On the politics of Swedish Doctors for Human Rights:

Many have written about the role NGOs & human rights groups play in coopting the narratives about humanitarian needs & human rights demands to serve state power. Just the most egregious examples: there were 10,000 NGOs in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake with nothing to show for it, including the Red Cross which raised $500 million & only built six houses; Human Rights Watch refuses to condemn war but only elaborates less barbarous ways to conduct it; Amnesty International reported that Hamas war crimes were as responsible for Israel’s seven-week carpet bombing of Gaza in 2014 as Israel; the International Rescue Committee is a Kissinger operation run by Madeleine Albright, Colin Powell, Kofi Annan, Condoleezza Rice, & other such criminals. Shameful stuff.

That’s why you have to vet the politics of every so-called human rights group. It’s not that some of them don’t do important work–because they do–but that their politics are compromised by too close association with the power elite. Now extreme right & fascist forces have picked up on the value of using human rights for their front groups. One of the most notable of these is Swedish Doctors for Human Rights, a front group for Assad propagandists. If one vets the individuals involved, one will see they are doctors more of the Joseph Mengele than of the Benjamin Spock kind. Now they are using their dishonor to promote the Rohingya genocide as “fake news & massacre marketing.” If one stands on the wrong side of Syria & the Rohingya genocide, one is squarely in the camp of political reaction.