When human rights organisations get the facts wrong
In our post on Reports Without Borders condemnation of the Hamas sniper who fired at the media, we touched on a recent case of Hamas propaganda in relation to the power situation in Gaza. As Jerusalem Post reported “On at least two occasions this week, Hamas staged scenes of darkness”.
This reminds us of another tragic case of media manipulation. Remember the Gaza Beach Incident in June 2006? This was a case of damage control by the Palestinians, an attempt to throw blame on Israel, and manipulation of Human Rights NGOs to further this cause.
The incident was recently examined in detail on the blog Augustian Stables. On January 24 they posted a blog entry including a ten minute video (shown below) demonstrating how NGOs and the media jumped to conclusions over the Gaza beach incident. In this case the public was mislead and the credibility of Human Rights NGOs was damaged.
One of the most prominent NGO in this incident was Human Rights Watch. They sent a “senior military analyst” to ascertain what had happened. This analyst concluded, within three days of the incident, that the explosion was the result of the Israeli military. The video posted by Augustian Stables demonstrates that this accusation could not withstand scrutiny.
In a previous blog posting we discussed the ethical dilemmas that human rights workers face. This story provides an example where the ethical standard of some NGO employees was less than desirable.
When publicly laying blame for human rights abuse, it is of the utmost importance that NGOs do their fact checking and provide evidence, otherwise their statements, both in the short term and in the longer term, will lose credibility.
Human rights NGOs need heed the lesson of the boy who cried wolf, otherwise the public and governments may stop listening and an important check against serious human rights abuses will be lost.
Watch the YouTube video here:
