Amnesty International - Not a Reliable Source
By Steven Plaut
FrontPageMagazine.com | June 2, 2003
Amnesty International (AI) represents itself as a human rights watchdog organization that likes to style itself "the world's largest private human rights organization." Up to a point, it is. It has done valuable work in many countries on behalf of human rights and has shown light upon abuses of those rights in many a dark corner of the world. But Amnesty International has never restricted itself to protection of civil rights. It has long been a highly politicized organization that has ties with and identifies with the political agenda of the left. In particular, it has vehement anti-American and anti-Israel political biases. This leftist orientation has resulted in AI acting less and less as a human rights watchdog, and more and more as an anti-American and anti-Israel pit bull.
AI earned a Nobel Prize for its campaigns on behalf of human rights in 1977. To AI’s credit it has taken some politically incorrect positions. It has denounced Iranian persecution of Jews and has issued reports about the dismal state of human rights in Arab countries. It has spoken out against anti-Jewish attacks in a variety of countries. It has repeatedly criticized human rights abuse by the PLO directed against ARABS, including attacking the PLO’s infringement of the rights of free speech and free press, has denounced PLO executions of “collaborators” and Palestinian “prisoners of conscience." AI earned the badge of honor of being publicly attacked by the spokesman for the PLO, Saeb Erekat, because Amnesty criticized the Palestinian Authority's claim that it cannot prevent attacks because its security forces have been severely damaged by repeated Israeli air strikes and demolitions. AI responded to this nonsense by saying, "This does not diminish its obligation to take concrete measures to prevent attacks, to conduct thorough and impartial investigations and to bring those responsible to justice." Last year for the first time Amnesty denounced Palestinian atrocities committed against Jews "crimes against humanity under international law." It was better late than never.
Unfortunately, while recently discovering that Palestinian terrorism constitutes the abuse of human rights of its victims, Amnesty has remained reticent about the fact that it is the PLO itself and not simply the Hamas, Jihad and similar Islamist groups, that are responsible for terrorist atrocities. In recent years the bulk of Palestinian terror, including many suicide bombings, were perpetrated by members of the Fat’h, Al-Aqsa ‘Martyrs,’ and the Tanzim, all PLO factions under the direct personal command and control of Arafat himself. Amnesty pretends that some amorphous unnamed organizations are conducting Palestinian terror, not the PLO. While AI is willing to denounce PLO violations of the rights of Arabs, it is all but silent about PLO terrorism and atrocities committed against Jews. While acknowledging that Palestinian terrorists (but not the PLO) have targeted Israeli children, Amnesty maintains “balance” by insisting that Israel also intentionally targets children, a bit like arguing in the same breath that Nazi German and the Allies in 1944 both killed people. AI has never quite come out with a clear defense of the right of Israel to protect the human right of its children not to be blown to bits by the PLO.
While Amnesty International has done excellent work in some areas, its political biases are often visible. Its credibility has been severely damaged because of its inability to separate out its leftist political advocacy from its determination to protect human rights.
Among the many problems of Amnesty International are:
[1] AI suffers from an acute case of the Moynihan Syndrome. According to Moynihan’s law, the amount of violations of human rights in a country is always an INVERSE function of the amount of complaints about human rights violations heard from there. The greater the number of complaints being aired, the better protected are human rights in that country. The reason is obvious. Those countries in which human rights are the most severely violated are also those where no freedom of speech nor press is permitted. This explains the AI reticence and almost total absence of denunciation of human rights abuses in places like North Korea and Cambodia. It also explains why AI apparently had no knowledge of the killing fields in southern Iraq until US and British troops uncovered them in the recent war.
[2] AI makes no distinction between the fighting of wars and the civil procedures of judicial due process. If AI were setting the rules, the Allied troops in World War II would never shoot a German nor a Japanese soldier before first Mirandizing them and making sure they had the right to appeal their being shot in a duly constituted courtroom with public defenders present.
This inability to understand that war is not a law school mock trial nor a schoolyard game is evident in the jihad by AI against countries defending themselves against terrorism. AI has repeated condemned both the US and Israel for violating the “rights” of terrorists, and for use of force against terrorism in which innocent bystanders get hurt. AI has generally NOT condemned terrorists for causing these innocent bystanders getting hurt by hiding amongst them and for opening fire from behind human shields.
[3] AI has an academic notion of ethical pureness, which it insists must be applied in the dirty business of war and in the battle against terror. While paying mere lip service to why terror is not nice, AI refuses to draw the obvious conclusion that those battling against terror must use means that sometimes have unpleasant side affects. If those fighting terror never use violence, terror wins. If those fighting terror must never use impure methods that may cause collateral damages, this is the same as saying they give up any struggle against terrorism altogether.
AI refuses to countenance any tradeoffs at all in the war against terror. If Western countries must choose between suffering endless mass atrocities committed by terrorists or battling terrorism using means that produce some civilian casualties, AI clearly prefers the former choice.
AI has gone so far as to denounce Israel for passing a law that denies Palestinians injured while attacking Israeli troops and civilians the right to sue Israel for compensation in Israeli courts (AI statement from 27 July 1997).
[4] AI routinely goes beyond issuing complaints about violations of human rights to open endorsements of the political aims of anti-American, anti-Israel, Far Left and Third World totalitarian political organizations.
In the name of “protecting human rights,” AI regularly and repeatedly endorses the political goals of the PLO, including its “right” to its own state, and has condemned Israeli “occupation” of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Since when is taking one side in a territorial dispute a form of defending human rights? Would AI have supported Hitler’s demands that the Polish, Czechoslovakian and French “occupations” of what he regarded as “German lands” - all in the name of human rights? AI has also discovered that Palestinians have a “right”, not only to their own state in the West Bank and Gaza but also to migrate to and reclaim any property inside Israel they may wish to claim. Of the countless hundreds of millions of people who became refugees after World War II, the only ones with such an AI-recognized “right” are the Palestinians.
AI has never had anything to say about the rights of Jews who were evicted from Moslem countries to reclaim their property, and their property was worth perhaps a hundred times more than anything left behind by any emigrating “Palestinians”. It is only a question of time before AI discovers that Tories evicted from the US by patriots in the 1770s also have the right of return.
[5] AI’s own wesite links to a large number of pro-terrorist, anti-Jewish, pro-violence, extremist organizations. The Anti-Defamation League has repeatedly denounced AI for its anti-Jewish bias (
http://www.adl.org/Israel/jenin/), although has praised AI efforts on behalf of the imprisoned Iranian Jews who were “convicted” in an Iranian show trial. AI has participated in anti-Israel political rallies and collaborated with Arab and other anti-Jewish propagandists.
A letter from Amnesty International USA signed by its Executive Director, William Schultz, explains Amnesty’s official sponsorship of a Palestinian Right of Return rally: In it he says this “right”... is based on the fact that our mandate opposes forcible exile. ... The right of refugees to return is guaranteed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights Article 13(2) which states: “Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.” Amnesty staffer Marty Rosenbluth, who has repeatedly signed extremist ads declaring that “the Zionist structure of the state of Israel is at the heart of the racism and oppression against the Palestinian people and should be dismantled,” was the Amnesty International speaker at the rally.
Quite clearly such a “right to return” to their homeland does not evidently apply to any Jews. AI has sponsored events in which the PLO’s official spokeswoman, Hanan Ashrawi, spoke, leaving little doubt about AI’s political position regarding the Arab-Israeli conflict. AI has participated in many other Bash-Israel rallies and events.
