I’m limited in what I can say by a non-disclosure agreement, even though this relates to my personal experience and practices I observed inside my organization that are arguably in the public interest. For now, I’ll say this: I have come to see many established human rights organizations—especially the large legacy NGOs founded in the 1960s and 1970s, such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International—as increasingly irrelevant and, frankly, increasingly unintelligent.
Why? Because political ideology has come to dominate work that was once intended to be impartial and grounded in universal principles. These organizations were meant to document abuses wherever they occur—regardless of the perpetrator or the victim’s identity. Instead, their output is increasingly selective and inconsistent. The most visible example is bias against Jews and Israel, but the deeper issue is the collapse of standards: evidence thresholds shift depending on the target, and moral urgency is applied unevenly.
One striking sign is what they don’t do. Where is the sustained advocacy when Kurdish communities are attacked, including in places like Aleppo? Where is the global solidarity campaign for Iranians resisting a brutal regime? These silences are not incidental. They reveal a human rights world that has sided with certain causes and constituencies, rooted less in universal principles than in left-wing political movements and fashionable narratives.
I began noticing this shift before COVID—perhaps during the first Trump administration, when opposition to Trump became an organizing principle across civil society. Internal debates changed in tone and content. Human rights organizations began focusing obsessively on topics that were not traditionally central to the movement. Social, economic, and cultural rights suddenly dominated discussions, while classic human rights work—torture, political imprisonment, freedom of speech—felt downgraded. The mission blurred. Standards blurred with it.
At the same time, the language changed. Increasingly, organizations imported terminology from the ideological left that emerged from universities. Academic frameworks and far-left activist models were treated as moral authority. Staff repeated slogans as if they were insights. Post-colonial theory swept through institutions: the “Global South” was romanticized, “decolonizing” rhetoric became compulsory, and priorities were shaped less by field realities than by internal status games, fundraising incentives, and political fashion.
Much of this felt hollow—slogans without substance. Yet these slogans gained power because disagreement became socially risky. Leadership—often more cautious, more conventional in private life than junior staff—frequently avoided confronting the culture. People would tell me privately that I was right, but publicly they stayed quiet. They’d say, “These are different times.”
This ideological capture became unmistakable with the rising antisemitism of the mid-to-late 2010s. As broader left-wing movements grew stronger—MeToo marches, activist coalitions—Jews increasingly found themselves unwelcome or excluded. It became popular to argue that human rights organizations should “join the bigger movement.” But the bigger movement was not neutral: it was ideological, often openly anti-Zionist, and at times anti-Jewish.
At first, I was still heard internally. But the internal dynamics became what I can only describe as “cotton woolish”: no direct confrontation, just silence, soft ostracism, ghosting, quiet exclusion. Issues were evaded with phrases like, “Yes, we know, but it’s difficult,” or “We agree, but we lack capacity.” Meanwhile the opposite was happening: coalitions formed around maximalist framing of Israel as an apartheid state and escalating accusations in increasingly absolute terms.
Over time, this shift changed how abuses were prioritized. Some victims mattered more than others. Human rights concerns around ISIS detention camps run by Kurdish forces were immense. Yet abuses against Kurds by Turkey often received limited attention. The serious, sustained reporting didn’t come. Instead: a few tweets, minimalist statements, selective outrage. That is not impartiality—it is politics.
The deeper pattern, as I saw it, was institutional: after 9/11, legitimate condemnation of Western abuses became entangled with an overbroad sympathy for Islamist actors. Recruiting pipelines from universities brought in staff steeped in ideological frameworks that treated Western power as uniquely illegitimate and certain identity groups as uniquely virtuous. As a result, “neither left nor right” human rights universalism was lost. These organizations are now unpopular not only with the far right (which has always opposed them), but increasingly with mainstream audiences as well. In my new life, when former professional contacts learn that I left my organization, I often hear a spontaneous response: “Congrats. Good move.” There are consequences to abandoning standards. Principles matter, but principles applied without context become ideology.
The most absurd example was Amnesty’s report in 2022 accusing the Ukrainian army of wrongdoing for fighting from urban areas and using damaged schools. In the context of invasion, destroyed cities, and existential defense, the report read as detached from reality—an exercise in performative “impartiality” that punished the victim for the conditions created by the aggressor. Outputs like that erode credibility because they show an organization more loyal to doctrine than to judgment.
Then came October 7. Hamas attacked Israel, and many human rights and humanitarian organizations failed to condemn it with clarity. Statements were vague—like wire copy—with moral seriousness missing. For me, it was the final straw.
After October 7, I faced aggressive internal attacks. Leadership was unwilling to protect me in the way they would have protected other staff. The organization effectively kowtowed to an antisemitic wave inside. Jewish staff left in large numbers; Arab staff mostly stayed. Staff who tried to stress Israeli victims or basic universal principles were silenced. Leadership refused to confront antisemitism or even to recognize that throwing one group’s rights under the bus for another’s is a betrayal of human rights.
Even worse, much of the Gaza-related advocacy was built on rumor and Hamas propaganda repeated uncritically, including Ministry of Health numbers treated as unquestionable. When mistakes were made, they were rarely corrected.
That is how credibility dies: institutional certainty, slogan repetition, and refusal to self-correct. The reality is that many of these organizations now function less like watchdogs and more like unelected political parties—powerful actors inside left-leaning public opinion but increasingly detached from rigorous standards and from the basic human rights principles they claim to defend.
