Human rights advocate vetoed at Kennedy School for being “anti-Israel”
JVL Introduction
Kenneth Roth, outgoing head of Human Rights Watch, was a shoe-in for a prestigious appointment at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Prestigious for him and prestigious for the School.
Only he was vetoed. The reason given was clear and transparent: he has an “anti-Israel bias”. There had long been attacks on HRW for being too critical of Israel, but its recent report, A Threshold Crossed, arguing that “Israeli authorities are committing the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution”, was the last straw.
It led to what Peter Beinart described recently as America’s most prominent Jewish organizations accusing the world’s leading human rights organizations of promoting hatred of Jews.
In a careful analysis Michael Massing tells the story of how this pro-Israel bias operates.
It is essentially one of power and influence in academia in the USA – in which money talks but so, too, do intelligence services like the CIA. and nowhere more so than in the defence policy, military strategy, and intelligence gathering institutes which largely make up the Kennedy School.
Nothing surprising, really, but having it laid out in detail quite takes your breath away…
This article was originally published by The Nation on Thu 5 Jan 2023. Read the original here.
Why the Godfather of Human Rights Is Not Welcome at Harvard
Ken Roth, who ran Human Rights Watch for 29 years, was denied a fellowship at the Kennedy School for having the temerity to criticize Israel.
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“Shoo-in”, please.
Unless of course it wasn’t a typo but perhaps the phrase: “putting the boot-in” flitted across the writer’s mind”?
[JVL web ed. It wasn’t a typo. I just always believed it was “shoe-in”. You live and learn!]
I wonder how long U.S. “scholars and practitioners” will be prepared to go along with the extreme expressed public views of some new members of Israel’s government. Especially when a few supposedly “Liberal” commentators now occasionally employ the terms “racist” and “fascist”, in addition to “apartheid” in their critiques of some Israeli Government Ministers.
No big news here. The Israel lobby is commandeering every source it can.
This is like something to be read in a badly written pulp-fiction novel, but is – actually – fact. All of it.
The US funds Israel. Israel then uses – some – of that money to corrupt a prestigious US educational establishment.
No one would buy that book, as the idea is too fantastical.
I’m assuming, the story of these events will be carefully filed away, to be produced, once more, when Israel is, finally, officially recognised as an apartheid state.
The decision of the dean of the Harvard Kennedy School to veto the appointment of Kenneth Roth on the ground of his role in the claim by Human Rights Watch that Israel is guilty of apartheid is yet another example of the shameless persecution of those who seek to expose well-documented violations of the rights of Palestinians under international law. We do not know if the decision expresses the personal view of Dean Elmendorf or is the result of direction or pressure from his Board of Directors. In either case it is a disgraceful insult to one of the most distinguished and admired human rights advocates. Dean Elmendorf should resign or be dismissed.
I’m not much good at prediction but I’ll have a go all the same (!). Most of the newspapers are keen on the idea that the people who do the ‘cancelling’ are the ‘left’ (which as we know can mean anything from ‘woke’ to ‘tofu-eaters’ to Keir Starmer to all universities and so on. Meanwhile there are some documented examples of cancelling coming from those who see themselves as opposed to the ‘left’. The Guardian covered the cancelling of a colleague of mine who worked at the National Maritime Museum and Goldsmiths thanks to Oliver Dowden, the Culture Minister at the time. I know of others (including cancellations of me!) that I am happy to share in private.
This is surely extraordinary given that Kenneth Roth was heading Human Rights Watch in the very controversial period when HRW defended one of Israel’s many ‘defensive’ incursions into Lebanon? In the early 90s Roth was one of the first to speak up for the Bosnians so he has my longstanding support, but this episode shows how fairly mainstream liberal support for Israel is now being outlawed and only full-on uncritical backing for the state is being accepted.
An enlightening article, but as for the top brass at the Harvard Kennedy School? The words hypocrisy and humbug come to mind when related to their treatment of Roth. Bowing to undoubted pressure from members of the security sector, not to mention their mentors in the state of Israel as it lurches further in its trajectory towards the neo-fascist right, guided by Netanyahu’s Likud Party’s new found far-right allies, even the prospect of the mildest of censure from someone long associated with the liberal HRW can no longer be tolerated.
Those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it.
McCarthy’s (“are you – or have you ever been – a communist?”) witch hunt carried all before it … until suddenly it didn’t. I think McCarthy’s fall came about because he attacked people who were better able to defend themselves than he’d realised.
It’d be worth taking a “forensic”(!!!) look at how the McCarthy anti-communist witch hunt was begun, sustained and fell as a possible guide to the future of the antisemitism witch hunt. There are loads of similarities between the two episodes, the techniques used and the types of powers and of individuals supporting the campaigns.
In both campaigns, the witch finders defined and “sold” to a naive public descriptions of their opponents in terms that suited their own attack goals. McCarthy defined communists as anyone active in civil rights, anti-racism, union activities, liberal politics … no wonder he found “communists” everywhere.
If the world at large can be persuaded to adopt the Jerusalem Definition of what antisemitism is – instead of the IHRC one – the witch finders within Labour and elsewhere should find it much harder to smear their political opponents as antisemites.
Standing for fair treatment and human rights of any group has no negative connotation and if the group in question is Palestinian that cannot be construed as anti-Israel. Israeli malpractice needs a stiff dose of education and advice which should come from everyone claiming support for human rights but who seem to prefer playing dumb. Those who know and understand yet are too reticent to speak up are the ones who should be barred from leadership roles in University Human Rights Departments.
The knock on effect of acts like this, driven by the Israel Lobby, will cause many people not to side with the Palestinians and or condemn Israel. Which in the end let’s Israel off the hook.