Former Human Rights Watch chairman: Group is “lost in the Mideast”

Robert L. Bernstein, chairman of Human Rights Watch from 1978 to 1998, writing in the New York Times: “Now the organization, with increasing frequency, casts aside its important distinction between open and closed societies. Nowhere is this more evident than in its work in the Middle East. The region is populated by authoritarian regimes with appalling human rights records. Yet in recent years Human Rights Watch has written far more condemnations of Israel for violations of international law than of any other country in the region.”