What Does the Human Rights Report Say About Its Author?

By George Moses

For more than 200 years the United States has been blessed in its leadership. Capable men and women have left their personal pursuits or combined them with public needs to ensure that our republic has enjoyed leadership of the highest quality.

Every so often, however, we get someone so ill-suited for his office that we, as a country, are disgraced. Such a man is Richard Schifter, the present assistant secretary of state for human rights.

Those aware of his political background, or who have had personal dealings with Schifter, find it incomprehensible that his should be this country's voice to discuss human rights with the outside world. A product of the most parochial and reactionary ethnic politics, Schifter is a founding president of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), a stridently anti-Arab group that lobbies for Israel's arms industry. It seeks the export of American technology to Israel, and encourages US purchases, at taxpayer expense, of Israeli products based on that technology. In pursuit of its tightly-focused ends, it routinely libels not just extremist Arab leaders, but the leaders and citizens of all 22 Arab states.

This year's edition of the Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 1989, prepared under Schifter's supervision, is a monumental piece of work. It contains more than 1,600 tightly-spaced pages describing the status of human rights around the globe. By and large, it is a tribute to the extraordinary efforts of hard-working men and women in American embassies and private human rights organizations, and to the staff officers of the regional bureaus and the Bureau of Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs at the Department of State.

Tensions are built into the compilation of such a report. Normally they would be between officers in the regional bureaus, seeking not to complicate US bilateral relations with the countries with which they must deal, and officials in the Human Rights Bureau, seeking to defend the integrity of the report and the standards upon which it is compiled.

Role Reversal

In preparing the Middle East portion of this report, however, the roles apparently were reversed. According to one press account, Schifter "demonstrated from the outset that [he] intended to diffuse criticism of Israel." According to a number of sources, Schifter opposed each exposition of serious Israeli wrongdoing, choosing even to confront field officers possessing direct knowledge of events with his own Israeli slanted version of the truth.

The most despicable omission from this "comprehensive" report has to do with treatment of Americans abroad. Schifter's bias is nakedly displayed in the contrast between his treatment of allegations of mistreatment of Americans by Arab and Israeli authorities. He apparently insisted on including an alleged incident of flogging of two Americans in Saudi Arabia for alcohol related offenses. (We are not told in what year this alleged event occurred.) Yet the well-documented unsolved murder last year of a 14-year-old American boy, in which Israeli soldiers have been implicated, was not even mentioned.

Evidently, for Schifter, being American does not count for those of Arab extraction. The boy, Amjad Hussein Jabril, had the bad luck to be an American of Arab descent who died at Israeli hands, thereby putting himself beneath the notice of this American official in charge of monitoring abuses of human rights by every government in the world.

An example of the obvious tension between Reagan political appointee Schifter's motives and those in the State Department's foreign service bureaucracy, who wanted to perform this important task honestly, is the treatment of freedom of the press in Israel. While the report includes the statement that "individuals, organizations, the press and electronic media freely debate a wide range of public issues," the report also contains such contradictory statements as: "in 1989 the license of an Arabic-Language newspaper was revoked..." Thus, the body of the report refutes many of its conclusions.

A Pervasive Bias

The report's blatant pro-Israel bias is, unfortunately, pervasive. The report is notable for its gloves-off treatment of some of the most human rights-conscious countries on earth. It even found something to criticize in Sweden! Yet several of the most egregious Israeli violations were either ignored or misrepresented.

For example, although pages are devoted to anti-Christian activities of the Soviet government, not one word about such Israeli mistreatment of Christians as the disgraceful barring of senior clerics representing four Christian denominations from the Shepherds Field Church in Beit Sahour (near Bethlehem) appears in the document.

The body of the report refutes many of its conclusions.

The report's treatment of state-sponsored discrimination is especially revealing. South African apartheid is condemned in the sternest tones: "South Africa's laws codify the doctrine of apartheid, which prescribes the basic rights and obligations of people according to their racial or ethnic origin. The country's black majority ... suffers from pervasive, legally sanctioned discrimination based on race in political, economic and social aspects of life."

Moving on to Northern Ireland, the criticism of events is only slightly less severe: "Tensions and long-held animosities between the two communities in Northern Ireland continued to mean that many Catholics were denied equality of some rights and opportunities despite government efforts to redress their grievances. "

When it comes to Arabs, however, Schifter's magic transforms discrimination into a failure of those discriminated against: "Israel's Arab citizens have nonetheless not shared fully in the rights granted to, and duties levied on, Jewish citizens." In fact, nowhere does the report refer to the fact that discrimination against its Muslim and Christian Arab minorities is codified in Israel's basic laws, despite the obligation of the American officials in charge of preparing the report to report this.

There are other omissions on the same theme. The report fails to mention the beatings of reporters who write stories the government of Israel doesn't like. The report makes the outrageous assertion that "Israel does not condone disappearances. " It deliberately misuses the term "deportation," when "expulsion" is the legally appropriate term. Most damning of all, however, is the absence of the condemnatory tone used when the same practices are described in sections about other countries. Schifter's view seems to be that such violations as enforced family separations are far less serious when perpetrated by Israeli occupation authorities against Arabs, than when enforced by Soviet authorities against Jews.

An attack on Schifter's actions as a public official was launched by syndicated columnists Jack Anderson and Dale Van Atta, who reported that Schifter afforded American Jewish groups preferential treatment during the preparation of the report and prior to its release, while treating Arab-American leaders as though they should have no particular concerns with the work of his bureau. Schifter has denied the Anderson story.

Notwithstanding his denial, Schifter's refusal to equate Israeli human rights violations against Arabs with the violations of other governments against the people under their jurisdiction represents a kind of discrimination intolerable in any American official at any level of government. It betrays the State Department's responsibility in this field, and casts into doubt US commitments in any area where Israel is involved.

Schifter's presence in an administration that is working to bridge the gap between Israelis and Palestinians is an added burden to the already heavy load that Secretary Baker must carry. The departure of this Reagan-Shultz holdover political appointee would send an important message about the conduct expected of US government officials by the Bush administration. Schifter's continued presence in the Department of State is an affront not only to every Arab American, but to all Americans who believe our human rights policy should be based on principle, and not be subject to political distortion by public officials with a private agenda.

George Moses, a former president of the National Association of Arab Americans, is a legislative consultant in Washington, DC