So otway links to the discredited B'tselem non-human rights organisation. This organisation is not in the business of looking after human rights so much as being in the forefront of the movement to delegitimise Israel with almost its entire annual budget being provided by European governments whose foreign policies are anti-Israel to say the least and American foundations, such as the New Israel Fund and the Ford Foundation for that purpose.
In this article
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/the-btselem-witch-trials/
Noah Pollak tears them to shreds.
Obviously this group is beloved by the BBC which tells you everything you need to know about them.
As the article says:
All in all, B’Tselem has been an innovator in manipulating traditional definitions of international law, no matter how concocted and implausible, to suit an assault on whatever Israeli practice B’Tselem wishes to condemn. The group does admit in its reports that Israel has a right to protect its citizens. But it is a right that B’Tselem affirms only in theory, never in practice.
Then he writes: Shortly following its self-proclamation regarding accuracy and moderation, an Israeli columnist discovered that the group’s data-coordination director—one of the most important positions in the organization—had posted a number of curious entries on her personal blog. “Israel is committing Humanity’s worst atrocities,” Lizi Sagie wrote. “Israel is proving its devotion to Nazi values. . . . Israel exploits the Holocaust to reap international benefits.” Israelis, she noted, “don’t erect gas chambers and extermination camps, but if there were any, how many people would actually resist it, and not only in their hearts?” And she admonishes, “In the name of the State of Judaism we have stolen lands, murdered, starved others . . . have created ghettos [for] all kinds of ‘others’ [and] allowed fascists to raise their heads.”
Sagie resigned from B’Tselem following the exposure of these statements.
He then goes on to talk about Anat Biletzky—who was chair of the board of B’Tselem and its most prominent public face during a period that included the Palestinian suicide-bombing war, the Gaza disengagement, the Lebanon War, and the beginning of the Hamas rocket war—shaped B’Tselem into the aggressive, activist force that it is today. Her record of activism while serving as the chair of B’Tselem displays astonishing, serial antagonism to the Jewish state.
For example in 2004, when she helped write what is known as the “Olga Document,” a rambling tract named for the location in Israel where it was written. Israel, the letter says, is a “death trap” and “the biggest ghetto in the entire history of the Jews”; “military operations and wars has [sic] become the life-support drug of Israel’s Jews.” It goes on to state that “we are living in a benighted colonial reality—in the heart of darkness”; and that Israel seems “determined to pulverize the Palestinian people to dust” by subjecting them to “the nightmare of apartheid, the burden of humiliation and the demons of destruction employed by Israel unremittingly, day and night, for 37 years.” Out of “racist arrogance,” the document claims, Israelis across the political spectrum “depict the Palestinians as subhuman.”
The Olga Document continues: “We are united in a critique of Zionism, based as it is on refusal to acknowledge the indigenous people of this country and on denial of their rights, on dispossession of their lands, and on adoption of separation as a fundamental principle and way of life.” Besides adopting the self-evidently racist claim that only Arabs are “indigenous” to the land of Israel, Biletzky also called for the repeal of all laws and the end of all practices that make Israel a Jewish state. This, she said, along with creating an Arab majority in Israel through the Palestinian “right of return,” would finally absolve Jews of the moral stain that is Israel.
Biletzky has also acknowledged that she has been working to end Israel as a Jewish state since the late 1960s. She stated that “Israel [today] is like the Nazis or like Germany in ’34” and that life for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza “is something that I do not hesitate to call a concentration camp.”
The current co-chair is Oren Yiftachel, a professor of “political geography” at Ben-Gurion University. Yiftachel is one of Israel’s most outspoken anti-Zionists and calls his country “an ethnocratic regime” and a “Judaization project [that] has caused the pervasive dispossession of Palestinian-Arabs.”
His signature has appeared with Biletzky’s on many of the most extreme anti-Israel petitions of the past decade, such as a 2001 letter they signed endorsing Palestinian terrorism and calling for a “peace force” to stop Israel from defending itself: “We regard Palestinian violence as being, on the whole, a legitimate revolt against colonial occupation,” the statement read. “We call for an immediate international intervention to stop the killing and wounding of human beings who are exercising their elementary right to claim political freedom.”
This it is who the odious Otway has linked to not as some would believe a human rights organisation but a vicious and craven anti-Israel if not anti-Semitic outfit whose prime agenda is the destruction of Israel. May I suggest the next time you see B'tseelem quoted approvingly you send the quoter a copy of the article and ask if B'tselem can be trusted with the truth when it comes to Israel.