherman
Margate, Florida
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