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The very first column I wrote for this newspaper was in January 2007, about a report by the nongovernmental organization (NGO) Human Rights Watch accusing Israel of war crimes in Lebanon.

The report was, to put it mildly, bunk. And it revealed not a desire to stand up for human rights, but rather an idiopathic vendetta by Human Rights Watch against Israel -- cause unknown, but the symptomatic anti-Israel vitriol was there.

Well, the last two months have given us more information than we could have asked for about the source of Human Rights Watch's hostility toward Israel, and I feel like we've come full circle.

It started with a July 15 report in the Wall Street Journal claiming that the organization's Middle East and North Africa director, Sarah Leah Whitson, traveled to Saudi Arabia to raise money for Human Rights Watch. The delegation she met with -- including a member of the Shura Council, the state-appointed enforcers of Wahhabi practice -- was treated to her sales pitch, which included Whitson boasting of Human Rights Watch's battles with "pro-Israel pressure groups in the U.S."

The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg decided to follow-up with Kenneth Roth, Human Rights Watch's executive director, and confirmed the Journal report. Roth admitted that his organization attempted to raise money from the Saudis by highlighting its fights with the Israel lobby.

Natan Sharansky wasn't pleased. "Here is an organization created by the goodwill of the free world to fight violations of human rights, which has become a tool in the hands of dictatorial regimes to fight against democracies," Sharansky said. Whitson responded by saying Sharansky and the other critics were "griping and whining".

The Weekly Standard then reported July 27 that Joe Stork, Human Rights Watch's deputy director for the Middle East and North Africa, had in the 1970s attended a conference on "Zionism and Racism" hosted by Saddam Hussein. Stork was a presenter at the conference, where he spoke of the "devastating defeat" of the Six-Day War, achieved through "imperialist collusion that lay behind the Israeli blitzkrieg."

Just last month, Stork authored a Human Rights Watch report accusing Israel of intentionally killing Palestinian civilians waving white flags. The Israeli Hebrew-language newspaper Ma'ariv published a report Aug. 16 by Ben-Dror Yemini, which was translated into English by Commentary's Noah Pollak, on Stork's past statements concerning Israel.

Yemini unearthed a sort of "greatest hits" of Joe Stork, such as "Zionism may be defeated only by fighting imperialism and not through deals with Kissingers." Stork said the political Left around the world must take its orders from the PLO.

But he topped the charts with his statement on the massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972. "Munich and similar actions cannot create or substitute for a mass revolutionary movement," Stork said, "But we should comprehend the achievement of the Munich action.... It has provided an important boost in morale among Palestinians in the camps."

While Stork is contemplating the "achievement" of the murder of Israeli athletes in Germany, let's contemplate what for human rights activists may be his worst offense. These organizations pride themselves on being "fair" and "evenhanded," but what if Stork was making up his reports about Israeli violations?

That is no longer a what-if. Here is what Stork said about accuracy: "Academic neutrality is deceitful."

Perhaps the most bizarre story concerning Human Rights Watch's Middle East directors this summer was the discovery by the Web site Elder of Ziyon that Marc Garlasco, a senior analyst at Human Rights Watch who has authored reports on Israel, is an obsessive collector of Nazi paraphernalia and has published a book on Nazi memorabilia.

Garlasco's grandfather apparently fought for the Nazis, and on one forum for Nazi collectors Garlasco posted this: "That is so cool! The leather SS jacket makes my blood go cold it is so COOL!"

Garlasco's reports on Israel have been exposed as biased and inaccurate, but this goes beyond bias. The team that Human Rights Watch put together to investigate Israel's activities in war and peace consist of a Nazi fetishist, an admitted falsifier and fan of the Munich massacre, and a woman who raises money for all this by telling Saudi religious leaders that Human Rights Watch needs Arab money to continue fighting the Israel lobby.

Human Rights Watch, by the way, knew about Garlasco's "hobby," though he has been suspended with pay. Garlasco took to the pages of the leftwing blog site Huffington Post to defend himself, saying this: "I've never hidden my hobby, because there's nothing shameful in it, however weird it might seem to those who aren't fascinated by military history. Precisely because it's so obvious that the Nazis were evil, I never realized that other people, including friends and colleagues, might wonder why I care about these things."

Having formed in 1978 as Helsinki Watch to pressure the Soviet Union into complying with the Helsinki Accords and protect Soviet dissidents, Human Rights Watch has turned its crosshairs on Israel. Garlasco says his hobby makes his "blood go cold". His employer has that effect on the rest of us.

Seth Mandel is the managing editor of The Jewish State.