by Richard Landes

In the 1990s, human-rights organizations that had spent decades exposing real dictatorships — the Soviet Union and its allies — went through a quiet takeover. A new generation, trained to treat free countries and authoritarian ones as equally suspect, if not reversed, redirected the same watchdog machinery toward democracies, especially Israel.

There's a simple rule of thumb here: the louder a country's critics complain, the less likely it is to actually be the worst offender in the room — real dictatorships don't usually let anyone complain at all. These researchers ignored that rule. They went looking for evidence to support a story they'd already decided was true, not evidence that might complicate it.

The result: organizations that started out independent gradually fell into lockstep. Today, when a dozen different human-rights groups all publish nearly identical condemnations of Israel within days of each other, that's not a coincidence — it's decades of internal pressure that quietly pushed out anyone who disagreed.

When the reports are that uniform, it stops looking like independent research and starts looking like a chorus that knew the ending before it started writing.