Seth Freedman’s misguided guide to NGO hysteria
Seth Freedman’s latest offering on The Guardian’s “Comment is Free” site, provides an intriguing but somewhat deluded insight into the obsession and hysteria surrounding the Arab-Israeli conflict. Having taken a gratuitous swipe at NGO Monitor in his opening paragraph, Freedman describes how a seemingly innocent enquiry about ‘Western gyms’ in Ramallah within the town’s NGO community became the catalyst for a surreal debate on cultural relativism.
Freedman appears exasperated at the ‘outraged’ community members who take apparent offence at reference to ‘Western gyms’, regarding it as a code for Western cultural superiority and an affront to local culture and values. Interestingly, Freedman condemns ‘the hysterical hyper-sensitive reaction…which is most indicative of a deep-rooted malaise in the NGO world’. Yes, the label of hysteria can so easily be used to describe the NGO world. And by the same token, how else do you explain obsessive claims of ‘war crimes’ and ‘collective punishment’ by these groups following any IDF action, even those in response to terrorist attacks? Yet, Freedman often goes to great lengths to fuel their compulsion. He is part of the very problem that he criticizes.
In his next breath, Freedman gives a useful explanation for the hysteria which he believes unjustifiably gripped elements of Ramallah’s aid community. He describes them as ‘so assailed with guilt for their European and American backgrounds… that they will use any opportunity – however unwarranted – to trumpet their reborn status to the world again and again.’ Does Freedman not realize that this post-colonial guilt is also a plausible explanation for those who continually condemn the Middle East’s only true democracy, while ignoring the abuses of a myriad of despotic regimes in the name of ‘cultural relativism’? Freedman’s article has an air of self-satisfaction about it, a self-assured belief in his own righteousness and fairness, while scoffing at the misguided obsession of others. Yet, he must realize that the accusations he levels at the ‘hysterical few’ could so easily be attributed to his own words and the human rights NGOs he so consistently defends.
