CAIRO, January 15 (IslamOnline) – The report that the Human Rights Watch released Tuesday, January 14, on the status of human rights post-September 11, 2001, is highly selective, and raises questions as to why it focuses on violations in certain countries while at the same time turns a blind eye to other countries, analysts told IslamOnline.

Diyaa Rashwan, an expert in Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies, told IslamOnline, that for example, equating Palestinian stone-throwers with the heavily equipped Israeli occupation forces backed by U.S.-made Apaches is unreasonable and smacks of nonsense.

On the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Human Rights Watch said that both Palestinians and Israel are equally responsible for the human rights violation in the occupied Palestinian territories.

“Both Israeli security forces and Palestinian armed groups committed grave breaches of the rules of war in deliberately attacking civilians or displaying serious and systematic disregard for innocent civilian lives,” it said.

“While old abuses continued and intensified, new ones appeared,” including a worrisome refusal by both the Israeli army and the Palestinian Authority to open substantial investigations into rights violations committed by their respective sides, the report noted.

“The human rights crisis arising from Israel’s continued occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and armed Palestinian resistance to it, provided a shared but painful reference point for governments and ordinary citizens alike throughout the Middle East and North Africa,” the report said.

In the case of Egypt, the Human Rights Watch applauded Washington for freezing new aid to Egypt over imprisonment of Egyptian rights activist Saad Eddin Ibrahim, calling it “the first occasion on which the U.S. openly linked ... military and economic assistance to the human rights practices of a close ally in the Middle East.”

Ibrahim was sentenced twice, to seven years in jail, and the U.S. practiced huge pressure over the Egyptian government for his release.

The pressure ultimately resulted in Ibrahim’s release from prison in December and the order of a retrial for the dual Egyptian-U.S. citizen, said the report.

“There is not even a possibility that the integrity of the judiciary in Egypt can be questioned,” Rashwan said.

Rashwan said that the U.S. only uses the aid as a “selective weapon” firing on those countries whose policies stand in contrast with the U.S. interests. “Such selectiveness raises our brows high why the report puts a focus on human rights violations in certain countries, while turning a blind eye or lowering the tone of criticism to other countries.”

But Mohamed El-Sayyed Saeed, a famous Egyptian columnist and researcher, ruled out the survey is contrived to serve the U.S. interests through exercising pressures on specific countries. He made case for that all information mentioned in the report is accurate.

However, he appears critical of the report’s linking the U.S. aid pressure to the release of Ibrahim, a sociology professor at American University in Cairo and director of the now-closed Ibn Khaldun Center for Development Studies (ICDS).

“The U.S. pressure on the Egyptian government has been extensive and tough as to Ibrahim’s case, but Cairo succeeded to counter all these influence ferociously,” Said told IslamOnline. He said that if the U.S. pressures worked, Ibrahim would have been acquitted, and not ordered a retrial.

The report mentioned no words on Libya’s human rights record, or at least kept a low-profile about them, for example, Rashwan said.

Libyan President Muammar Qadhafi said in a press interview just days ago that Libya and the U.S. are now exchanging intelligence on Osama bin Laden Al-Qaeda network, and that his country is ready to cooperate in all efforts meant to combat terrorism.

The Libyan leader also said that the attempted assassinations on his life were the work of Al-Qaeda.

This conclusively demonstrates that Libya and the U.S. now begin to stand on the same wall, turning away from traded accusations of recent years that had been featured by Washington’s slamming Tripoli as a “terrorist country”.

“The human rights groups in the U.S. are not separated from what is actually happening on the arena of Washington’s foreign policy,” Rashwan said.

Another inconsistency in the report is the stinging attack on Saudi Arabia, and claiming that Washington downplayed repressions in the Kingdom.

The report named Egypt’s State Security Investigation department and Saudi Arabia’s Directorate of Investigation as among the more notorious practitioners of torture.

The report’s note of Saudi Arabia’s human rights record can be considered part of the full-blown campaign now being launched in the U.S. media, Rashwan said.

The unabated spate of American press reports always highlight that most of the September 11 attacks are allegedly of a Saudi nationality.

One recent report claimed that Princess Haifa Al-Faysal, the wife of Saudi Ambassador in Washington Prince Bandar Bin Sultan, was involved in an indirect channeling of funds into the September 11 hijackers, enough to strain relations between Riyadh and Washington.

In addition, Saudi Arabia’s reluctant acceptance be a launching pad in a potential US invasion of Iraq helped inflame the situation.

The New York-based organization blamed this bleak record on the U.S. willingness to overlook abuses and problems triggered by allies in the war on terrorism, such as Pakistan, China, and some Afghan warlords, taking a heavy toll on efforts to improve the human rights conditions around the world

“The United States is far from the world’s worst human rights abuser,” Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, said.

“But Washington has so much power today that when it flouts human rights standards, it damages the human rights cause worldwide.” He lamented.

In the name of fighting terror, Washington had bred a “copycat phenomenon,” in which other governments flout rights in the name of security, read the report of the human watchdog.

“By waving the anti-terrorism banner, governments such as Uzbekistan seemed to feel that they had license to persecute religious dissenters, while governments such as Russia, Israel, and China seemed to feel freer to intensify repression in Chechnya, the West Bank, and Xinjiang,” the group said.

However, many of the these countries paid less consideration to an important and viable hypothesis; that repression in the name of security can backfire, breeding resentment of governments and the United States by the repressed.

These feelings of resentment of America’s policies are already there, and abundantly clear in recent polls that found the approval rate of the U.S. in countries as Egypt, the most populous country in the Middle East, sagging to less than 10 per cent.

Also, Pakistan is simmering with this wave of anger directed to the Americans, as they are vehemently critical of Washington’s full-fledged backing of General Pervez Musharraf, who took power in a 1999 coup.

Musharraf promised to step down for a democratic president to lead the country. But he backtracked on all of such promises, with the U.S. complete acquiescence.

“From Rabat to Tehran, there was profound dismay at the Bush administration's flouting of international law” with respect to the secret detention and alleged forced confessions of terrorism suspects at home and at the U.S. military base in Guantanamo, Cuba, the rights group said.

Local human rights activists and others were concerned that these actions conveyed a strong message that basic rights and safeguards could be “shelved in times of crisis or emergency”.

The report warned that the Arab public perceived Washington to be on the wrong side of the fence in their struggles for greater rights despite a White House campaign to improve its image abroad after the September 11, 2001 terror attacks.

The report also voiced concern over the decade-old civil war in Algeria, pitting the military-dominated government against so-called “radical Islamists” that costs an average of 125 lives, mostly civilian, each month.

It criticized Lebanon for shutting down Christian opposition broadcasting media which had called for the removal of the more than 20,000 Syrian troops present in the country.

The watchdog also slammed Syria - whose president Bashar Al-Assad had revived hopes of greater freedom after taking office two years ago - for throwing 10 democracy activists in jail.

Iran was singled out for opprobrium over its Islamic Revolutionary Courts and Special Court for Clergy, which the report accused of being “grossly unfair” and “operating with complete disregard for due process safeguards.”

The report also criticized Tunisia for trying civilians on terrorism charges before military courts.