The latest controversy involving Human Rights Watch is the fact that their senior military analyst, Mark Garlasco, is also an avid, and fairly prominent, collector of Nazi military memorabilia, and he has now been suspended from his position.

I think that a lot, though not all, of the issue here is stupidity, whether or not Mr. Garlasco harbors anti-Semitic thoughts or not.

When you are a military analyst who collects such stuff, and you are assigned to look at Israeli military operations, you need to know that it is best to not accept the assignment, and if your boss knows your hobby, he needs to know that he should never give you such an assignment.

They both had to know that it would harm his reputation and that of HRW.

Still, it’s clear that some of the commentary out there is clearly hysterical, such as hyping the picture of him with a German Cross on his hoodie, and NGO Monitor assertion his name on various boards, “Flak88,” is a secret Nazi symbol thing (8=H, so 88=HH=Heil Hitler). His specialty is German anti-aircraft memorabilia, his grandfather was a conscript serving in an anti-aircraft unit, and the Krupp 88mm gun was the best known AA (and anti-tank) gun of the war.

In any case, Mr. Garlasco published a response on Huffpo.

My assessment is that there is no evidence that he is an anti-Semite, nor that sympathizes with the Nazis.

That being said, there is another issue, which is whether Marc Garlasco, and Human Rights Watch are biased against Israel for other reasons, most notably nostalgie de la boue, literally “love of the mud”, which can either refer to the “elites” affecting “peasant” style and the like, or, and this is the definition that I’m using, the idea that those non-western “less advanced” societies are somehow more inherently good because they are less polluted by civilization.

I think that there reasons to be concerned that both Garlasco and HRW watch are guilty of this, and objectively anti-Israel as a result.

Omri Ceren observes that while no one is perfect, that the errors that have been found have always cut against Israel, and so, much like the “errors” in Florida in the 2000 presidential vote recount, show bias, though Mr. Ceren makes it very clear that he lacks any sort of smoking gun.

I do think that there is a smoking gun on the part of Human Rights Watch and Mr Garlasco as to a double standard.

Specifically, Daled Amos digs into the interviews with him, and uncovers two telling quotes.

The first is from 60 minutes:

“I don’t think people really appreciate the gymnastics that the U.S. military goes through in order to make sure that they’re not killing civilians,” Garlasco points out.

“If so much care is being taken why are so many civilians getting killed?” Pelley asks.

“Because the Taliban are violating international law,” says Garlasco, “and because the U.S. just doesn’t have enough troops on the ground. You have the Taliban shielding in people’s homes. And you have this small number of troops on the ground. And sometimes the only thing they can do is drop bombs.”

This is not something you see in reports from Human Rights watch in any report about Israeli military actions until at least page 6, and then only in the most circumspect terms.

And the news broadcast further states:

Garlasco says, before the invasion of Iraq, he recommended 50 air strikes aimed at high-value targets — Iraqi officials.

But he says none of the targets on the list were actually killed. Instead, he says, “a couple of hundred civilians at least” were killed.

Note that “targeted killings” that he advised on is something that Garlasco has specifically said is a war crime when Israel does this.

My thesis is that much of the overwrought nature of the coverage of Israel comes from the fact that the existence of Israel is an indictment of the western industrialized world.

The origins of modern Israel are that Jews in western Europe, particularly as a result of the Dreyfus affair in France, felt a need to have a homeland to flee to, and the events of the following century reinforced this need.

Israel exists because of the moral failure of the west over the past 120 years, and acknowledging that failure does not sit well with a lot of people.