How disgraceful anti-Israel NGOs set UN agenda

Hint: it is all about the money

A full-page ad in the Sept. 27 issue of the Globe and Mail, sponsored by the NGO Médecins sans Frontières/Doctors without Borders (MSF), begins with the words, “Doctors can’t stop genocide: World leaders can.” At the end, it asks readers to “stand up for humanity” by signing a linked petition calling on the Canadian government to “uphold international Humanitarian Law.”

In between, the duplicitous ad tots up the many calamities Gazans have endured in the two-year Hamas-Israel war. The ad speaks of civilian hunger, but not of plentiful aid stolen by Hamas. It does not mention Hamas at all — or the hostages taken, or any other casus belli.

And hanging overall the false accusation that it is Israel that is committing genocide. Genocide requires intent, demonstrably not the case in Israel’s defensive war, but which perfectly describes the motivation behind Hamas’s rabid pogrom on October 7.

Nevertheless, credulous empaths will read the ad through a lens of trust in MSF’s original humanitarian mandate. They won’t register the absence of objectivity that today’s transmogrified MSF as a politicized, biased and untrustworthy source of information.

Amongst other derelictions of professional honour, MSF has not only lied about proven Hamas entrenchment in Gaza hospitals (“we have seen no evidence that the hospital buildings or the compounds are being used by Hamas as a military base”) but admitted — following Oct 7, mind — giving funding to the Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health.

The words “non-governmental organization” are a synonym for “civil society.” They are supposed to be made up of altruistic civic-minded groups that provide expertise independent of the narrow self-interest of political bodies. It is on that ground that they are invited to participate in UN activities and speak during UN sessions. (Outside the UN, NGO is a generic term to distinguish non-profits from the business and government sectors.)

But when the upright Cold War era founders of worthy, but now corrupted NGOs like MSF, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty retired, anti-democratic Marxist activists executed the equivalent of a corporate hostile takeover of their organizations.

Apart from their anti-Israel ideology, attacking Israel brought them headlines, money and approval from Islamists. Their new brand failed to attract the scrutiny it deserved. Worse, because of their groups’ original politically neutral respectability, they still enjoy the “halo effect” established by their honourable forebears. Consequently, an equally politicized, incurious media accept their biased “reports” as objective without fact-checking or independent analysis.

I conducted an email interview with Professor Gerald Steinberg, founder and president of NGO Monitor, since 2013 “a recognized organization in Special Consultative Status with the UN Economic and Social Council,” to help me navigate the less-travelled byways of this complex terrain.

NGO Monitor has published damning reports on all the superpower NGOs, which have massive budgets and public relations divisions that allow them to manage perceptions of events and actors, but also to avoid substantial regulation. MSF’s annual income is 2.4 billion euros (C$3.9 billion) ; Amnesty International — whose anti-Israel rap sheet is worse than MSF’s — has an annual budget of 370 million euros (C$605 million); Human Rights Watch a $111 million (C$150 million); Oxfam a billion euros (C$1.6 billion). They all have in common an antipathy to Israel too extreme to disguise the antisemitism at its core.

This wealth, Steinberg says, “buys political influence and immunity from criticism.” And because of an absence of elections or oversight in almost every case, these NGOs become easy paths to political power for ideologically committed activists.

The website of the International Committee of the Red Cross proudly states, “We take action, not sides.” False. The Red Cross’s inner corruption and its abandonment of duty regarding Hamas’s Israeli hostages over the last two years in Gaza has been beyond disgraceful. The ICRC is what Steinberg calls a “GoNGO” — a pejorative term to denote “governmental non-government organizations.”

Even smaller NGOs can, when dedicated to a common mission of delegitimizing Israel, collectively exert great influence. Hamas and the Palestinian Authority would never tolerate hostile NGOs operating on their territories, but democratic Israel tolerates the presence of some 150 NGOs, both within Israel and in Judea and Samaria, who support the Palestinian dream of dismantling Israel. These groups encourage political revanchism, nourishing Palestinian delusions of victory over Israel rather than helping them to move on to envision a viable, responsible future. (Germany, which funded many of such NGOs, has to its credit, following NGO reports after October 7, greatly reduced and in some cases, cut off that funding.)

Unlike real corporations, the superpower NGOs are accountable to nobody, yet in large part they are setting the UN’s agenda on Israel. Then, when the UN executes the agenda they have promoted, they endorse it as if it were a coincidence that they’re on the same page.

These obsessive NGO feral cats purr beguilingly of “humanitarianism” for the public. Belling them with “reports” alone that the general public rarely sees is hard, slow, and often thankless work, but it is the only permissible weapon in a democracy.