Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hi everyone. Welcome to the 325th episode of objectively speaking. I'm Jag, CEO of the Atlas Society. I'm very excited to be joined by Professor Gerald Steinberg, founder and President of NGO Monitor, to explore how NGOs like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch evolved from neutral human humanitarian projects to activist drivers of international policy, especially regarding Israel. So, Professor Steinberg, thank you for joining us.
[00:00:36] Speaker B: Thank you for having me. Thank you for the invitation. I look forward to the conversation.
[00:00:40] Speaker A: Yes, and he is joining us from Israel. I am joining us from Washington D.C. about to kick off a three week long tour up and down the East Coast. So first, let's start with the definition and origin of NGOs or non governmental organizations. I've always found the description kind of odd. Why aren't they just called nonprofits or charities?
[00:01:12] Speaker B: It goes back to the late 1940s, early 1950s. It was in the era of the founding of the United Nations. It was also after the Second World War and governments in Europe in particular, and the record of Germany and the Weimar Republic was very strong in the memories of the people who created the UN and then also NGOs. The sense was that democracies can't really be trusted, particularly in Europe, to be the reflection of popular sentiment, of processes, of open processes, and that non. This was an American idea, primarily non governmental organizations. That was the phrase that was coined for that, that they would help strengthen democracies. There's a parallel term that was used not so much in the UN, but by academics, intellectuals, political theorists who called it and still do call these things civil society organizations that are supposed to be, and that's, I think, the key point here. They are supposed to be because they are non governmental.
Talk about that later, about how accurate that term still is. But they were non governmental, therefore non political civil society. They weren't involved in partisan politics. They weren't corrupted by the money that often generates partisan politics and is behind it. All of those factors that were considered to be problematic in creating a European, especially again in Germany, countries that were aligned with it. The United nations opened the doors and said, we are going to give special privileges. We're going to recognize certain non governmental organizations as being part of the political process and in a form that keeps democracies from going off the rails. So that goes back to the origins and as we'll see in the next hour, and things that I've been working on for 25 years, that in fact those hopes, desires, the image of non governmental organizations strengthening democracies is really not what happened somewhere along the way and we'll talk about that as we go along.
[00:03:22] Speaker A: Yeah. Well, the term non governmental organization seems increasingly misleading when organizations receive substantial government funding. To what extent are European and other government using NGOs to pursue foreign policy objectives indirectly? And what transparency is required of these arrangements?
[00:03:47] Speaker B: I think in many, many cases the term non governmental NGOs or even civil society is a deliberate misnomer. It's not just a misnomer, but it's something that is used to disguise what is really a political process. I often call these organizations governmental subcontractors.
I think the European Union provides on the and its members, not just the framework of the EU, but its member states, mostly Western Europeans, provide over 1 billion euros. That's over, I think 1.1 or something billion, billion US dollars a year to what are supposed to be non governmental organizations. Some of them, a lot of them do international humanitarian aid. They often do what they call human rights, which is political frameworks. A lot of the money, by the way, goes to Palestinian, Israeli to promote European policies, Western European policies particularly. So that whole concept of non governmental has become very, very much, I would say, diluted and distorted. We have the news these days. We have a report that the Swiss government is freezing or ending, I think it's 50 million Swiss francs a year to Doctors Without Borders, Medicine San Frontier because of sexual misconduct of a number of Ms.
Staff members and volunteers. Now that's clearly a major problem, which is the lack of oversight among many NGOs. But 50 million Swiss francs, government funding, in other words, taxpayer money going to what's supposed to be an ngo. It's a form of also of outsourcing. Let's take also the US Government.
You're sitting in Washington. Up until the end of the Biden administration, the usaid, the Agency for International Development also had these huge multibillion dollar budgets. A lot of that money went to non governmental organizations. In fact, there's an Office of the Inspector General, the State Department is producing reports showing how much of that money was unaccounted for, how much of it was not transparent, and in a number of cases went to organizations which were found to be involved in terrorism. So this is government money not being properly vetted and being used to promote government policies. It's taxpayer money. I shouldn't say government money. It's taxpayer money that's being used. What are supposed to be non governmental organizations. It's a very widespread phenomenon. There's government money going into Amnesty International.
We'll talk a Little bit in a minute about the origins of that. But it's very different from what the founders thought about what they were supposed to be doing. And, and that's true for many NGOs. NGOs were often founded as really were citizen initiatives, civil society, and then they got taken over. And as they expanded and the issue of greater funding became central, then governments became a major source of that funding. So I think the whole. I call it an industry, but an industry that really needs to be reexamined from the beginning for these and other reasons that we'll talk about.
[00:06:52] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, it seems like a complete sort of moral inversion. The founders envisioned government to protect individual rights from coercion. And now, you know, the government, or at least was funding these groups that are promoting coercion. And you founded NGO Monitor after recognizing that powerful organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch were exercising enormous influence with very little scrutiny. What First Alert alerted you to the problem? And how has that situation changed in the 25 years since?
[00:07:35] Speaker B: I spent a good 45 years teaching, writing, doing research in something called political science. I never liked that term, political studies or politics and international politics.
And NGOs were not at all, not on, not just not on my radar. They weren't even part of any curriculum. There was no serious research that was done about NGOs. They were not on the radar.
But around the end of the 1990s and early 2000s, I would go to conferences. My field was nuclear strategy, believe it or not, and what was called bombs and bullets. I got my degree at Cornell university writing about U.S. soviet strategy and arms control related issues. And I would go to conferences on nuclear proliferation and related issues, other weapons. And some of them took place in places like Geneva. That's where the United nations has both the Conference on Disarmament and the Human Rights Council back in those days was called the Human Rights Commission, basically the same thing. And I would go past the offices of, and the, the auditorium where the Human Rights Commission met, and there would be people handing out flyers and posters. And I lived in Israel. I'm an Israeli. I've lived here now for over 40 years. And I noticed that this is already in the late 90s, early 2000s, that a lot of their handouts, propaganda, agitprop material, featured Israeli war crimes. That's something we've gotten used to hearing that term since October 7th. But we're talking now about over 25 years ago, Israel was violating international law. They said they would hand out these pictures and images that in some Cases were obviously fabricated, posed. There was one conference that I was actually invited to in Geneva as someone with a technical background, and it was something on landmines. They needed some Israeli to participate in this, and I was as close as they could find. And there I found a large. It was run by Human Rights Watch primarily, and I saw there was a first or second conference of state parties, but interestingly enough, it was run by an ngo, Human Rights Watch.
And there a lot of the handouts, the annual report had these posed pictures with which said Israel was using landmines doing. Committing war crimes.
That struck me as being problematic, I'd say, and odd.
It wasn't part of my agenda. But then as I saw more of these cases, and then in the end of the end Of August, early September 2001, the United nations held a huge conference, the World Conference on the Elimination of Racism in Durban, South Africa.
I started to hear about that in my various meetings and discussions. Sort of a side issue, how proud the Canadian government was. They were funding this.
And then the United nations, the European Union and the Ford foundation, and they're bringing all these human rights activists to Durban, South Africa, to celebrate the end of apartheid.
But as this process was beginning to develop, they held preparatory conferences in Tehran.
They invited, of course, the usual NGOs. And as I began to see and hear more about this, this is in mid-2001, it became clear that NGOs were controlling the entire agenda. And the agenda was going to be Israel as an apartheid genocidal state.
And that's the beginning of what we call the BDS movement. Boycotts, divestment and sanctions, all sorts of things led by NGOs. The NGO Forum was a major anti Semitic event. It was infamously anti Semitic to the point where even the head of the Human Rights Commission of those days, Mary Robinson, who was certainly not pro Israel, said this crossed a red line and she refused to adopt the report. But the point is, that's where you see the power of NGOs. And that's when I decided that it was very important as an academic in the realm of political, international politics to start studying these systematically. So it's a relatively long answer, but it's part of my biography to say that's how I really was the first person in the academic Realm who examined NGOs. Not as wonderful organizations, but like some people at Harvard and elsewhere wrote in those days that did transparent, one of the transnational advocacy networks to keep governments honest and moral and promoting these values of human rights, but rather to see These organizations as political actors that were controlling agendas that were counter to the democratically elected the leadership and representatives. That was the way I began to see it back 25 years ago. And those kinds of events are what triggered it. And that's really what's been the main focus of my professional activity since then.
[00:12:36] Speaker A: Was this a gradual mission drift or did particular individuals or movements consciously redirect them?
[00:12:47] Speaker B: You know, first of all, we're now talking, I mentioned the Durban conference. There were 1500 roughly organizations represented. So this is a huge industry and now it's much bigger. Of course there are close to 6,000 organizations that have UN representation. So each one has a different story.
There's some trends. I guess it's not quite as unique for each one, but if you look at some of the biggest, most influential household names, there's a pattern here.
Amnesty International was founded in the early 1960s by a gentleman by the name of Peter Bennison.
He a Jewish person who's a journalist at the time.
And it was designed to support and promote freedom for political prisoners, particularly behind the Soviet Union Iron Curtain and also in some of the countries in Latin America and elsewhere where there were a lot of political prisoners.
And the whole point of Amnesty International under Peter Benson was to write these postcards to support the rights of political prisoners. It was basically a volunteer organization, very low budget, low visibility that was taken over. Amnesty today is entirely different in many ways the opposite of what Peter Bennison created and the process by which that took place, a lot of it is still hidden, but there are enough elements of it to be seen. And I think it's typical of Human Rights Watch, Doctors Without Borders and other organizations, well intentioned, really volunteer, low profile, low budget organizations that really were non governmental. Benson said, well, the governments, Western governments back in the early 60s weren't doing enough to help political prisoners. So we're going to help, we're going to push that issue.
And then when Bob Bernstein created Human Rights Watch, when he came back from a visit to the Soviet Union, he was a publisher of Random House and he or CEO of Random House and he came back from meeting the Solzhenitsyn and others in the Soviet Union, Andrei Sakharov particularly, and he said, you know, I'm going to support them and their fight for freedom. I'm going to create Human Rights Watch in the United States and other stories which are similar. These organizations are readily. When the founders tend to remove themselves or die or they leave the organization, they're easy takeover targets. That's One of the things that I found in looking at that also Doctors Without Borders founded in France in the.
I believe it was the 70s also for the same type of reason, except they provided medical aid to again when they felt the governments weren't doing enough. And they were all taken over.
And they were all taken over by post colonial, what are called post colonial ideologues. Anti Western, anti capitalist, anti American, anti Israel. It's a package.
Ken Roth, a Human Rights Watch. In his case, you can see the role of a particular individual who as Bob Bernstein once said to me, he said the biggest mistake of my life was agreeing to have Bob having. Ken Roth was a young guy with not very great experience to behead this small organization called Human Rights Watch. Roth stayed for almost 30 years and with his anti Western, anti American and very, very personal anti Israel ideology twisted the whole thing. He was able to take it over. He got funding from George Soros, we're talking about around 2008, 2009, and was able to change the board and able to take over and change the trajectory and the agenda. Amnesty is a little more complicated. It's hard to point to specific individuals.
But also when Peter Benenson was less involved or left the organization, it was taken over and again the agenda was changed.
It wasn't overnight. All these are gradual processes, but they are very focused in the sense that the board of directors that's responsible legally and fiscally for the groups, those are changed, the main personnel are changed. In some cases key people are pushed out, in other cases they leave.
It is a quite well known process and a major problem.
It's important for me to say in this context that almost uniquely among major industries, and again I think I want to call NGOs industries when they have budgets of 400,000,000 million euros a year like Amnesty or Doctors without borders, which is 2.7 billion, or even Human Rights Watch US$100 million a year, that there are no checks and balances.
It's not like in the business world where if a company's run very poorly, well, it goes out of business.
And there are in terms of the SEC and other frameworks or their oversight frameworks. And the board of directors is very active and NGOs there are no. There's no penalty for corruption for all sorts of other illegal and other activities or for being hijacked. It's easy to change the process and the. And the board of. To really to appoint your own board of directors, which
[00:18:03] Speaker A: is
[00:18:03] Speaker B: what happened with organizations. So bottom line is they're Easy hijack targets, takeover targets. And that's what happened.
There's also, because I talk mainly, I look primarily.
I didn't realize when I started this that there are going to be so many groups to look at. We focus on groups that claim to promote human rights and international aid. There's also a whole universe of NGOs in the field of environmentalism and various other groups that this is a huge, huge industry. It wasn't like that 40 years ago than it is now.
[00:18:36] Speaker A: All right, we're going to dip into some of the audience questions, and I appreciate our regulars being here on this irregular schedule.
We have a question here from Jackson Sinclair asking what mechanisms exist to investigate NGOs. Obviously, there's yours, but are you alone in the field?
[00:18:58] Speaker B: There are more organizations and individuals who are taking this seriously. I consider that to be one of the successes. Put this on the map.
But the tools that are used. First of all, any organization that has a status like the IRS 501c3, nonprofit and therefore tax exempt, has the special status in the US they have to file what are called 990 forms every year. And those contain a considerable amount of information. There are also some major holes, but the information there provides a basic framework to examine.
Who are their funders, what are their agendas, what do they actually do as distinct from the mission statement, who are their board members, who are the officials that run it, all that stuff.
In the uk, where Amnesty is registered, you have something called the Charity Commission. Not quite as transparent as the 501C3 process, by the way. Anybody can go online and look at any registered NGO in the US and look at their tax returns, look at their tax details, the 990form. What you can't find out, by the way, is who funds them, particularly overseas. Is it Qatar money? That's one of the questions that comes up a lot on Human Rights Watch. They can hide their funders, and that's a big hole that needs to be addressed. We'll talk about that later, but I think that's important to say now so you can do a lot of research.
Most of these organizations produce annual reports.
They have websites where they also post biographical information on their major officials and what I call researchers, board members, all of that. There's quite a bit of information. It's more a matter of wanting to sit down and look at it.
Got to go through the material and then examine and try. And I think that's something NGO Monitor pioneered and was successful. You look for the things that just don't make sense.
They're reporting X over here and then over here, they saying something different.
Try to connect the dots.
A lot of. First a lot of these groups say, well, we don't take government money. Then you find that Amnesty takes a lot of money from, through their Netherlands branch called oxam. Novib gets funded by, very substantially by, by the, by the government, by the Dutch government. And again, there's a subcontractor relationship there. So the research is available, it require the data, the information is available. And also it's important always to say this is what we know and this is what we don't know. Some governments publish in a very organized fashion all the NGOs that they fund in the amounts. Norway in particular, other governments like Germany and the Netherlands, most recently they used to publish Netherlands annual reports. In the last year or so, they have erased and removed all that information. They're hiding something. That in itself is a piece of research to be focused on. How is that process done?
I'll just add one other quick point on that. Very often members of Parliament will ask questions, will often NGO monitor other groups will provide that in the questions. In other words, the information on the basis of which they can ask the question saying, hey, this is our taxpayer money. Parliament was not asked to approve it. What's going on here? And that also tends to in many cases bring about changes and greater transparency.
[00:22:30] Speaker A: Candace Morena is asking, are there smaller human rights organizations that you believe have greater transparency than their larger counterparts?
[00:22:41] Speaker B: There are some.
They are very much less visible and also they're, they're very small numbers of them. There's an organization in Canada called the Raoul Wallenberg, I think center for Human Rights. I've forgotten what it's named after a Swedish diplomat who in the Holocaust helped save Jewish lives and then disappeared in the Soviet Union and apparently was killed by the Soviet Union.
But in his memory, the Raoul Wallenberg center, which is based in Canada and has branches in other countries and they do good work, they're transparent. And I think most importantly, you don't see the biases, the political agenda. Bias is a very mild, understated word. You don't see the advocacy, the anti Western, anti American and anti Israeli, often anti Semitic biases that are. And agendas that are there. Human Rights first, which is US Based, is another organization which generally is across the board, doesn't have the same blatant hypocrisy as, let's say, Human Rights Watch. So there are certain groups like that. I think there's a group in Oslo Called there's a group in also that does the human rights.
I think it's the Oslo center for Human Rights or something like that. And also does good work. So I've named three. There may be a couple of more, but it's not the thousand or 1500 groups that you see in places like UN Human Rights Council elsewhere. But there is at least some other more, I would say legitimate and non hypocritical voices out there.
[00:24:20] Speaker A: That's encouraging. All right, Sparky Sterling is asking, would it be more accurate to call NGOs Super Governmental Organizations SGOs?
[00:24:32] Speaker B: Well, there are different phrases that are used, by the way. There's also the term gongos, governmental funded, non governmental. And then there's bongos, foreign government funded NGOs. You have all those. So I guess SNGOS might work.
I actually call them superpowers when I talk about Amnesty International and the size of their budget, the amount of money and the amount of influence and the size of the staff, large part of which is used for PR and fundraising, not for human rights.
But those are superpowers. So I at least meet them halfway on that and say, yeah, that's a very appropriate term.
It highlights the absence of checks and balances.
Another term that sometimes uses that NGOs are a scam industry.
It's a very blatant statement. But when you look at a lot of the details, that's really what it comes down to. They raise money, for one thing, and do something completely different with it.
[00:25:32] Speaker A: All right, you have described the influence of Marxist and postcolonial ideology within the human rights movement. How much of what we are witnessing now is specifically hostility towards Israel and how much reflects a broader hostility towards civilization and liberal democracy?
[00:25:56] Speaker B: Well, the two are very closely connected. Post colonialism very much adopts an anti Israel and often anti Semitic ideology.
Again, you see then Ken Roth and Human Rights Watch, a lot of the people who run these organizations or became the heads of these organizations back in the, let's say 80s and 90s were universities during the Vietnam War.
And that's where their ideology developed. But I think even goes back further than that.
This agenda of using human rights to accuse Israel of being apartheid or genocide, or saying the United States is the greatest violator of human rights because of its treatment of its black citizens. That comes out of the Kremlin. And Certainly in the 1950s and 60s it was very blatant. 1975, the Soviet Union and the Soviet bloc and its allies, including the Arab League, were able to get the General assembly majority to adopt what's called the resolution, determine calling Zionism as racism.
So you have this Soviet. And it's a much wider agenda than the points that I can make now. By the way, there is a very, very skilled and expert academic by the name of Isabella Taborovsky, who I strongly recommend, who's documented this. She's got films from, I believe from the seventies of Angela Davis and other people going to these Soviet run conferences and summer camps in Cuba and elsewhere and having all the stars of that world of with Castro and so many others coming and then speaking Gaddafi.
And this is what really set the stage, created the foundation for, not just in NGOs but in the United nations, that the human rights what the use of human rights to promote an anti Western, post colonial agenda, anti American. And within that, certainly Israel comes up even back in the 60s and 70s as a dominant theme. And you see the anti Semitism. And of course under the Soviet Union, anti Semitism was a major part of their policies going back even to Stalin and certainly afterwards.
So what we see in these NGOs is that they have become the inheritors. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the end of that era in 19, around 1990, that exactly parallels the growth of the NGOs as major sources of the same ideology. And you also see the funders emerging. So George Soros became a major source of funding with his ideology, which also reflects that same post colonial, anti Western, anti American ideology. It was George Soros that gave Human Rights Watch $100 million. Ken Roth, when their earlier funders broke with the organization because they were denounced by the founder Bob Bernstein on the pages of the New York Times. And Ken Ross said, well, I don't need your money. I can get it from Soros. $100 million. That was a lot of money spent in those days. So that ideology started in the Kremlin, in Moscow and Soviet Union and can be traced really a straight line. I mentioned the Durban Conference, the UN Conference on the elimination of Racism in South Africa back in September of 2001. That's where the NGO industry really became very visible for the first time as the inheritors of that same Soviet agenda. So it took them roughly 10 years to go from the collapse of the Soviet Union to the point where they had almost the same language, the same basic agenda and objectives.
[00:29:55] Speaker A: Right. All right, Brian Sanders joining us from LinkedIn asks who decides what specific NGO will have pseudo governmental decision power? So really like who has the power over designating this organization is just a nonprofit and this organization is an ngo.
[00:30:16] Speaker B: Well, the only formal title of an NGO is awarded by the United nations, what's called the Economic and Social Council.
And the un, like any other body where representatives of different regions sit on this ECOSOC committee and vet applicants. And it's also very politicized. I won't go into the details, but like everything else, it depends on what your ideology is, your political standing. That's a small group.
Other than that, any organization is free to call itself an NGO.
And that's why the governmental funded gongos are known as NGOs, even though that's a really not appropriate term.
What was the other part of the question? The naming is not central to this. As I said, they can call it whatever they want. What was the other part of the question?
[00:31:08] Speaker A: Yeah, he was just asking who decides what specific NGO will have these pseudo governmental powers?
[00:31:15] Speaker B: Okay. The government governmental powers or tax exempt status is determined in each country by the basic framework. So in the United States, it's the IRS that does that, and in Britain it's the Charity Commission, in Canada, it's the Canadian Canada Revenue. Each country has its own, somewhat in the west, somewhat similar frameworks. The awarding of funding is of course determined by the political leadership, in some cases also by the bureaucrats. So for instance, it's unlikely that the head of the European Union, for instance, the vice president in charge of foreign policy approves grants. I sent civilian or more dollars that go to NGOs or other elements. These are usually bureaucrats who sit at much lower levels and are often part of the NGO industry. You'll often find, just as you did in USAID, you'll find U.S. government officials, officials, European government officials, British government officials who had worked and been part of the NGO industry, then moving over into government, it works the other way too. And handing out the money to their friends who are in the same NGOs, and that's a major problem. Again, very little oversight. You know, the USAID is a great case because there was more oversight in the US than any place else in the world.
But in the case of usaid, there's still very little transparency on how decisions were made. And certainly they didn't even report on when they gave a lot of money to a particular ngo, how that money was then used.
The awardee, the grantee was able to subcontract to sub grant that funding without any kind of public discussion, congressional approval, or even transparency. So I don't want to sound too conspiratorial, but in this case, if you look at the case studies and the Individuals and the processes it's done behind closed doors. Huge amount of public funding and a small number of individuals, most of whom are not either elected or even approved by the Senate, the United States or by Parliament and other countries who make these decisions of who gets the money to.
I'll just tell you quickly, NGO Monitor is part of the work that we did. We once went to the European High Court. I think it's the Court of Justice, all the European documents about funding for NGOs, particularly for Israeli and Palestinian NGOs, who really are subcontractors for these governments. They do what the governments work with the governments to promote their objectives, which are in most cases very much demonizing Israel. You see all these claims of war crimes and other things. It's all part of the policies of weakening Israel. And we asked the European Court of Justice, after we got our freedom of Information requests were denied on grounds which seemed to me very artificial, that this was about security and therefore they couldn't provide the documents of the meetings. There were transcripts of the meetings where the funding was decided that the European Court of Justice said, well, this is a closed issue, we're not going to even hold a hearing on this. So it's very hard to break through. These are very, very strong barriers. They've really succeeded in preventing serious public knowledge or discussion. And again, the main point is when we're dealing with taxpayer funds and these are supposed to be democracies practicing the basic best practices of dealing with government taxpayer funding, they're violating that and they don't even want to open the door to having that information being revealed.
[00:35:06] Speaker A: I'm curious of your take. You know, as you saw, what was rather controversial, the whole takedown of usaid, what, what was going through your head?
What's your kind of post action analysis of what happened there?
[00:35:27] Speaker B: It's hard. And don't forget, I'm sitting in Jerusalem. So I don't know all the, all the details is an exaggeration. Look at the beginning of the second Trump administration, really with the, from the inauguration in the first couple of months, you had Elon Musk running this, what was it called, the Department of Government doge and all sorts of funding was just cut off. And the US Idea was one of the organizations and certainly there's room for criticism of the rapidity by which this was done. On the other hand, if they would have started looking at hundreds of grants, it might have taken forever and the money would have kept flowing. I think that there were some non political, important, non political activities. You know, aid for people in Sudan.
On the one hand there's a lot of, a lot of the money ended up going to these militias and terror organizations. On the other hand, people that are starving and, or medical care. So that's my, I accept and share some of the criticism. On the other hand, the more we find out about what was going on at USAID and how taxpayer funding was in wholesale distributed without proper or any serious oversight, this was an unacceptable situation.
And if and when USAID type funding is restored, hopefully some of the lessons will be learned. And I think there's still a lot more to go through, a lot more details to be revealed. As I said, there's an office inspector general issued a couple of important reports already showing, detailing the lack of due diligence that took place. So if it's going to be restored, then it has the, the lessons I think are very important to be learned from this.
And that's if you, as I said, the USAID is one of the most, one of the, probably the best run of these massive international aid groups that work through NGOs and UN agencies. UN agencies are in the same basket in this case for international aid.
I'll say one other thing about USAID versus other countries in other realms. There was a tendency to give money for projects the USAID was somewhat cautious about funding salaries, not entirely, but funding salaries and other operational costs and largely built hospitals, schools which are more tangible and more accountable in terms of where the funding goes. When the Europeans threw out money, it goes for all sorts of things which ended up in the case of Gaza very clearly a lot of the money in Gaza was, A lot of the aid was just went straight to Hamas and that's. They were able to build these huge tunnel complexes basically stealing aid went through unrwa, went through unicef and those were all funded by governments and also by groups like Norwegian Refugee Council and, and Oxfam and other groups where there was just no accountability.
And they said, well we got to work with Hamas because they're the ruling power.
So it's like putting money just straight. Might as well just give it straight to Hamas and not pretend that you're doing anything like international aid.
[00:38:47] Speaker A: This is a very thoughtful question from Valiant Mike.
He's asking isn't political advocacy an inevitable part of defense, human rights?
[00:39:00] Speaker B: What kind of political
[00:39:02] Speaker A: legitimate advocates?
[00:39:10] Speaker B: It is an excellent question and it's a complex. The answer may not be as good and it'll be more complex.
I'm an academic and I go on the one hand on the Other hand, a lot. But first of all, let's take the basic foundations of both realms, Human rights, the whole concept of framework, the organizations, everything else. Go back to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that was written and adopted after the Holocaust, after World War II, and in that shadow in 1948. And the words are very important. Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Human rights must be universal.
The first, and I think the most important criticism of this process is that when an NGO, or basically a network of NGOs of NGO superpowers along with their allies, and there's very close connections between these NGOs and the human Rights Council of the United nations and similar groups, International Criminal Court. There you see the fingerprints all over the place.
When they act hypocritically, when they focus the dominant part of their resources on one country, Israel, and in all sorts of different ways lead and fund and promote the demonization the hypocrisy screams out.
I don't think you need to have very detailed litmus tests when you see the type of discrimination and demonization that's directed through a Human Rights Watch under Ken Roth. That was the dominant theme. And he brought in people. Most of the staff that he hired were people who had a history of both anti Semitism and of obsessing over Israel. I'm not talking about the late 90s, 2000, talking about 25 years.
People like Sara Leah Whitson, who ran for a while, another organ I won't go through. All NGOs tend to be revolving doors. They go from one to the other with the same agenda, raising from the same donors. But that's just one of many examples. So I think criteria like hypocrisy or universal. Universality, the two opposite ends of the polls.
Human Rights Watch says it does research well, if the methodology is what I call garbage methodology, it's just throwing all sorts of stuff into a pot, stirring it and saying, okay, here we have all these allegations, none of which we can prove, none of which can be independently verified. Okay, here goes. Israel is a commits genocide or starvation or war crime system. And all those other allegations.
There's no methodology.
It's just all slogans and myths. There's no verification. I think that's also another clear criteria that can be pointed to a series of different criteria. They can be pointed to in dimensions. And that's part that's. People are welcome to look me up, look up the research of NGO Monitor, including in all sorts of academic publications, conference presentations that we have the goods. We can show very specifically false Claims systematically, not just, oh, we made a mistake, but systematically setting up their reports in a way that anybody who reads them with an open mind says, well, this is obviously propaganda. And if you buy into the strategy, the objectives, then you're going to say, oh, here we have proof that all these war crimes take place. And we have the same thing, by the way, now with the United States and in the conflict with Iran, a lot of denunciation saying this is all right, not human rights. They say, violation of international law. Well, if you look at the details, it's all hand waving. There's nothing systematic about it here. We're going to set, we're going to determine the target and then we're going to make sure that all of our reports, all our darts hit that target. And that's the way the entire industry works, whether it's the NGOs or whether it's the UN agencies that do that. And also academic frameworks. The Carr center for Human Rights has a record of giving academic support or legitimacy to these same processes, which are the exact opposite of what an academic institution should require in the terms of consistency and in terms of verifiability of factual claims. None of that exists.
[00:43:54] Speaker A: I'm, I'm curious, where do the NOS stand on reporting human rights abuses in Iran, where, you know, tens and tens of thousands of people were murdered and during the most recent protests. And also, where do these NGOS stand on China? Next week we're going to be having on this space Jan Yik, who has a book called Killed to Order about systematic organ harvesting and murder of political prisoners in China. Where, where are they?
Obviously a block, Israel. But are, do they have anything to say about, you know, real abuse of human rights in Iran and China?
[00:44:52] Speaker B: They do. Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, other organizations like that.
It's not zero.
There are token reports.
They may have a researcher, halftime, full time, some cases, maybe even one or two people who write about China and write about, even in Russia, of course, and other North Korea gets an occasional report.
But in Iran, but these are very much occasional.
They're token. I once took all of the reports that were written by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty. This was about 10 years ago, was published in a law review.
And I took, and simply this was before the age of AI, where I had to count pages.
How many pages, how many documents in a period, I think of five or six years were written about each country in the spectrum of what these organizations did. And by the way, they all have websites and those websites have all of their publications. So that kind of research can be done. It's hard. It takes a lot of time. It's frustrating.
But what I said, the bottom line is you see this huge spike for Israel and you see almost nothing for the dictatorships around the world. Almost nothing on China, not zero.
Same thing for Iran. Iran gets up there a little bit higher.
They did some reports, they posted on social media, condemnations or statements about the killings of protesters in Iran back a number of months ago, but then they forget about it. You don't see Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, Doctors Without Borders calling for international independent investigations of war crimes, allegations, accusations or mass killings of civilians against China, against Iran, against the regimes that comes almost uniquely for Israel and occasionally for the United States. Back when Australia had a conservative government and migrants was probably still the case. But migrants that came from the area of the South Pacific were sent to an island, were not allowed to enter Australia until they had been vetted to see if they were genuine refugees. They issued reports on them. They issued more reports on Australia in those days than they did on the repression in the Iranian regime.
[00:47:35] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:47:37] Speaker B: They're just examples. And there are many more like that.
Their agendas are clearly politicized. Their advocacy groups.
And what I have to say is part of this whole realm is when you look at the donations from The Ford Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, a lot of other groups, not just George Soros, but Open Society, but the donors and the governments, they seem to be automatically renewed every year without looking at the substance of what is being done with the money.
So when you have this very stilted agenda that focuses only on democracies, and again, Israel always stands out as the world's greatest violator of human rights and international law. And the real violators, you don't see any reports on Qatar. Maybe one report on Qatar, slave labor, and then they forget about it. They don't speak about it in the United Nations. That would be. Each of these organizations that has UN standing can take the podium and speak in the human sessions of the Human Rights Council, and they do. But the vast majority condemn Israel, condemn the United States in that order. And they're completely silent on. On China or Qatar or the regime in Iran.
[00:48:52] Speaker A: So former Human Rights Watch senior Danielle publicly criticized the organization's internal culture and research practices. How important are insiders and whistleblowers in exposing problems that outside researchers cannot easily document?
[00:49:14] Speaker B: The slow emerge.
What is the word I'm looking for?
The presence of people like Daniel Haas and Michael Goldfarb from Doctors Without Borders. There are also some people from Amnesty, some anonymous with their names, the fact that they're stepping forward, yeah, it took a long time, but to say, hey, what NGO Monitor has been monitoring, writing, reporting, documenting is true. And it's even worse when you're on the inside.
That's very important.
And I think that's the fact that although after she, Danielle, was working for Human Rights Watch and Ken Roth as a Senior Editor for 14 years, it would have been, I think, nice to see, important to have those kind of statements coming out earlier. But the fact that she's doing it, I think, is important because it does put these issues on the public agenda. It strengthens the demands, the claims, when there are, for instance, in different parliaments around the world and journalists write about this, that it strengthens the case that NGOs need to be much more carefully monitored, regulated. And I go back to the funding issue, but it's more than that.
Danielle talked about it, as did Michael Goldfarb at MSF and and some other people, about the culture of antisemitism, the corporate culture of antisemitism. When she resigned, it was after October 7th, the big Hamas atrocities. And she talked about the condemnations of Israel that were issued by people like Omar Shakir and Human Rights Watch in those days, before the blood of the victims had dried.
And that was, for her, the breaking point. And then she took a courageous step by leaving the organization.
We saw a lot more of the visible antisemitism in the wake of October 7th and slow emergence of individuals to say, this is something, this is a culture which we have been silent about for too long. It definitely reinforces the detailed, documented research that NGO Monitor does, because you have somebody on the inside who says, yeah, that's really what's going on. And the problem there is, at least up until now, we have not seen donors that withhold their funding, condition their funding, or stop their funding until there's a fundamental change.
I want to make one slight caveat on that.
Human Rights Watch, which is where Daniel Haas worked, where Ken Roth ran everything and brought in all of his cronies and his agenda for almost 30 years, there are some new members of the board of directors. The two chairs of the board of directors resigned recently, and there is movement of staff members, not all of them. There's still a couple of people there who are very, very much part of that. Anti Semitic, anti Israel, anti Western, post colonial. I had to make the long list who are still there.
But some of the top leaders either have left voluntarily or were pushed out, including the successor to Human Rights Watch. Tirana Hassan, that Ken Roth. Sorry, the successor as executive director from Ken Roth, Tirana Hassan. She was pushed out by the board. Public statements, disagreements, they said financial and other disagreements or fiduciary disagreements. But what's interesting also Tirana Hassan was then hired by Doctors Without Borders USA to be their executive director or CEO. So it's a revolving door.
There may be some movement in Human Rights Watch. It should be much, much wider and really a much more thorough investigation of what went on in the previous 30 years. But at least it's moving and it's a long answer. But I credit to some degree people like Daniel Haas and Michael Goldfarb for starting that process.
Great
[00:53:16] Speaker A: question here. Fair question from my modern Gault who asks, how do, how do these large NGOs feel about NGO Monitor? What criticisms do you commonly see?
[00:53:32] Speaker B: This is an article that I want to write. I have at least 15 pages of attacks on NGO Monitor.
Very often they're ludicrous. They're always false. They're ludicrous and they use labels. They don't like us. They're the ones who are supposed to be monitoring and defending human rights. And it's. The Yiddish word is chutzpah, but whatever the appropriate term is that how dare an academic, an Israeli academic, do research on us.
That's usually the approach that we get. So we are pigeonholed as often the terms are right wing, anti Palestinian fascists. We get that occasionally. We got a report recently by an NGO which is linked closely to the. Well, it's part of the Linka. The NGO is called the Rosa Luxembourg Foundation. It's also funded by German taxpayers and it's part of the. The far left German political party which is anti Israel, anti Semitic in many ways. And they wrote a whole report. They named two organizations as responsible for.
I think it was attacking UNRWA and naming and shaming and that was terrible thing to do. And the NGOs that are supporting the poor Palestinians because they have terror ties and pages and pages that named NGO Monitor, I think were named 10 different places in UN watch. What's a proud company to be in?
I think the fact that the NGOs are nervous and try to silence us in some cases shut us down. I think that shows that our work is important.
[00:55:10] Speaker A: Well, as we're wrapping up here you are in Israel.
Would love for you to share your thoughts with our audience on the elections in Israel and what do we know and what are your personal feelings about the political direction of the leadership there?
[00:55:31] Speaker B: You don't want an hour lecture Right now. Right.
[00:55:35] Speaker A: We've got five minutes, so.
[00:55:36] Speaker B: Okay. First of all, by the way, I do tweet a lot on this or post on X.
I'm Gerald Ngom and I've posted a lot since yesterday on this particular issue.
Right now, I think that first of all, the votes are being counted.
We have also, I think, a large number of soldiers that have not yet been counted. They will change the results a little bit. I think right now what we have is a very close, just like the last four or five elections. There's no clear winner in this and the country is quite evenly balanced between the pro Netanyahu and the anti Netanyahu camp or blocks.
Whether there will be some movement on that is still unclear, but I think we're in for perhaps a period of again, the President is pushing for another period of broad national unity in dealing with Iran on other national issues.
Netanyahu was not defeated, but he also didn't do extremely well. His party, Likud, came out as the largest party, but they only got about 25% or less of the total vote. So 20%, actually around that number. So they have to rebuild the coalition, which is always the case in Israel. So we're going to be in for a period of uncertainty. It could take months to sort this out and may lead to new elections or we may get to some sort of a broad, let's get over this by working together type of unity government. There may be, there will be an attempt to try to oust key people of the Netanyahu coalition like the speaker of the Knesset, which will change the parliamentary agenda, but that will be resisted and there may be some repercussions. The main leader of the opposition, former chief of staff of the idf, Gadi Eisencot, did not overwhelmingly well and got significantly less number of votes than Likud party.
So there's not going to be a revolution as a result of this election in Israel. In terms of the politics, where it will end up could be take a number of months to decide. And if Netanyahu leaves the scene, it will probably more likely a slow process rather than a sudden reversal of the political framework.
[00:57:55] Speaker A: Well, thank you. Hang
[00:57:56] Speaker B: in there and watch this space.
[00:57:57] Speaker A: Yes, and we've shared your X handle, so folks can follow you and continue the conversation there. Please check out the NGO monitor and support it if you can.
So thank you very much, Professor.
[00:58:12] Speaker B: Thank you. It's been a pleasure to talk to you. A very good conversation.
So I'm glad that people are able to participate. Thanks
[00:58:19] Speaker A: and thanks all of you again for your great questions, for your patience and flexibility with our timing changes.
But do please come back and join us next week. I'm going to be talking with Jan Yekelik about his book killed to China's Organ Harvesting Industry and the true nature of America's biggest adversary, talking about a real case of human rights violations. So we'll see you. I think I'll be in Florida and looking forward to joining you guys then. Thanks so much.
