NGOs’ Selective Outrage and Hypocrisy – The American Spectator | USA News and PoliticsThe American Spectator

They dumped his body on his family’s doorstep. Twenty-two-year-old Odai Nasser al-Rubai was tortured and murdered — his face disfigured, his bones broken, his corpse used as a grim warning to others — because he dared to join a recent protest in Gaza calling out Hamas’s corruption and brutality.

Al-Rubai was one of thousands of Gazans who took to the streets in late March and early April, demanding an end to Hamas’s oppressive rule and the devastating war it provoked. Media reports indicate that other demonstrators were also arrested, tortured, and executed.

And yet, as Palestinians dared to speak out, even at the risk of being murdered by the terror group governing Gaza, the world’s leading human rights organizations remain silent. (RELATED: Palestinians’ ‘Allies’ Need to Abolish Hamas, Not Israel)

Where are the watchdogs of injustice now — NGOs like Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Paris-based FIDH, Al-Haq, and U.N. bodies like the Human Rights Council? These are the same groups that have flooded headlines with false accusations of Israeli “genocide,” that rushed to submit International Criminal Court (ICC) complaints about Israel, and treated inflated Hamas-supplied casualty figures from Gaza as gospel. But when Palestinians are beaten, imprisoned, and killed by their own rulers, those voices fall silent.

This silence not only destroys the credibility of these organizations — it exposes the facade that they seek to protect or even care about Palestinian civilians. Many powerful NGOs and international organizations, such as the U.N. agencies operating in the region, claim to advocate for human rights and freedom. But they are less interested in protecting Palestinians and more interested in demonizing Israel — even if that means defending the actions of terror groups. (RELATED: ‘Pro-Palestine’ Is a Cover for Anti-American)

Although the silence on the Hamas protest crackdown throws this issue into sharp focus, it has long been a pattern deeply ingrained in the way many international organizations and NGOs approach the conflict, and shows no signs of changing, bringing little hope that such organizations can make any real positive impact on Palestinian lives.

For example, Francesca Albanese, who was recently re-appointed as the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Palestinian territories, has spent most of her tenure demonizing Israel. Notably, she stated that Israel’s “aggression” was the cause of the Oct. 7 attacks. She, too, not surprisingly, has been silent about the anti-Hamas protests in Gaza. Her history of rationalizing terrorism and downplaying the antisemitic nature of the support for the Oct. 7 atrocities, combined with her current silence, shows that she is not a human rights activist, but rather a political anti-Israel activist.

The broader human rights community follows the same script. When Palestinians risk everything to protest the regime that oppresses them and brought them into a devastating war, their so-called defenders double down on critiquing Israel’s actions in defending itself. They continue to focus exclusively on accusations of Israeli wrongdoing and ignoring, if not exonerating, Hamas for causing the suffering in Gaza (and beyond).

Take Amnesty International. As Palestinians were being tortured and killed for protesting Hamas, Amnesty decided to instead focus on Israel. It called on Hungary to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and surrender him to the ICC, launched an international campaign urging Hyundai to boycott Israel, rallied support for Mahmoud Khalil — the Palestinian student activist who organized anti-Israel demonstrations at Columbia University, and continues to blame European leaders for failing to protect the people of Gaza from Israeli “genocide.” (RELATED: The Arrest of Columbia University’s Mahmoud Khalil: Unmasking Campus Radicalism)

This obsession with Israel shows that Amnesty is more invested in attacking the Jewish state than examining the terror groups and extremism causing suffering in Gaza. Ultimately, this undermines the cause of universal human rights and provides cover for terrorists to thrive in Gaza, causing immeasurable suffering among the Palestinians whom Amnesty claims to protect.

Amnesty was not alone. Human Rights Watch. Norwegian Refugee Council. Oxfam International. None of these supposed human rights stalwarts — who never miss an opportunity to go after Israel — made significant comments or initiated campaigns to support anti-Hamas protesters. Where were the dozens of NGOs that have signed countless joint statements condemning Israel?

And the damage doesn’t stop at the halls of the U.N. or the offices of international NGOs — it spills into classrooms, campuses, and newsrooms across the West.

On university campuses, especially in the U.S. and Europe, student-led protests have increasingly taken their cues from this warped moral framework. Many have openly glorified Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre, justified hostage-taking, and framed even the most barbaric acts, including rape and baby-killing, as legitimate “resistance.” These movements — often supported or amplified by the same NGOs that claim to promote peace — aren’t advancing justice. They’re fueling hate. And in doing so, they are aligning themselves not with the victims of Hamas, but with the terror group’s agenda.

Meanwhile, the NGOs behind these narratives continue to receive generous funding from Western governments and major philanthropic foundations. There is little transparency, and even less accountability. While NGOs speak in the language of justice and freedom, their actions empower the very forces that crush both.

A movement that only targets Israel and its actions, often without any justification, and stays silent when Palestinians are murdered by their own rulers, is not promoting human rights — it’s promoting propaganda. If it wants to be taken seriously, the international human rights community must end its silence and hold Hamas accountable for its actions.

NGO Monitor has long warned that many so-called human rights actors are enabling authoritarianism, not fighting it. It’s time for these organizations to be held accountable for their hypocrisy and to genuinely advocate for the rights of all individuals, regardless of the perpetrator.

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