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| Founded | 2001 |
|---|---|
| Founder | Gerald M. Steinberg |
| Type | Non-profit NGO |
| Focus | End promotion of "politically and ideologically motivated anti-Israel agendas" by certain NGOs. |
| Location |
|
| Area served | Israel |
| Method | Academic research institute |
| Owner | NGO Monitor |
| Key people | Gerald M. Steinberg (President) |
| Revenue | US$ 385,000 (2008) |
| Employees | 13 (November 2010) |
| Website | ngo-monitor.org |
NGO Monitor (Non-governmental Organization Monitor) is a non-governmental organization based in the western part of Jerusalem, whose stated aim is to generate and distribute critical analysis and reports on the output of the international NGO community for the benefit of government policy makers, journalists, philanthropic organizations, and the general public. NGO Monitor says in its mission statement that it was founded to "to promote accountability, and advance a vigorous discussion on the reports and activities of humanitarian NGOs in the framework of the Arab-Israeli conflict." The organization was founded by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs (with funding from the Wechsler Family Foundation) as part of "an array of cutting-edge programs to present Israel's case to the world". NGO Monitor became a financially distinct organization in 2007 when it registered with the Registrar of Non-Profit Organizations in Israel. NGO Monitor has been characterized as being pro-Israel.
Structure and staff
NGO Monitor is the central project of the Organization for NGO Responsibility, an independent non-profit organization registered in Israel. Its President is Gerald M. Steinberg, a Professor of Political Science at Bar-Ilan University and a Senior Research Associate at the BESA Center for Strategic Studies as well as a columnist for The Jerusalem Post.
Its staff includes:
- Gerald M. Steinberg, President.
- Naftali Balanson, Managing Editor.
- Anne Herzberg, Legal Advisor.
- Dov Yarden, Chief Executive Officer.
Funding
NGO Monitor states that it was originally funded by the Wechsler Family Foundation when it was part of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs (JCPA). NGO Monitor says it receives no governmental support and is currently funded by private donors and foundations. NGO Monitor receives significant financial support from Research + Evaluation = Promoting Organizational Responsibility and Transparency (REPORT) (formerly American Friends of NGO Monitor (AFNGOM)), which provided a grant of $500,000 in 2010. Current donors include Peter Simpson, Jerusalem; Jewish Federations of North America and United Jewish Appeal; Orion Foundation; The Jewish Agency for Israel; Matan; and The Center for Jewish Community Studies (part of JCPA). Financial reports for 2009 and 2010 are available on their website.
According to a February 2012 article in Haaretz (Hebrew), an examination (of NGO Monitor's finances) reveals that "the organization sought to block the publication of one contributor and to get hundreds of thousands of Shekels from anonymous sources." The donations from the Jewish Agency for Israel and Matan originated with unnamed donors from outside Israel. Noam Sheizaf, in a discussion of NGOM's finances for +972 magazine, has described the Jewish Agency for Israel, one of NGOM's major donors, as "a quasi-governmental organization, operating in Israel under special status". Jason Edelstein, NGO Monitor's communications director, told Haaretz that "all of our financial information is fully disclosed with the Registrar for Non-Profits as required by law."
Activities
NGO Monitor states that its mission is to "end the practice used by certain self-declared ‘humanitarian NGOs’ of exploiting the label ‘universal human rights values’ to promote politically and ideologically motivated agendas".
NGO Monitor maintains an online directory of NGOs worldwide, which generally includes a description of each organization, a quote from the organization itself, its funding sources, and relevant quotes about the organization from publications and officials. NGO Monitor also has considerable material related to the first Durban Conference and the Durban strategy of divestment and boycott, as well as considerable discussion regarding the 2009 Durban Review Conference.
With the stated aim of encouraging critical debate on the role of NGOs in the Middle East conflict, NGO Monitor held a 2006 conference in Jerusalem with 21 humanitarian aid groups in attendance. A panel discussed the pros and cons of NGOs dealing with Hamas. NGOs such as Amnesty International, B'Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights were invited to speak but declined. Amnesty International said the conference did "not give a balanced ground for open and fair dialogue" while another human rights group accused NGO Monitor of "partiality".
NGO Monitor has criticized several major international human rights organizations, such as Christian Aid, for ignoring "Palestinian responsibility in the conflict" and minimizing "Israel’s right to self-defense." Other NGOs under the microscope have been Amnesty International, Oxfam, the Center for Constitutional Rights, Médecins Sans Frontières, and Human Rights Watch.
In 2009, NGO Monitor published a monograph called “Experts or Ideologues: Systematic Analysis of Human Rights Watch” which includes analysis of key HRW staff members, five case studies of HRW campaigns, and quantitative analysis comparing HRW publications in the Middle East, covering the period from 2002 to 2009. In April 2010, Benjamin Birnbaum published in The New Republic a lengthy and highly critical piece about HRW, on the same line of the research done by NGO Monitor, stating that HRW gives "disproportionate attention to Israeli misdeeds."
NGO Monitor released a document comparing Amnesty International's response to the twenty years of ethnic, religious and racial violence during the Second Sudanese Civil War to their treatment of Israel. NGO Monitor said that Amnesty International issued 7 reports on Sudan, as opposed to 39 reports on Israel. They further said: “While ignoring the large-scale and systematic bombing and destruction of Sudanese villages, AI issued numerous condemnations of the razing of Palestinian houses, most of which were used as sniper nests or belonged to terrorists. Although failing to decry the slaughter of thousands of civilians by Sudanese government and allied troops, AI managed to criticize Israel’s ‘assassinations’ of active terrorist leaders.” NGO Monitor also wrote there were 52 reports on Sudan and 192 reports on Israel. NGO Monitor opined “this lack of balance and objectivity and apparent political bias is entirely inconsistent with AI's official stated mission.”
The organization formerly criticized the Ford Foundation for funding the 2001 World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance which took place in Durban, South Africa, which it accuses of condoning violence against Israel. The Ford Foundation has modified its policies regarding funding of NGOs. It also has taken exception to such accusations and says its involvement in the Palestinian territories reflects its belief that a just solution to the conflict is vitally important to the region and the peoples directly affected and that it also funds groups such as the New Israel Fund.
NGO Monitor also states that B'Tselem, an NGO that calls itself "The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories", has employed "abusive and demonizing rhetoric designed to elicit political support for Palestinians".
NGO Monitor has criticized the New Israel Fund, which states that its primary objective is "to strengthen Israel's democracy", for funding organizations that NGO Monitor says are engaged in a "campaign to delegitimize Israel." These arguments were denied by the ex-president of the New Israel Fund and law professor at Georgetown University Law Center, Peter Edelman, who described NGO Monitor's criticism as "un-democratic and un-Jewish" and "inherently and fundamentally flawed." Larry Garber, then Executive Director of the New Israel Fund, and Eliezer Yaari, then NIF's Israel Director and a retired Israeli air force major, wrote in an op-ed for The Jerusalem Post that if Israel were to accept the premises of Gerald Steinberg, the director of NGO Monitor, then "Israel's credibility - and, more important, the nation's morality - will suffer." Ongoing public debate in 2009 and 2010 about the NIF's funding practices continues, with NGO Monitor calling for the NIF to draw a firm line regarding funding those organizations which "support activities designed to promote the NGO Durban strategy to isolate Israel." NGO Monitor decried NIF’s use of “uncivil rhetroric” including being accused of "McCarthyism", being called “extremist”, and more.
On October 12, 2006, NGO Monitor made a submission to the government of the United Kingdom on the funding of Israeli NGOs.
On August 31, 2009, NGO Monitor made a submission to Canadian Parliamentary Coalition to Combat Antisemitism, regarding "Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) and the “Durban Strategy”: The Emergence of an Antisemitic Global Movement" explaining in detail the Canadian government funding for NGOs promoting the Durban Strategy.
Reception
Praise
The Forward, in an article written by Nathan Jeffay in January 2011, says that NGO Monitor is "Israel’s most prominent watchdog of human rights groups".
Jennifer Rubin, writing in the Washington Post in December 2010 says that NGO Monitor is "an organization that investigates and sharply criticizes many self-described human rights groups as thinly disguised anti-Israel outfits."
Criticism
Yehudit Karp, a member of the International Council of the New Israel Fund and a former Deputy Attorney General of Israel, said that NGO Monitor has released information "it knew to be wrong, along with some manipulative interpretation."
The New Israel Fund said in May 2011 that NGO Monitor "knowingly published false information in its newsletter," regarding the NIF funding of Coalition of Women for Peace (CWP). NIF stated that NGO Monitor's director was provided the correct information verbally in advance. NGO Monitor responded that their report was based on NIF grant information, which is public. NIF's rejoinder stated that their public records lag the end of the reporting year by several months, but reiterated that updated information was provided to NGO Monitor verbally. They also stated that they asked CWP to remove mention of NIF's name from the CWP website.
In July 2009, HRW issued a statement saying that "NGO Monitor...conducts no field investigations and condemns anyone who criticizes Israel".
Uriel Heilman, a Managing Editor for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) and a senior reporter for the Jerusalem Post, wrote in an online opinion column that there were a "couple of disingenuous (read: inaccurate) elements" in the May 2009 digest of NGO Monitor. Heilman rhetorically asked whether the situation itself was "enough for Steinberg and NGO Monitor's followers without Steinberg having to stretch the truth?" Gerald Steinberg, head of NGO Monitor, later conceded the phrasing was confusing and revised the statement.
Kathleen Peratis, a member of the board of Human Rights Watch called into question the research methodology underlying an op-ed by NGO Monitor's Steinberg for not saying specifically where or when HRW statements have been unverifiable. She also has criticized, in 2006, NGO Monitor for accusations against Human Right Watch and its "executive director, whose father fled Nazi Germany". Peratis took issue with an op-ed by NGO Monitor's Gerald Steinberg titled "Ken Roth's Blood Libel", and argues those like NGO Monitor "who want selective exemption of Israel from the rules of war" may not "have faced the implications of getting what they wish for."
Political Orientation
NGO Monitor published a press release in 2010 regarding Electronic Intifada focusing on a grant EI receives from the Dutch foundation ICCO. In response, Electronic Intifada wrote that "NGO Monitor is an extreme right-wing group with close ties to the Israeli government, military, West Bank settlers, a man convicted of misleading the US Congress, and to notoriously Islamophobic individuals and organizations in the United States." Dutch Minister of Foreign Affairs, Uri Rosenthal, told IKON radio, "anti-semitism was not the issue" but "my concern about calls to contribute to boycotts and embargoes", in an interview on 5 December about ICCO's support of The Electronic Intifada.
According to a United States diplomatic cable, uncovered in the Wikileaks documents, Prof. Gerald Steinberg said that "he did not want the NGO legislation to feed into the delegitimizing rhetoric, but that such an unintended consequence might be an acceptable cost to reduce the power of the NGOs' current monopolization of human rights rhetoric for politicized purposes."
David Newman, a professor of political geography at Ben-Gurion University, wrote an op-ed in the Jerusalem Post in 2009 criticizing NGO Monitor for attacking the transparency of human rights organizations while ignoring the murky funding and support for extremist settler organizations.
In a 2009 opinion column he writes for The Jerusalem Post, Larry Derfner asserted that "NGO Monitor doesn't have a word of criticism for Israel, nor a word of acknowledgment, even grudging, for any detail in any human rights report that shows Israel to be less than utterly blameless. In fact, on the subject of Israel's human rights record, NGO Monitor doesn't have a word of disagreement with the Prime Minister's Office," he wrote.
John H. Richardson, writing in Esquire Magazine's online magazine in 2009 described NGO Monitor as a "rabidly partisan organization that attacks just about anyone who dares to criticize Israel on any grounds." It notes that Steinberg is dedicated to fighting "the narrative war," and has made a "special project" of attacking Human Rights Watch.
Didi Remez, a former spokesperson for the Peace Now group and former consultant to BenOr Consulting, (which was co-founded by Jeremy Ben-Ami of J Street), said NGO Monitor "is not an objective watchdog: It is a partisan operation that suppresses its perceived ideological adversaries through the sophisticated use of McCarthyite techniques – blacklisting, guilt by association and selective filtering of facts."
In 2007, The Economist and Jewish Telegraphic Agency identified NGO Monitor as a pro-Israel non-governmental organization.
In an op-ed published in 2005 by Forward, Leonard Fein, a former Professor of Politics and Klutznick Professor of Contemporary Jewish Studies at Brandeis University, takes issue with NGO Monitor's statement that Human Rights Watch (HRW) places “extreme emphasis on critical assessments of Israel” and has issued more reports about HRW than on any other of the 75 NGOs it concerns itself with. In his op-ed, Leonard Fein writes that HRW has devoted more attention to five other nations in the region — Iraq, Sudan, Egypt, Turkey and Iran — than they have to Israel; but that, despite extensive correspondence, Mr Steinberg has failed to correct the "misleading" statement about HRW on the NGO Watch website. Fein argues that NGO Monitor may not be free of the "narrow political and ideological preferences” of which it accuses HRW. The Forward writes NGO Monitor says it has increased Human Right Watch's reporting on Hamas, Hezbollah and the Palestinian authority while Human Rights Watch has rejected the statements and said it was dealing with counterterrorism in a post-9/11 world.
In a 2004 article for the Political Research Associates, Jean Hardisty and Elizabeth Furdon describe NGO Monitor as a "conservative NGO watchdog group,...which focuses on perceived threats to Israeli interests", adding that "the ideological slant of NGO Monitor's work is unabashedly pro-Israeli. It does not claim to be a politically neutral examination of NGO activities and practices."
Ittijah, Union of Arab Community Based Organisations in Israel, has said NGO Monitor represents the interests and the say of the Israeli state rather than civil society’s voice based on human rights values. Ittijah further states that NGO Monitor is guided by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
In January 2010, thirteen Israeli human rights organizations released a common statement which described NGO Monitor and Im Tirtzu as "extremist", and criticised an "unbridled and incendiary attack" by them against human rights groups.
See also
References
- ^ "About NGO Monitor". NGO Monitor.
- "2008 Annual Report" (PDF). NGO Monitor. 2008. Retrieved 9 June 2010.
- NGO Monitor: Staff
- About the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs
- Registration number 580465508
- Non-Profit Listing
- Non-Profit Listing
- ^ Boycotting Israel: New pariah on the block, The Economist, September 13, 2007.
- ^ Ha'aretz columnist dropped by British Zionists, JTA, August 31, 2007.
- Bar Ilan University Faculty Info
- NGO Monitor: Donors
- Donor and Financial Information
- http://972mag.com/questions-regarding-foreign-influence-transparency-of-ngo-monitor/35854/
- העמותה שעוקבת אחר ארגוני השמאל לא רוצה שתדעו מי תורם לה
- Directory of Non Governmental Agencies Alphabetical by Country
- NGO Monitor Reports on Durban at website
- NGO Leadership in Boycott and Divestment Campaigns
- Durban Review Conference 2009 at NGO Monitor site
- ^ European Jewish Press: EU to discuss Middle East NGOs funding
- ^ The Jerusalem Post: Major NGOs skip 'unfair' monitoring conference
- "Christian Aid (UK)". NGO Monitor.
- ^ "Human Rights Groups are Working Against Peace". NGO Monitor.
- "´Political Humanitarianism´ and Medical NGOs", NGO Monitor website. Retrieved 13 March 2012.
- Report: "Activity Summary of Human Rights Watch March 2003 - March 2004"|work=NGO Monitor
- "Experts or Ideologues: Systematic Analysis of Human Rights Watch"
- Minority Report: Human Rights Watch fights a civil war over Israel, by Benjamin Birnbaum, April 27, 2010
- ^ Fredman, Asher Ahuvia (August 26, 2004). "Asleep at the Wheel: Comparing the Performance of Human Rights NGO's on Sudan and Arab-Israeli Issues". NGO Monitor. Retrieved 2006-07-27.
- NGO Monitor: Ford Foundation NGO Funding Update
- netWMD: "Stunning Reversal"
- Forward: Ford Foundation Backs Proponents of Peace
- Betselem: Report Uses Outdated Sources and the Rhetoric of Demonization, NGO Monitor Analysis (Vol. 2 No. 12), August 15, 2004.
- NGO Monitor Mission Statement
- NGO Monitor: Exchange of letters on NIF transparency and accountability
- Jewish Tribune: New Israel Fund director responds to criticism
- The Jerusalem Post: Who's really damaging Israel's image?
- NGO Monitor Calls on New Israel Fund to draw Red Lines
- McCarthyism - Pure and Simple
- NIF letter to President Peres
- NIF Funds NGOs which assisted the UN Goldstone Commission
- The humanitarian and development situation in the Occupied Palestinian Territories: Oral and written evidence By Great Britain. Parliament. House of Commons. International Development Committee. (Session 2007-08). Published by The Stationery Office, 2008 ISBN 0215523199 p 79
- Submission to Canadian Parliamentary Coalition to Combat Antisemitism
- Does Arab Money Fund Left-wing Israeli NGOs?
- Mourning on International Human Rights Day
- NGO Monitor and Adalah: The thinly veiled agenda
- Letter to Rachel Liel - NIF-Israel Executive Director
- JTA: Playing fast and loose with the facts at NGO Monitor
- dyn/content/article/2006/08/29/AR2006082901045.html The Washington Post: Diversionary Strike On a Rights Group
- Jerusalem Post: Ken Roth's blood libel
- dyn/content/article/2006/08/29/AR2006082901045.html The Washington Post: Diversionary Strike On a Rights Group
- NGO Monitor Press Release: Dutch Government Funding for Antisemitic "Electronic Intifada"
- http://www.ikonrtv.nl/daw/uitzending.asp?lIntItem=3&lIntEntityId=266
- Knesset Considers Controversial Ngo Legislation To Register As Foreign Agents
- Who's Monitoring the Monitor?
- Derfner, Larry (2009-07-22). "Rattling the Cage: The smearing of human rights organizations". The Jerusalem Post. Retrieved 2009-08-18.
- Richardson, John (2009-10). "Why Is This Good Man Getting Hung Out to Dry?". Esquire Magazine. Retrieved 2010-03-29.
{{cite news}}: Check date values in:|date=(help) - BenOr Staff
- Jewish group pays PR firm co-owned by its president
- Didi Remez: Bring on the transparency (Haaretz, Nov. 26, 2009)
- Leonard Fein (2005-05-20). "Monitoring The Monitor". Jewish Daily Forward.
- Human Rights Watch To Increase Focus on Terrorism, Marc Perelman, July 29, 2005, The Forward,
- Policing Civil Society Spring 2004, Political Research Associates
- Ittijah: Statement on Israel’s Pronouncement to Boycott
- Re: Assault and delegitimization of human rights organizations in Israel – warning and request of meeting (ACRI, Jan. 31st, 2010)
External links
Official Links
News articles related to NGO Monitor
- NGO Monitor slams German agency for Durban II coverage by Benjamin Weinthal, The Jerusalem Post, February 25, 2010
- NGO Monitor turns to EU court for transparency by Dan Izenberg, The Jerusalem Post, January 21, 2010
- Right of Reply: Who's afraid of NGO Monitor? byh Naftali Balanson, The Jerusalem Post, December 2, 2009
- Israel, Aid Groups Have Long Feuded By Craig Whitlock, Washington Post Foreign Service, January 14, 2009