Letter from Richard Sherman to Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) re foundational antisemitism of Human Rights Watch, in response to Professor Michael deGraff

Dear Letter to the Editor:

MIT Professor Michael DeGraff might want to do some research concerning the foundational antisemitism of Human Rights Watch before he cites it. (" A Call For Courage in the Face of Rising Fascism, Antisemitism and Anti Palestinian Racism and Genocide")

The founder and former president of Human Rights Watch, Robert L. Bernstein,  declared in a lengthy and famous Op Ed in The New York Times in 2009, that Human Rights Watch  had devolved into an anti Israel organization ("Rights Watchers, Lost in the Mideast", October 19, 2009).

Mr. Bernstein( Harvard 1944) wrote:

"Human Rights Watch has lost critical perspective on a conflict in which Israel has been repeatedly attacked by Hamas and Hezbollah, organizations that go after Israeli citizens and use their own people as human shields....Yet, Israel, the repeated victim of aggression, faces the brunt of Human Right Watch's criticism...

"Only by returning to its founding mission and the spirit of humility that animated it can Human Rights Watch resurrect itself as a moral force in the Middle East and throughout the world. If it fails to do that, its credibility will be seriously undermined and its important role in the world significantly diminished." ( Robert L. Bernstein, New York Times, 10/19/09)

Also, on December 5, 2022 Steven Postal in the Jewish News Service wrote that "NGO Monitor finds over 300 flaws with Human Rights Watch report on Israel's ' apartheid."

Professor DeGraff's failure to do his homework concerning the antisemitism of Human Rights Watch undermines all the citations in his article.

He would do better to study the wisdom and prescience of Nobel Peace Winner the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr who said in Cambridge, Massachusetts in October 1967:

"When people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews; you're talking antisemitism".

(" The Socialism of Fools - The Left, the Jews and Israel", Seymour Martin Lipset, "Encounter", December 1969, page 24; see also: " The Words of Martin Luther King", Harvard website 2016, Professor Martin Kramer).

See Also: " The Pro-Israel Legacy of the Reverend Dr. Martin

Luther King Jr" in " Zionism and the Black Church", Chapter 4,  Pastor Dumisani Washington, pp 77-102, (2021).

Richard Sherman, POB 934853, Margate, Florida 33093(646)267-7904.