Brontides

Sunny Hundal at Liberal Conspiracy reports on The Times’ humiliating climbdown over its attack on the Human Rights Watch, an international and non-governmental organization that conducts research and advocacy on human rights. As the second link, from Opinio Juris, points out, the attack is as inaccurate as it is unprincipled, and although the retraction is fairly all-encompassing there are some distortions that remain uncorrected.

At the end of his post, Sunny asks:

In other words [Jonathan] Foreman didn’t really do his research properly and ran a hatchet job that smeared HRW. If he approached HRW in advance with these points that could have been corrected.

So why didn’t he? Why did it require HRW to contact the Sunday Times after the article had been published?

If this had been an isolated issue then it would be a fair question, but attacks upon progressive international organisations have been a staple weapon in the armoury of the right-wing media – and in particular the Murdoch-owned press – in the UK and America for a few years now. These attacks are often incoherent and frequently attract corrections and retractions, but the effect is cumulative. Take Robert Bernstein’s criticisms of the organisation, from October last year, as being “left-wing, anti-Israel [and] anti-Western” (note that not only is HRW anti-Israel, it’s actually anti-Western, and – worse yet – left-wing). As an attack it holds together by the barest of threads, and is quickly demolished by Kevin John Heller of Opinio Juris, but the headline that sticks in the memory is that the organisation’s own founder turned on it for its anti-Israeli policy, and that’s a problem.

Nor is it the only problem. Recently Amnesty got into a spot of bother over a whistleblower who claimed that the organisation was working with the Taliban in Afghanistan. The Times led the charge on this one, and I’m disinclined to defend the charge – for better or worse, Amnesty was working with the Taliban, and silencing internal dissent on the matter rather than forcefully articulating and defending its policies was the wrong decision. But that’s not my point. My point is that if you go back and look at that Google search, you’ll see that – with the exception of one story, detailing the origin of Israel’s white phosphorus shells – the Times has effectively ignored the entirety of Amnesty’s 2010 activity, mentioning the organisation only to report this story. A brief list of some of the other things that Amnesty has done in 2010, which other organisations have found newsworthy:

• Released a report detailing the rate of capital punishment in the world in 2009
• Detailed the failing system of maternal healthcare in the US
• Reported on migrant abuse in Malaysia
• Commented on a survey showing that 1 in 7 women students have been subjected to sexual assault or violence in the UK
• Attempted to prevent the execution of a Lebanese man in Saudi Arabia
• Held a panel discussion on how religious fundamentalism affects gay and women’s rights
• Called upon Sudan to respect the work of NGOs and allow them to work unmolested

…You know what? I’m bored. That’s not all of 2010; just what I can find, from other news organisations – most of which are significantly smaller are far more poorly resourced than News Corp – from the last month. The Times has covered none of it.

What it has done is to take some chunks out of DfID – the UK government’s Department for International Development – for, again, no very good reason. I could go on in this vein but you get the gist.

The question is, why does the right wing mistrust and fear internationalism so much? The economic right should love it; organisations such as Amnesty, HRW and DfID set up supply routes and manufacture chains that, in the long run, can form the paths that corporate bodies can follow to new markets. The problem is the social right, whose witlessly reflexive delusions grow ever more elaborate – witness, today, the claim that Lady Gaga is the principle obstacle to Middle Eastern peace, and those pesky settlements are just Beltway bleating. There really isn’t much that can be done about that – other than to oppose it when it emerges and hope that enough people are listening that it doesn’t take root.

As an aside: a track from the new New Pornographers album exists. It’s good; check it out.