Freies Politikforum für Demokraten und Anarchisten

palestina libera · Beiträge: 1665

Amnesty International is among the premier human rights organizations in the world. Its pronouncements shape public opinion, while councils of state feel obliged if not to heed them at any rate to respond. A movement for justice aspiring to reach a broad public and inflect state policy can ill afford to ignore Amnesty if and when it goes astray. It is the contention of this monograph that Amnesty has indeed lost its way, and it is the intention of this monograph to document this proposition, in the hope that Amnesty will perform—or its grassroots membership will compel it to perform—a midcourse correction.

In recent years, Amnesty International has issued meticulously documented, legally unflinching human rights reports on the Israel-Palestine conflict, for example, Operation “Cast Lead”: 22 days of death and destruction[1], a searing indictment of Israel’s 2008-9 assault on Gaza. But this has not always been the case. For many decades, this venerable human rights organization effectively gave Israel a free pass on its pervasive torture practices in the occupied Palestinian territories[2]. Judging by the reports it issued after Israel’s summer 2014 assault on Gaza, Operation Protective Edge, Amnesty is regressing to its earlier apologetics. For those who have come to rely on and cite Amnesty as a source of accurate human rights reportage, this development is troubling and deeply frustrating. The primary purpose of this monograph is not to account for Amnesty’s apparent backpedaling, although some speculations on this score will be ventured in the conclusion, but to thoroughly document it, focusing in particular on Amnesty’s comprehensive indictment of Hamas[3], Unlawful and Deadly: Rocket and mortar attacks by Palestinian armed groups during the 2014 Gaza/Israel conflict[4].

https://www.byline.com/project/13/article/149