NGO Monitor - Political Orientation

Political Orientation

NGO Monitor published a press release in 2010 regarding Electronic Intifada focusing on a grant EI receives from the Dutch foundation ICCO. In response, Electronic Intifada wrote that "NGO Monitor is an extreme right-wing group with close ties to the Israeli government, military, West Bank settlers, a man convicted of misleading the US Congress, and to notoriously Islamophobic individuals and organizations in the United States." Dutch Minister of Foreign Affairs, Uri Rosenthal, told IKON radio, "anti-semitism was not the issue" but "my concern about calls to contribute to boycotts and embargoes", in an interview on 5 December about ICCO's support of The Electronic Intifada.

According to a United States diplomatic cable, uncovered in the Wikileaks documents, Prof. Gerald Steinberg said that "he did not want the NGO legislation to feed into the delegitimizing rhetoric, but that such an unintended consequence might be an acceptable cost to reduce the power of the NGOs' current monopolization of human rights rhetoric for politicized purposes."

In a 2009 opinion column he writes for The Jerusalem Post, Larry Derfner asserted that "NGO Monitor doesn't have a word of criticism for Israel, nor a word of acknowledgment, even grudging, for any detail in any human rights report that shows Israel to be less than utterly blameless. In fact, on the subject of Israel's human rights record, NGO Monitor doesn't have a word of disagreement with the Prime Minister's Office," he wrote.

John H. Richardson, writing in Esquire Magazine's online magazine in 2009 described NGO Monitor as a "rabidly partisan organization that attacks just about anyone who dares to criticize Israel on any grounds." It notes that Steinberg is dedicated to fighting "the narrative war," and has made a "special project" of attacking Human Rights Watch.

Didi Remez, a former spokesperson for the Peace Now group and former consultant to BenOr Consulting, (which was co-founded by Jeremy Ben-Ami of J Street), said NGO Monitor "is not an objective watchdog: It is a partisan operation that suppresses its perceived ideological adversaries through the sophisticated use of McCarthyite techniques – blacklisting, guilt by association and selective filtering of facts."

In 2007, The Economist and Jewish Telegraphic Agency identified NGO Monitor as a pro-Israel non-governmental organization.

In an op-ed published in 2005 by Forward, Leonard Fein, a former Professor of Politics and Klutznick Professor of Contemporary Jewish Studies at Brandeis University, takes issue with NGO Monitor's statement that Human Rights Watch (HRW) places “extreme emphasis on critical assessments of Israel” and has issued more reports about HRW than on any other of the 75 NGOs it concerns itself with. In his op-ed, Leonard Fein writes that HRW has devoted more attention to five other nations in the region — Iraq, Sudan, Egypt, Turkey and Iran — than they have to Israel; but that, despite extensive correspondence, Mr Steinberg has failed to correct the "misleading" statement about HRW on the NGO Watch website. Fein argues that NGO Monitor may not be free of the "narrow political and ideological preferences” of which it accuses HRW. The Forward writes NGO Monitor says it has increased Human Right Watch's reporting on Hamas, Hezbollah and the Palestinian authority while Human Rights Watch has rejected the statements and said it was dealing with counterterrorism in a post-9/11 world.

In a 2004 article for the Political Research Associates, Jean Hardisty and Elizabeth Furdon describe NGO Monitor as a "conservative NGO watchdog group,...which focuses on perceived threats to Israeli interests", adding that "the ideological slant of NGO Monitor's work is unabashedly pro-Israeli. It does not claim to be a politically neutral examination of NGO activities and practices."

Ittijah, Union of Arab Community Based Organisations in Israel, has said NGO Monitor represents the interests and the say of the Israeli state rather than civil society’s voice based on human rights values. Ittijah further states that NGO Monitor is guided by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

In January 2010, thirteen Israeli human rights organizations released a common statement which described NGO Monitor and Im Tirtzu as "extremist", and criticised an "unbridled and incendiary attack" by them against human rights groups.

The Australian, in October 2011, refers to NGO Monitor as a "human rights watchdog."