The Jews behind ‘Jewish Human Rights Watch’
‘Jewish Human Rights Watch’ (hereafter JHRW) is a weird pro-Israel organisation operating out of a mailing address the city of Manchester in the United Kingdom. (1) It specialises in bringing spurious legal actions against smaller organisations in support of the UK’s Israel Lobby. A good example of which is its legal action against Leicester City Council after it voted to support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (hereafter BDS) in 2014 with JHRW charging that to endorse BDS would ‘negatively impact the local jewish community’ and was thus ‘discriminatory’. (2)
The fact that three High Court Judges agreed with this nonsensical claim – as it ironically suggests that jews are loyal to and only identifiable with the state of Israel – is quite the statement of the power of the Israel Lobby in the United Kingdom. Despite this JHRW is a small organisation that can only manage to organise a couple of jews to ludicrously protest about so-called ‘anti-Semitism’ outside of NGOs such as ‘War on Want’ (3) or Methodist churches because they dare to endorse BDS. (4) They also take out back page adverts in provincial newspapers – such as ‘The Daily Record’ in Scotland – shrieking about the ‘anti-Semitism’ of opposing Israel’s national interests. (5)
From what I can see of JHRW’s ‘reasoning’ it is more or less: ‘Oy Vey! You cannot disagree with Israel unless you are an anti-Semite!’
Despite the obvious lack of serious funds – hence the fact they could only afford back page advertisements in provincial newspapers – JHRW has friends in high places within the jewish community with fawning coverage from the two main jewish periodicals in the United Kingdom: the ‘Jewish Chronicle’ (6) and ‘Jewish News’. (7) They’ve also somehow managed – no doubt through the goodwill and influence of figures within the jewish community – to get coverage of their ‘activism’ into national newspapers like ‘The Independent’. (8)
This is not because of any real hard work or good content produced by JHRW – their ‘updates’ are often months apart and even manage to misspell ‘anti-Semitic’ in their posts among other things – (9) and farm out their ‘reports’ to one David Collier. Who – despite the English surname – is a jew and a revisionist Zionist (i.e. the most insane and anti-gentile of all the forms of Zionism) as well as a founding member of revisionist Zionist political party ‘Herut UK’. (10)
Interestingly there is little evidence that the ‘directors’ of JHRW do very much for their organisation themselves – given the lack of updates and poor quality of the JHRW website as well as the farming out of report writing to David Collier – but it makes sense when you realize that JHRW is basically a front for one Manny Weiss – who was born in Brooklyn, New York and is ‘the CEO of Marylebone Diversified LLP, a commodities trading advisor in the base metals business’ and was fingered by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s staff as being a potential donor to the Likud party. (11) Supporting this is the fact that his brother Moshe Weiss was an advisor on ‘personal status and Jewish identity issues’ to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government between 1996 and 2000. (12)
Writing in 2016 anti-Zionist journalist Ben White summarized the links between JHRW and the gentile-hating revisionist Zionist Israeli right as follows:
‘JHRW is the trading name of a company called Jewish Rights Watch, incorporated on December 17, 2014 – four months after a devastating Israeli attack on Gaza that prompted a surge in Palestine solidarity activism. There are four listed officers: Jonathan Neumann, Robert Henry Festenstein, Joseph Rosenfield, and Manny Weiss. Weiss, who according to a report in The Jewish Chronicle actually “started” JHRW, is a commodities trading advisor with a variety of business interests. In 2011, one of Weiss’ companies donated £5,000 to Michael Gove.
Festenstein, according to his Law Society entry, is Sole Practitioner at the Manchester-based insolvency specialists RHF Solicitors, who have also acted as JHRW’s solicitors. He blogs at The Times of Israel and, at least as recently as August 2015, was listed as a ‘Committee Member’ on the website of North West Friends of Israel, a group established in 2014 (he now no longer appears on the site). Neumann, meanwhile, is a writer who has published a number of articles for US-based Commentary Magazine, and has also apparently done work with The Forum for Jewish Leadership.’ (13)
In effect JHRW is an unofficial adjunct of Israel’s Likud party, but I should add – for sake of accuracy - that Jonathan Neumann was ‘terminated’ as a Director of JHRW on 1st August 2017, (14) which is probably around the time when David Collier’s employment by JHRW begins if we are to make an educated guess. This leaves Robert Henry Festenstein, Joseph Rosenfield and Manny Weiss as the remaining directors of JHRW – with Jonathan Neumann and founding director Osker Heiman having resigned – with David Collier as its main intellectual content provider.
JHRW isn’t really the politically disinterested jewish communal organisation that it pretends to be: is it?
References
(1) https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/09359516/filing-history
(2) http://jewishnews.timesofisrael.com/judges-rule-local-councils-must-consider-bds-impact-on-jewish-communities/; another case was against made against local councils in Wales: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/israel-boycott-ban-local-councils-face-legal-action-at-high-court-over-boycott-on-israeli-goods-made-a7012351.html
(3) https://www.thejc.com/news/uk-news/poverty-charity-s-boycott-is-like-nazi-germany-says-new-group-1.65196
(4) https://www.thejc.com/news/uk-news/fighting-back-against-hate-1.435887
(5) Ibid.
(6) Ibid.
(7) http://jewishnews.timesofisrael.com/judges-rule-local-councils-must-consider-bds-impact-on-jewish-communities/
(8) https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/israel-boycott-ban-local-councils-face-legal-action-at-high-court-over-boycott-on-israeli-goods-made-a7012351.html
(9) For the spelling see: https://www.jhrw.com/single-post/2018/07/03/High-Court-Ruling-Spells-END-for-Anti-Semetic-Boycott-Motions-in-Local-Government
(10)http://jewishnews.timesofisrael.com/more-than-70-attend-re-launch-of-uk-zionist-party/
(11)http://powerbase.info/index.php/Manny_Weiss
(12)http://powerbase.info/index.php/Moshe_Weiss
(13)https://benwhite.org.uk/2016/03/02/israel-and-friends-battle-the-boycott-in-britain/
(14) https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/09359516/filing-history