Garlasco does his ‘splainin’

Capital J

By Ron Kampeas · September 14, 2009

At Huffington Post, Human Rights Watch's Marc Garlasco defends his icky Nazi memorabilia collection as, well, icky, but his kind of private icky. In that case, please, refrain from sharing it with us in book and online form.

Maybe he was prompted to write after HRW stalwarts such as Daniel Levy, M.J. Rosenberg and Helena Cobban were moved to protest.

Their collective caveat is that this is part of a ~~right-wing~~ an assault on HRW by its pro-Israel critics.* That's credible -- I noted in my earlier post the unseemly alacrity with which the Netanyahu government's Ron Dermer joined the fray.

And critiques of HRW's failure to contextualize, of its overemphasis on Israel and of its officers' collection habits should nonetheless also take into account HRW's credible and independently verifiable finds.

Still, geese, gander and the like; If HRW's findings deserve attention despite the group's deviations from objectivity, the same is true of the folks who uncovered Garlasco's thang.

Cobban deserves kudos for doing exactly that:

But right now, I'm looking at this page on NGO Monitor's website, and agreeing with much of what they have there on this topic.

*I've decried the use of meaningless "right-wing-left-wing" labels in the past, and here I go using one. A lot of HRW's critics occupy moderate territory in Israel's spectrum. Thanks to a reader for chastising me on this one.