NGO Monitor Responds

By Naftali Balanson, NGO Monitor (From the July/August Issue of Moment) Letty Cottin Pogrebin’s uncritical piece on the Israeli NGO known as Breaking the Silence, or BTS (“The IDF’s Silent Whistle-Blowers,” May/June 2011), omits crucial information about the group. A significant portion of the organization’s activities targets foreign audiences, not Israeli public opinion, while demonizing the Israeli army. Events in Sweden, Ireland and the U.S. (in one case, Pakistani and Egyptian diplomats were in attendance) are part of the BTS contribution to the global de-legitimization campaign. The absurdity of BTS faux-suffering peaked with its nomination for the EU’s Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought. In sharp contradistinction to BTS, the other nominees were real dissidents and opponents of totalitarian regimes, including a Cuban who had conducted 23 hunger strikes and others who had languished in prison. In...

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NGOs Fail Palestinian Women at the UN

By Paula Kweskin In April 2010, a 32-year-old woman was shot to death in a town in the northern Gaza Strip.  Several men, including her father, were arrested for the crime.  A year prior, a girl from a Palestinian village south of Qalqilya was smothered to death by her brother.  In 2005, a father murdered two of his daughters and badly injured a third for an alleged sexual affair.  In December 2008, two Palestinian girls were killed when militants' rockets directed at Israel fell short of their targets.  Two years later, a teenage girl was injured in central Israel when Hamas militants fired rockets on her kibbutz. Unfortunately, at the UN review of Israel’s compliance with the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) in January, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) squandered the opportunity...

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