Bob Bernstein, the founder and former longtime chairman of Human Rights Watch (HRW), has written countless New York Times op-eds on behalf of the famous international rights group he founded 31 years ago. So it came as a shock to see his latest Times piece, published today, in which he criticizes HRW for its anti-Israel bias. “Human Rights Watch has lost critical perspective on a conflict in which Israel has been repeatedly attacked by Hamas and Hezbollah, organizations that go after Israeli citizens and use their own people as human shields,” Bernstein writes.

He’s correct, of course. HRW’s anti-Israel bent has long been obvious. Earlier this year, the press revealed that HRW had even asked the Saudi government to fund its Middle East programs. Bernstein undoubtedly has fought for objectivity on Israel from within the organization, and he surely faced an agonizing decision about whether go public today. He likely did so because the U.N. Human Rights Council just adopted the Goldstone Report, declaring that Israel’s counterterrorism campaign against Hamas is effectively a war crime. HRW’s politicized attacks on Israel supported this conclusion, which might well result in a devastating international boycott against Israel.

But in his Times article, Bernstein does not go far enough. HRW’s critical reporting on Israel and its concomitant failure to detail fully the abuses of Muslim and Arab governments are only part of the problem. More broadly, HRW has long advanced an international criminal process that is blind to the stark moral and ethical differences between open and closed societies. HRW helped spearhead U.S. support for the U.N. Human Rights Council, despite prescient warnings that the Council would be no different from the politicized and discredited Human Rights Commission that it replaced. HRW continues lobbying for a permanent worldwide criminal system. Indeed, HRW wants the U.S. to join the International Criminal Court, a move that could lead to American leaders’ being charged as war criminals. It is this politically charged international human-rights process that has given the Goldstone Report traction, and that now poses an existential threat to Israel’s economy.

Once considered the world’s preeminent human-rights group, Human Rights Watch has been thoroughly discredited in both its substantive reporting and its strategy to advance a flawed international criminal process.

– Nina Shea is director of the Center for Religious Freedom of the Hudson Institute.