A New York Sun editorial blasts the director of the George Soros-funded far-left “NGO” Human Rights Watch, for twisting the facts and attempting to obfuscate his organization’s clear antipathy toward Israel: Roth’s Latest.

Kenneth Roth denies a “rush to judgment” in Qana. But only hours after the attack, Mr. Roth and Human Rights Watch issued a press release headlined “Israel Responsible for Qana Attack, Indiscriminate Bombing in Lebanon a War Crime.” The press release claimed the Israeli attack killed “at least 54 civilians,” a death toll that subsequently was revised downward to 28. Mr. Roth denies that he rushed to judgment, but he found Israel guilty of a war crime in a press release issued only hours after the attack.

Mr. Roth claims the Israel Defense Force “admitted that on the day of the attack there was no evidence of Hezbollah activity or rocket fire from Qana,” as if that were somehow dispositive. But the same IDF statement, according to a report in the New York Times, said that more than 150 rockets had been launched against Israel in the previous weeks from in and near Qana. Days after the Israeli strike on Qana that Mr. Roth decided in a matter of hours had been a “war crime,” the New YorkTimes reported “The Israeli military said the rockets that hit Haifa were fired from the Lebanese village of Qana, and that the military had hit and destroyed the launcher shortly afterward.”

The executive director of Human Rights Watch seems to think that even if hundreds of rockets are being fired from a Lebanese town at Israeli cities on the days before and after an Israeli attack, the Lebanese town should be immune from attack so long as no rockets were fired in the hours immediately preceding the attack. That standard is unrealistic for Israel, which has to plan its military operations in advance and is trying to defend itself from a terrorist group trying to kill Israeli civilians. The alternative to air strikes is ground operations in which Israeli soldiers risk being ambushed. How many Israeli ground troops does Mr. Roth think should die to satisfy his qualms about the timing of Israeli air raids? …

Mr. Roth claims to have half a staff member out of 230 devoted to researching Israeli “abuses.” How, then, one wonders, can he have been so sure, in a matter of hours, that Israel had committed a “war crime” at Qana? How can he be so certain that in “two dozen cases” there was “no evidence of Hezbollah”? He’s trying to have it both ways — claiming, on the one hand, that he’s got lots of authoritative researchers investigating Israeli war crimes while, on the other hand, claiming that he only has one person devoted half-time to Israel.

Mr. Roth calls “moral equivalence” a “false charge,” yet he recently wrote, “under international humanitarian law, just as Israeli abuses in Lebanon did not justify reprisals against Israeli civilians, so Hizbullah’s war crimes did not justify Israel shirking its duty to protect Lebanese civilians.” He wrote to us that Human Rights Watch “never identifies the aggressor or the defender.”