How Human Rights Became Big Business

In this episode of Quillette Cetera, Zoe Sankey speaks with Gerald Steinberg, founder and president of NGO Monitor and professor emeritus of political science at Bar-Ilan University. For twenty-five years, Steinberg has tracked how a small number of NGOs — Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Doctors Without Borders among them — grew from postcard-writing volunteer campaigns into billion-dollar political actors with outsized influence at the United Nations and in Western newsrooms. He and Zoe discuss how these organisations came to dominate the language of human rights, why journalists rarely investigate the NGOs they quote as authoritative, and how demonisation of Israel became, in Steinberg’s words, an industry unto itself — complete with careerists, whistleblowers, and self-citing footnotes designed to look like scholarship.

Transcript