2y ago

Human Rights Watch Under Fire For Allegedly Accepting Millions In Qatar Funds

www.i24news.tv

Human Rights Watch under fire for allegedly accepting millions in Qatar funds - I24NEWS

In 2020, the online news organization The Intercept revealed that HRW’s then-Executive Director, Ken Roth, accepted a $470,000 donation from a Saudi billionaire based on the condition that HRW would not use the money to protect the rights of the persecuted LGBTQ-plus community in the Middle East. 

Roth was compelled to return the donation after The Intercept report.

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2y ago

Human Rights Watch under fire for allegedly accepting millions in Qatar funds

www.i24news.tv /en/news/middle-east/1700763578-human-rights-watch-under-fire-for-allegedly-accepting-millions-in-qatar-funds

63 comments

- I am so sorry, Stamets. I am an ally with a queer daughter. Every day I worry about the world she's growing up in. She's been very bullied in school, but most kids don't know other kids' sexual orientation at 13, so they didn't bully her for that (although, of course, middle schoolers still love to call each other anti-LGBT slurs), but I'm much more worried about what adults will do to her. At her age, she's not truly aware of how bad it can be, but I do my best to educate her. Her best friend is a trans boy. His rights have already been taken away here in Indiana. He can't get gender-affirming care and the school legally has to deadname him even though his parents are supportive. He's already doing things like cutting himself and vaping, so he's obviously already pretty messed up. I really worry that he won't make it to adulthood. What hope do either of them have when human rights organizations won't even talk about how they're being oppressed and even victims of genocide?
  
  Sorry you’re dealing with this. I know families in similar situations. A friend’s daughter tried to Roblox herself, and my daughter’s friend is trans. It’s important as a family to always support them. There are groups on the internet that do meetups for social organization.
  
  I do not say the following lightly: in order to make a home where I feel truly comfortable I moved to a different country which is societally more accepting than where I was born.
  I hope that your daughter and her friend will have the freedom to find their community and build happy lives. Sometimes that means leaving forever.
- Some of us do give a shit, even some people you wouldn't expect. I try to get people to listen to and understand others' struggles and it's more effective than you think, but it's mostly people in my daily life.
- I read yesterday about the PR that Saudi Arabia and UAE have been doing to work their way up a "trust index", among other things.
  There are few, if any, uncorrupted organisations or countries, and I now believe that it is simply human nature to be monstrous. Anything else requires herculean strength or absolute bull-headedness.
  When I was young I watched Star Trek as an idealist looks Ng towards a brighter future, now I enjoy it as fantasy. If an interplanetary federation were to exist as it is portrayed, humans would have to be a minority to avoid contamination of ideals and truth.
Oh good, even human rights organizations don't care about queer people. What are they supposed to do? Who can they turn to?
- Jesus... I don't even know what to say about that. I'm just horrified and appalled.
  And that guy is not even the only one. Who knows how long police sat on evidence about Jeffrey Dahmer? I doubt they were all that concerned that he was murdering men for over a decade.
  
  Don't think about the downvotes. There are a lot of reddit trolls on lemmy who like to show up and downvote everything. There are people in this world who care. You are not an "issue" - you are a person. Your life matters.
The sudden media narrative that virtually every NGO operating in the Middle East is secretly anti-Semitic does not make a lot of sense, and has the appearance of a spin campaign.
- Yep. To be clear, though, it's not the reporting of corruption etc. that's the problem; it's the timing of the reporting that's suspicious.
  
  I agree. Any individual story may or may not be accurate but that’s not the point. We’ve seen the very abrupt and simultaneous reporting and discussion on many scandals in a variety of human rights organizations, usually based on innuendo or very shaky evidence. My suspicion would be Israel is behind this but there are many other governments that are hostile to independent NGOs which could be taking advantage of the situation to undermine trust in them.
- Eh, it could be but it seems like a stretch. I don't think it has to do with antisemitism. It's just kinda like when countries put oil execs in charge of environmental policy. It seems like this has been a problem for a while. People were probably just not paying as much attention in 2020 when that article came out.
- https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/i24-news/
  Israeli source slinging mud at a group that is calling them out.
  
  rated least biased. Editorially, they cover both sides of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and cover USA news with impartiality. When reporting on former right-wing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, there is a slightly negative tone
  Not that mediabiasfactcheck is infallible, but it seems like if anything they are biased against the Right Wing Israeli government. I've heard that MEMRI has problems with translating Arabic in unfavorable ways, so, we will have to wait and see if the leaked documents actually say what they claim.
They didn't imply they were for human rights
don't forget silencing hamas rape victims
Okay? So this was revealed in 2020 and the director guy returned the donation. Why is this being written about again 3 years later? Is someone trying to push a narrative in order to deflect from some other subject?
- I'm not sure if it's clear that there was an additional previous incident with HRW accepting money from Saudi Arabia. It's not a long article, and it's not behind a paywall. The current issue is potentially much more damning, accepting millions, not just hundreds of thousands, and this time from Qatar, which has an arguably worse human rights record than Saudi Arabia. Remember all those workers (slaves?) who died to build the World Cup facilities?
  Always helps to read the article before posting. 😉
- click the goddamn link if you have questions, jesus fucking christ.
Neither i24 nor memri are unbiased sources, but if this is true, it certainly would account for a lot of the anti-Israel bias that has been coming out of human rights watch lately.
- Yeah, it can't be the genocide.
  
  It's them inappropriately defining this as genocide or whatever other buzzwords will generate outrage. This is clearly about defense for Israel and not eliminating an ethnic group.

63 comments