Human Rights Botch
Last week the Wall Street Journal published the rather shocking details of a trip to Saudi Arabia by members of Human Rights Watch, an organization that is, by its own account, "dedicated to defending and protecting human rights." But the delegation from HRW was not in Saudi Arabia to lobby on behalf of beheaded adulteresses, executed rape victims, or imprisoned democratic activists. According to David Bernstein, author of the Journal op-ed, they were there "to raise money from wealthy Saudis by highlighting HRW's demonization of Israel."
In an exchange with the Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg, Kenneth Roth, the executive director of HRW, confirmed the report. Goldberg asked Roth if HRW had attempted "to raise funds in Saudi Arabia by advertising your organization's opposition to the pro-Israel lobby?"
The answer from Roth:
That's certainly part of the story. We report on Israel. Its supporters fight back with lies and deception. It wasn't a pitch against the Israel lobby per se. Our standard spiel is to describe our work in the region. Telling the Israel story--part of that pitch--is in part telling about the lies and obfuscation that are inevitably thrown our way.
This pitch that "wasn't a pitch against the Israel lobby per se," by the way, was made to a Saudi group that included a member of the country's Shura Council--the body that oversees the implementation of sharia law in the Saudi kingdom.
On the other hand, one shouldn't be too shocked. In the late '70s, the man who is now deputy director of HRW's Middle East section, Joe 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." It was Stork's boss, Sarah Leah Whitson, who went to Saudi Arabia to tout HRW's battles with "pro-Israel pressure groups."
When Human Rights Watch was founded more than 30 years ago, it was called Helsinki Watch and it aimed to monitor the Soviet Union's compliance with the 1975 Helsinki Accords just as the organization that inspired its creation, the Moscow Helsinki group, was already doing. The Moscow Helsinki group included a young Soviet dissident named Natan Sharansky. This week the Jerusalem Post quoted Sharansky's reaction to the news that Human Rights Watch was raising money in Saudi Arabia:
Here is an organization created by the goodwill of the free world to fight violations of human rights, which has become a tool in the hands of dictatorial regimes to fight against democracies. It is time to call a spade a spade. The real activity of this organization today is a far cry from what it was set up 30 years ago to do: throw light in dark places where there is really no other way to find out what is happening regarding human rights.
Whitson told the Jerusalem Post that critics of HRW were merely "griping and whining because they don't like the fact that we criticize Israel." So Sharansky is now a whiner? Shameless.
Book Alert
As the once-great American auto-industry goes down the tubes, THE SCRAPBOOK has no policy prescription to save the day, but we can recommend a highly effective pain-killer: WEEKLY STANDARD contributing editor P.J. O'Rourke has just published an anthology of his many hilarious articles on cars. Driving Like Crazy: Thirty Years of Vehicular Hell-bending Celebrating America the Way It's Supposed to Be--With an Oil Well in Every Backyard, a Cadillac Escalade in Every Carport, and the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Mowing Our Lawn (Atlantic Monthly Press).
THE SCRAPBOOK is well known as a pro-P.J. fanatic, so we'll turn the mike over to the Washington Post's disinterested reviewer, Jonathan Yardley: "When O'Rourke is on his game, he's as funny a writer as we have now, and even though many of the tales with which he regales us are certifiable stretchers, what matters is that they're funny, not whether they're true. If they really were true, O'Rourke would have been dead at least a quarter-century ago." Our recommendation: Buy this book. If Yardley is amused, you'll be on the floor holding your side. Buy a copy for your friends in the UAW, too--they can use a little comic relief these days.
No Laughing Matter
On July 9 the government-run website for Federal Business Opportunities--a clearinghouse for contractors looking to grab hold of the government teat--posted a listing for a project called "Humor in the Workplace." It seems that the Treasury Department's Bureau of Public Debt was looking for someone to give presentations on the importance of, well, humor in the workplace. No joke:
The Contractor shall conduct two, 3-hour, Humor in the Workplace programs that will discuss the power of humor in the workplace, the close relationship between humor and stress, and why humor is one of the most important ways that we communicate in business and office life. Participants shall experience demonstrations of cartoons being created on the spot. The contractor shall have the ability to create cartoons on the spot about BPD jobs. The presenter shall refrain from using any foul language during the presentation.
Twenty-two vendors registered to get the gig--although two of them seem to be a disgruntled taxpayer who listed his email as "fakeemail@hotmail.com" and his company name as "STOP WASTING TAXPAYER MONEY AND INFLATING THE CURRENCY. Obama wanted $787,000,000,000 for THIS?!"
Alas, a week later the job listing was yanked with the FBO informing contractors that the Bureau of Public Debt no longer needed the presentations. The ad itself must have been funny enough even though it was, in its own way, quite obscene.
Great Moments in Political Correctness
What THE SCRAPBOOK likes to call the "unmanning" of the English language (firefighter, not fireman; humankind, not mankind; chair, not chairman; person-in-the-street interview) proceeds apace. It's a trend we condemn, although not without exception. A few years back we were amused to read a puff piece on George Stephanopoulos in which his mother said that the former Bill Clinton sidekick had "always been his own person," eschewing the traditional "his own man."
But we have to say that Senator Patrick Leahy's bit of politically correct verbiage last Wednesday on PBS's News-hour was laughable. Host Jim Lehrer asked Chuck Grassley and Leahy if the vote on Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor wouldn't simply come down to an abortion litmus test--with pro-choice senators voting for her and pro-life senators against. No, said Leahy, "that's not the issue. . . . There's an awful lot of issues involved besides that. And I think [abortion] becomes a--that becomes almost a straw person."
Straw person? Man, oh man! Or should we say, person, oh person!
Westlake's Last
The late, great Donald Westlake has been amply lauded in these pages (see William Kristol's Casual in the January 19, 2009, issue, and Steven Lenzner's essays of July 2, 2001, and September 1, 2008). So THE SCRAPBOOK will spare the superlatives and simply call attention to the (sadly, posthumous) publication of Westlake's final Dortmunder novel, Get Real, just out from Grand Central Publishing. In this caper, John Dortmunder and his crew get enmeshed with a TV reality show, with riotous consequences.
Does this last Dortmunder effort have a happier-than-usual ending? Without giving too much away, THE SCRAPBOOK merely notes that near the novel's end, Westlake writes of the melancholy and unlucky Dortmunder, "And, for the second time in one day, he smiled."