Video on Behalf of Euro-Med Monitor 5/27/2026
My name is Richard Falk, a retired professor of international law at Princeton University. I speak here as the Chair of the Board of Trustees of Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, a civil society organization based in Geneva, that reports on human rights throughout the Middle East and North African region with a special focus on violations of the human rights of the Palestinian people. I am most proud to be associated with Euro-Med due to the fearless dedication it has displayed in its on the ground documenting and reporting upon human rights abuses since 2011 when it was founded by its current inspirational leader Ramy Abdu who has served throughout its existence as its Chair. Through my contacts with Ramy Abdu I came to appreciate his leadership, admiring how much was achieved by Euro-Med despite its modest budget. Ramy together with his small staff arranged the collection of evidence and documentation of huma rights allegations by the recruitment of unpaid volunteers from the region, mostly young persons committed to the promotion of human rights willing to accept the risks of this dangerous work.
What has impressed and moved me most about Euro-Med is the indispensable work done over the 15 years since 2011 in the most difficult of circumstances. I make this statement affirming the quality and integrity of Euro-Med’s work now in response to the intensification of defamatory attacks on the organization as biased and supposedly linked to Hamas. These charges have been made by the government of Israel and by pro-Israel media and Zionist zealots in Western countries, particularly the United States. These attacks that are intended to be discrediting have included vicious media diatribes leading to threats of violence against Euro-Med staff members that have forced the organization to divert attention from its crucial substantive priorities to use precious resources and valuable time to take prudential precautions to protect its staff.
This recent escalation of defamatory attacks on Euro-Med and its leadership has been prompted by the publication on May 11, 2026 in the New York Times of an opinion column written by Nicholas Kristof, a prize-winning regular contributor to the NYT. This carefully reasoned and sourced article explicitly relied on Euro-Med Reports to ground Kristof’s confirmation of severe forms of sexual violence engaged in by Israeli prison officials and IDF soldiers in dealing with Palestinian civilians, and particularly detainees, including women and children. It was not unusual for influential media, NGOs, and activists to rely on Euro- Met reports given its reputation for trustworthy information. In this instance, Kristof’s eminence as a journalist, and even more because the NYT enjoyed had a long record of being a pro-Israeli news source that self-censored itself with respect to the most incriminating abuses by Israel that defied its legal and moral responsibilities in relation to the Palestinian people. As a result when even the NYT took seriously such dramatic allegations it could not easily be refuted or brushed aside.Actually, Kristof’s reference to Euro-Med’s documentation of sexual violence against Palestinians should have enhanced the credibility and demonstrated the effectiveness of Euro-Med instead of serving as a launching pad for a smear campaign that is characteristic Israeli behavior whenever accused the state is accused in a persuasive manner. Israel employs the practice of shifting the conversation to the credibility of the messenger as a means of ignoring the message, especially when its veracity is beyond a reasonable doubt.
These charges of sexual violence, shocking as they were, came as no surprise to close observers of Israel’s behavior in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. The surprise was that the NYT had finally broken its habitual silence about Israeli atrocities that it had maintained for so long. The. NYT had been silent in the past whenever evidence of systematically and flagrantly violations of human rights principles by Israel was irrefutable.
This pattern of Israel’s sexual abuse in the aftermath of the October 7 Gaza attack became more extreme and notorious. This development was a major theme of the detailed report in March 2025 by the Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory established by the UN Human Rights Council. Additional to the description of instances of human rights abuses was the extremely damning assessment that ‘sexual and gender-based violence’ had become for Israel a ‘method of war.’ It was acknowledged that there was lacking convincing evidence that this practice was explicitly adopted by the Israeli government. Yet the Commission believed this behavior was implicitly endorsed by Israeli officialdom that responded to even the most extreme abuses by granting governmental impunity to the wrongdoers however serious the international crimes.
It is of utmost importance to support the integrity of Euro-Med and other objective human rights organizations and not allow state propaganda and extremist support groups of Israel to shut down or defame courageous efforts to expose human rights abuses. This attack on Euro-Med should be understood as part of a wider campaign of punitive response to truth-tellers (in contrast to impunity for wrongdoers) who are risking not only their reputations but their lives by devoting their efforts to the dissemination of inconvenient truths. The United States sanctioning of UN Special Rapporteur of Israeli Violation of Human Rights in Occupied Palestine, Francesca Albanese, is a similar disgraceful attack on an exceptionally brave truth-teller that should be seen as at one with these vicious attacks on Ramy Abdo and Euro-Watch.
Voices of global conscience need to accept and act upon the ancient wisdom that when truth prevails, justice is served, human dignity and moral decency upheld. Likewise, when truth is suppressed and evidence of atrocities is filtered or ignored, evil flourishes.
Global Justice in the 21st Century 
When BBC Calls, Don’t Expect Love
25 Jul[Prefatory Note: A slight rethinking of an earlier post, with a different assessment of what to do. Spurning BBC, however much we deplore their bias and malignant spins, is not sensible; we live in this media framed global space, for better and mainly worse, and to spurn it as I earlier proposed is immature posturing. The alternative of being possibly a dissident whisper in the wind is only slightly to be preferred, but as long as we are breathing such noxious media fumes, do we really have a choice?]
When BBC Calls, Should you Answer?
That is, don’t expect love, if you are a certified critic of Israeli policies and practices, and prepare yourself for rejection.
The siren lure of big time media is partly a romancing of the ego, partly a rare moment to intrude a moment or two of truthfulness into the endless spinning of the Israel’s narrative that stresses its extravagantly humane response to Hamas flurries of rockets and alleged human shield tactics.
Four times in the past week I have received invitations to be a guest on BBC programs dealing with Israel’s military operations in Gaza. Each time the female producer, with charming British intonation, expressed her strong interest in arranging my participation at such and such a time. And each time I agreed, although my presence in a Turkish village with limited Internet access made it logistically awkward to do so, yet far from impossible to make the necessary arrangements, usually with the kind cooperation of a neighbor with superior digital facilities.
Each time I was ready at the appointed hour, and each time I was given a last minute explanation for why my appearance was cancelled—a couple of times I was told that I was a casualty of ‘breaking news,’ and the other two times, there was no embellishment, merely “we apologize, but we have to cancel today’s appearance.” And on each occasion, as if part of how producers are trained, I was told that those in charge of planning the program were eager to have me appear as soon as possible, and that I would hear in a day or so. On the basis of my past experience on the few occasions when such last minute news altered programming, I was shifted to later in the program or rescheduled for the next day. My BBC experience in this respect was ‘terminal’ as in disease.
Needless to say, the phone lines have been quiet since each of these ‘dumping’ incidents. I wonder about this pattern of invitation and cancellation. I am quite sure that these was quite separate programming for each of the invitations with no coordination among them. Was there some master censor at the BBC that reviewed the guest list just prior to the scheduled broadcast, somewhat in the manner that an ethical submarine commander might review the manifest of an enemy passenger ship wartime? Perhaps, BBC was rightly concerned that there might be a faint and ugly stain of balance that would tarnish their unsullied reputation of pro-Israeli partisanship. I will probably be forever reliant on such conjectures unless a BBC Snowden steps out of the shadows of deception and into the sunlight of disclosure.
I feel self-conscious relating this little saga at a time when so many in Gaza are dying and bleeding, and all of us should be grieving. As I write I feel humble, not arrogant. It seems that somewhere buried in these trivial rejections there is occasion for concern that the media claim of objectivity in liberal societies is above all else a sham. That even powerful players such as BBC are secretly captive, and its reportage and commentary qualifies less as news than as Hasbara, at least when it comes to Israel-Palestine.
In any event, my advice to the media savvy, is that if you have caller ID, and you can tell that it is BBC calling, don’t bother answering. I hope I have the good sense to follow my own advice should the phone ever ring again!
But I am not even sure I should prolong such childish pique! How can we turn our backs on the opportunity, however slim, to weigh in for a minute or two on the side of those being so cruelly victimized? So more soberly considered, I hope that I will have the maturity to answer the BBC call, and even keep showing up however many times I am brushed off at the last minute. By the way, I have yet to be put to the test. Maybe in the interval BBC staffers have been handed a blacklist to avoid the slight tremors of embarrassment associated with last minute cancellations. I am not vain enough to suppose that my earlier post was passed around as a negative guideline on how to avoid inviting the wrong people to appear on news programs dealing with the Middle East.
Tags: BBC, bias, hasbara, Israel, media, Palestine