Critical Commentary and Response
B'Tselem has come under intense fire for what its critics describe as misrepresenting and distorting facts. Early in 2011, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman called for a parliamentary investigation of B'Tselem and other human rights organizations. These groups, he said, "are clearly not concerned with human rights. They spread lies, they slander and incite against the state of Israel and against Israeli soldiers... Clearly these organizations are abetting terrorism and their only objective is to undermine Israel," he said in a speech to fellow members of his nationalist Yisrael Beiteinu ("Israel our homeland") party.
Critics of B'tselem have challenged the accuracy of its reports. The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) and the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs charged that B'tselem repeatedly classified Arab combatants and terrorists as civilian casualties. NGO Monitor said that B'tselem distorts its data and uses "abusive and demonizing rhetoric designed to elicit political support for Palestinians". Caroline B. Glick, deputy managing editor of The Jerusalem Post and former advisor to Benjamin Netanyahu, pointed to several instances where she alleged B'tselem had misrepresented Palestinian rioters or terrorists as innocent victims, or where she said B'tselem failed to report when an Arab allegedly changed his testimony about an attack by settlers. B'tselem and another human rights group are "radical leftist organizations with documented histories of falsifying and distorting data," charged Glick in an editorial. She charged fellow journalists who covered B'tselem's reports with "professional malpractice... As long as we continue to base our national debates and policies on enemy propaganda, it should surprise no one that Israel finds itself in its current dire predicament."
In each of these cases, B'tselem issued detailed rebuttals, based on its own research, as well as statistics and information from the Israeli army and international organizations. Although CAMERA challenges the reliability of B'Tselem's statistics and describes them as "grossly deceptive", CAMERA commentator Tamar Sternthal notes that B'Tselem's statistics on casualty figures are "cited widely by Western news organizations".
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