Quillette Cetera
The NGO Industrial Complex: Gerald Steinberg on How Human Rights Became a Racket | Quillette Cetera Episode 67
NGO Monitor founder Gerald Steinberg on how Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, and the UN's "civil society" experiment were hijacked — and why journalists still buy it.
In this episode of Quillette Cetera, Zoe Sankey speaks with Gerald Steinberg, founder and president of NGO Monitor and professor emeritus of political science at Bar-Ilan University. For twenty-five years, Steinberg has tracked how a small number of NGOs — Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Doctors Without Borders among them — grew from postcard-writing volunteer campaigns into billion-dollar political actors with outsized influence at the United Nations and in Western newsrooms. He and Zoe discuss how these organisations came to dominate the language of human rights, why journalists rarely investigate the NGOs they quote as authoritative, and how demonisation of Israel became, in Steinberg's words, an industry unto itself — complete with careerists, whistleblowers, and self-citing footnotes designed to look like scholarship.
Transcript
Keep reading
The Grift at the Gate
Ireland's Antisemitism Crisis with Rachel Moiselle | Quillette Cetera Episode 68
On the Brink Again
They See Dead People
The Oldest Tradition in Art
The Tobacco Wars
