Human Rights Watch has come under withering attack lately, led by David Bernstein and Noah Pollack, prompted by a notorious fund-raising appeal made in Saudi Arabia that explicitly appealed to the Saudis to help fund HRW anti-Israel work. 

The non-governmental organization monitoring outfit, NGO Monitor, has long noted the anti-Israel bias of the group, with its obsessive focus on supposed wrongs committed by Israel and its blase attitude towards the rest of the world, which is filled with genocidal thugs, tyrants, despots, and Saudi royalty.

Human Rights Watch was deeply involved in Durban I - the conference (supposedly) against racism that became an anti-Semitic, anti-Americna hatefest.

The leader of its Mideast division, Sarah Leah Whitson (a class mate of Barack Obama's at Harvard Law School, by the way) has long been involved in pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel activism. But, as noted by Gerald Steinberg, who is the head of NGO Monitor, she is not alone in her anti-Israel animus among those involved in running HRW: the organization is rent with anti-Israel activists (many of them Jewish)

When confronted with this evidence of bais, the well-compensated leader of HRW, Ken Roth, said criticism regarding its reporting on Israel comes from people who "fight back with lies and deception."  Roth never identified these lies, for a simple reason; they were the truth. HRW does not deal in truth.

Well, I guess HRW does  now-at least in a somewhat minor, but welcome, way. HRW has just issued a report, a couple of years too late, declaring that Hamas's firing of rockets into Israel is a "war crime."

Conclusions we can draw from this episode? HRW does not like being scrutinized,though it feels free to subject others to scrutiny and judgment. Secondly, a determined group of individuals who can marshall facts and craft a compelling case can influence an organization to bend to meet its own declared principles. Thirdly, one does not necessarily need the New York Times on your side and publicize your findings, because that paper has been silent for years about the excesses and prejudice of the HRW (while the Wall Street Journal and National Review have been outstanding in uncovering the group's bias).

Kudos to Bernstein, Pollak, and Steinberg for their superb work on Human Rights Watch. This move on HRW's part was probably tactical in nature. Perhaps the powers at HRWwere thin-skinned (as Professor Bernstein believes) and perhaps their donations started to dry up. Maybe the group thinks that a report on Hamas now will make it easier to criticize Israel later.

We shall see. But the monitoring of the monitors should continue.