ABC Mini-Encyclopedia

Human Rights Activists

"Human Rights Activists" is one of the few honorable titles what people and organizations can and recently do grant to themselves without any control. Therefore, while respecting the title and all the good intentions behind, we'd better watch out more what the different self-declared human right activists (HRA) do, and not less, what they do NOT do, before we give them the credit due to the noble title.

1 - If a HRA is scrutinizing any state's and organization's, including Israel's practice and possible wrong-doings - it is honest HRA. If it reports and publishes well-based findings, painful or inconvenient as they be - it is still honest HRA.

2 - If a HRA forwards, possibly un-knowingly, false reports, and when evidence clearly shows their mistake they don't publicly and loudly correct their accusations - it starts to be suspicious to be not HRA, but hostile propaganda.

3 - If a HRA is searching, using data and sources, uses wordings and publishes findings on a conflict in a one-sided way - again it is suspicious of propaganda, or hate-speech.

4 - If a HRA is blowing up the figures of the Jenin battle's 52 Palestinian dead (47 men in arms, and tragically enough 4 women and a child too) to a 3000 strong-massacre, or as Mr. Saib Erekat did, tenfolds 'only' to a 520 victims-strong 'massacre') and never apologizes, then it is more than suspicious of manipulation and ill will, and commits actually the crime of blood libel.

But there is another, much more wide-spread sort of hardly honest HRA, the OMISSION. If amidst the thousands of pages and hundreds of hours of reporting a genocide of the size of 300 times Srebrenica or 40000 times the Jenin battle "avoids" the attention of the HRA organizations, it amounts to a cover-up, even if mostly probably unintentional.