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[Excerpts:]

"Prof. Gerald Steinberg, president of the Jerusalem-based NGO Monitor, criticized Human Rights Watch for neglecting the persecution of the Iranian LGBT population. “Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s most recent inflammatory and hateful rhetoric is indicative of the severe lack of human rights and poisonous atmosphere for Iran’s LGBT community, Steinberg told The Jerusalem Post. “In their obsessive targeting of Israel, HRW’s Middle East and North Africa (MENA) division largely has ignored this and other human rights abuses in the region. As HRW founder Robert Bernstein repeatedly has noted, HRW has abandoned its mission of demanding the opening of closed societies, and helping individuals in those societies to fight for their rights.”" "In last week’s edition, veteran reporter Doug Ireland noted: “Publication of the HRW report on persecution of Iranian queers had been promised by the organization’s former director of LGBT affairs, Scott Long, as long as four years ago. During his five-year long campaign of attacks on the UK’s iconic gay and human rights activist, Peter Tatchell, who had spearheaded global protests against the 2005 execution of two presumably gay Iranian teenagers on concocted charges of ‘rape.’” Long has since resigned from HRW, and Kenneth Roth, HRW’s executive director, issued a public apology to Tatchell last year, saying, “We recognize that personal attacks have no place in the human rights movement.” HRW’s Global Advocacy Director Peggy Hicks told the Post “HRW has spent years working on human rights abuse of Iranians persecuted for their real or presumed sexual orientation and/or gender identity or expression, and released a 100-page report on the subject in December 2010. We have also done extensive reporting on Egypt’s abuse of those suspected of homosexual conduct, and the murder, kidnapping and torture of gay men, and men presumed to be gay in Iraq. The only reasonable explanation for NGO Monitor’s remarks on this subject is that facts are irrelevant to them when they don’t fit into the false narrative they are pursuing about HRW and our work.” Responding to Hicks on Tuesday, Steinberg said, “HRW does not like NGO Monitor because we are the only research organization that denies the ‘halo effect’ to expose the contrast between their lofty words and the reality of their activities.” He added, “The evidence clearly supports Mr. Bernstein’s conclusion about HRW’s lack of moral clarity.”"