- Director of Middle East and North Africa Division of Human Rights Watch
- Distributed literature from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine
- Distributed literature from Yasser Arafat's Fatah faction
Joe Stork is the acting director of the Middle East and North Africa Division of Human Rights Watch (HRW), a New York-based NGO with a strong anti-Israel bias. While HRW has been condemnatory of democratic Israel, it has turned a blind eye to the terrorist Palestinian Authority and its campaigns of orchestrated violence aimed at Israeli civilians.
Stork was formerly the principal of the Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP), a leftwing organization that called for Israel's destruction and published a report lauding a terrorist leader affiliated with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). Stork distributed literature from both the PFLP and Yasser Arafat's Fatah faction. After the murder of nine Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympic games in Munich, MERIP issued a flyer that read, "Munich and similar actions cannot create or substitute for a mass revolutionary movement, but we should comprehend the achievement of the Munich action. . . . It has provided an important boost in morale among Palestinians in the camps." For many years, Stork was the editor of the Middle East Report, which had (and still has) a political agenda supportive of Palestinian terrorists and strongly opposed to Israeli and American policies.
When HRW released the results of a 2001 study of torture techniques used by the Palestinian Authority, Stork said that such practices had not been developed independently by Palestinian officials, but had been learned by Palestinian security officers while they were incarcerated in Israeli prisons, whose guards allegedly perpetrated acts of torture on a regular basis.
According to Stork, the Israeli government and police force has engaged in "a pattern of very, very serious violations of humanitarian law [against Palestinians] in some cases requiring criminal investigation." Stork and HRW have also denounced Israel's construction of an anti-terrorism security barrier as a violation of Palestinians' human rights. The barrier, says Stork, "seriously impedes Palestinian access to essentials of civilian life, such as work, education and medical care."
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