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This is a response to an op-ed by HRW’s Kenneth Roth, "The Incendiary IDF."

[Excerpts:]

"In 2004, Roth held a high-profile press conference at the American Colony Hotel in Jerusalem to publicize a glossy 135-page anti-Israel indictment entitled ‘Razing Rafah.’ The description of terrorists as "resistance" and the use of this report to promote the boycott campaign against Caterpillar over sales to Israel reveal HRW’s ideological bias. The main claims were that tunnels from Egypt to Gaza posed little threat, and, according to ‘experts,’ including sales clerks, could be readily detected by equipment used in America. The IDF’s attacks against buildings that hid tunnel entrances were ‘unnecessary,’ ‘unlawful,’ and designed to maintain ‘long-term control over the Gaza Strip.’ Less than one year later, Israel had fully withdrawn from Gaza, opening the way for the import of thousands of rockets through the tunnels. HRW got it completely wrong, but learned no lessons. Roth followed a similar pattern during the 2006 Lebanon War, with numerous false claims quoting ‘eyewitnesses’ from territory fully controlled by Hezbollah. In the case of an attack in Qana, HRW adopted false claims regarding casualties that were nearly double the on-site figure provided by the Red Cross. In these and other cases, Roth has never apologized, and no independent investigations of HRW’s numerous errors and biases have been conducted." "n contrast, HRW’s flood of condemnations suggests that all weapons used in self-defense are somehow illegitimate. In the complexities of defense against well-armed terror organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah, mistakes are made, and these should be corrected. But the checks and balances in Israel’s democratic process are clearly more credible than Roth’s emotional outbursts, HRW’s ideological "experts" or the counterproductive exploitation of international legal rhetoric. Beyond the demonization of Israel’s right to defend its citizens from attack, such cynical distortions undermine the moral foundation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This moral destruction is antithetical to the worthy objectives envisioned by the founders of HRW."