Amnesty International has done its reputation incalculable damage by allying itself with Moazzam Begg and his group Cageprisoners, and holding them up as human rights advocates. It looks very much as if Amnesty’s leadership is suffering from a kind of moral bankruptcy, and has lost the ability to distinguish right from wrong.
(H/T Noah Pollak via Facebook)
Well, at least Amnesty doesn’t send out press releases condemning investigative reports they haven’t seen or anything. Oh, wait; right….
UPDATE: Well, at least Amnesty doesn’t advocate extremely tendentious interpretations of international law that would make it impossible for a Western power to fight against irregular terrorist forces mingled with a civilian population.
Mikee says:
At what point does one question, publicly and loudly, the validity of an organization versus its stated goals, in order to delegitimize that organization? Amnesty International has been searching for motes in the eyes of the US, ignoring the beams in its own oculars, for as long as I can recall.
February 20, 2010, 10:43 pmorca says:
In a fast-paced, harrowing narrative that’s likely to become a flash point for the right and the left, Begg tells of his secret abduction by U.S. forces in Pakistan, his detainment at American air bases for more than a year and at Guantánamo for two more years as an enemy combatant.
Looks like Publishers Weekly nailed their review of Begg’s book. Bet the cat fight with Rushdie helps his book sales, too.
February 20, 2010, 11:31 pmPeteP says:
Amnesty International’s ‘good reputation damaged’ ?
bwahahaha !!!! Like they HAD one to start with !!!
February 21, 2010, 12:36 amAndy McGill says:
From someone who works in the non-profit world — it has to do with where they get their money from.
February 21, 2010, 12:59 amRushdie on Amnesty International | Liberal Whoppers says:
[...] rest is here: Rushdie on Amnesty International [...]
February 21, 2010, 3:16 ambailey says:
That makes AI different from the left, in general, how? We haven’t seen the first ACLU/NLG lawsuit based on Predator strikes but you know they are coming.
February 21, 2010, 8:59 ambailey says:
Heck, some posters were frothing while comparing us to the Khmer Rouge yesterday. Moral bankruptcy is what they are all about.
February 21, 2010, 9:01 amrequired says:
yes, yes they did. admittedly for some time they have been coasting on their previous good reputation, but even after they changed their name from Helsinki Watch they still had a good reputation for quite a while. personally i think they have become subject to a form of regulatory capture, they have spent so much time among the worst countries that they have “gone native”, or at least large segments of the group have. one of the problems with large groups is that they are large and not all people have the same values, even if they are similar enough to form a group in the first place.
February 21, 2010, 11:57 amYankev says:
Pete, isn’t the organization fka Helsinki Watch now known as Human Rights Watch, not Amnesty International? That being said, I agree that AI did good work at one time, but their myopia toward Israel, at least, goes back to the late 1970s or earlier.
February 21, 2010, 12:31 pmorca says:
They were a good outfit until they looked at my country’s misdeeds?
Now that’s the moral high ground.
February 21, 2010, 12:47 pmInstapundit » Blog Archive » SALMAN RUSHDIE on Amnesty International…. says:
[...] SALMAN RUSHDIE on Amnesty International. [...]
February 21, 2010, 12:49 pmHerb Sorensen says:
I stopped supporting them maybe 20 years ago, when their focus went from protecting women and children, to protecting murderous terrorists. Just typical amoral leftism.
February 21, 2010, 1:11 pmArty says:
“They were a good outfit until they looked at my country’s misdeeds?”
Tell us some of the misdeeds Orc.
February 21, 2010, 1:30 pmParad E. Makewater says:
Arty says:
“They were a good outfit until they looked at my country’s misdeeds?”
Tell us some of the misdeeds Orc.
Opposing the Soviet Union, North Vietnam, ChiComs, Cuba, etc.!!!!!!!! In other words, winning the Cold War.
February 21, 2010, 1:46 pmorca says:
Well, it certainly is decent of the ChiComs to lend us the money to keep our triumphant economy afloat then, isn’t it?
February 21, 2010, 1:53 pmGeorge Baily says:
Orca, stop avoiding the question. What misdeeds?
February 21, 2010, 2:00 pmorca says:
What country?
February 21, 2010, 2:09 pmMichael Lonie says:
Orca,
February 21, 2010, 3:45 pmWhichever one you meant when you wrote: “They were a good outfit until they looked at my country’s misdeeds?”
jgreene says:
Amnesty International has been a group of hypocrites and anti American and antisemitic (I refuse to use the anti Israel, anti zionist trope) SCUM.
They contribute absolutely NOTHING to life on this planet. The have always been apologists for the worst treatment of human beings by socialist and Marxist and IslamoFascist governments in the world.
Screw them!
February 21, 2010, 3:58 pmBrett says:
I blame it on a shift in view on what International Law is supposed to be. I’ve always seen it as a kind of “tit-for-tat” system, where both sides sign, and as long as one is following the rules the other ought to (with war crimes being possible when one side isn’t following the rules while the other does so).
Instead, it seems like International Law has been lately interpreted as some absolute thing, like the dictates of a would-be world government, where nations and groups are criminal if they don’t follow rules in conflicts that their opponents are openly flouting. Not to mention the threat of charges based on laws that the government in question never ratified.
February 21, 2010, 4:13 pmalgie says:
Ode to Amnesty/Dishonesty International
Well their proclaimed intentions are fine
But their support of terrorist swine
Show that their aims
Belie their claims
The results of their acts are malign
….uuuu..’o^o’..nn!n….algie
February 21, 2010, 4:20 pmIllegitimi nOn carborundum
required says:
Right, my bad (and I’m not Pete), AI used to Prisoners of Conscience. They all kind of blend together after a while, those groups set up for one purpose which morph into something else as their original purpose fades.
February 21, 2010, 4:38 pmArty says:
I can’t remember the last time Amnesty won the release of an actual political prisoner incarcerated in a third world hellhole. Their specialty is getting under the skin of western democracies and condeming them for defending themselves. They’ve evolved from well-meaning human rights activists to socialist agitators to mouthpieces for terrorism.
Infiltrated, undermined and turned against the west. Happens to all the NGO’s.
February 21, 2010, 4:40 pmGapeseed says:
AI lost me and a lot of Christian admirers when they decided that their mission included international abortion rights.
February 21, 2010, 5:28 pmYankev says:
No, they were a good outfit until they decided to ignore reality in the pursuit of politically fashionable third world politics.
By the way, as I have made clear many times before on VC, my country is the good ole US of A. If you missed those posts, now you know. If you saw those posts, thanks for the
February 21, 2010, 6:08 pmdual loyaltydisloyalty accusation accusation.Yankev says:
In context, I took it to mean fighting against Arab terror organizations and retaliating against attacks emanating from Arab states. You know, fighting genocide. My country is the USA, but Orca chose not to recognize that fact when responding to my post about AI’s anti-Israel bias.
February 21, 2010, 6:12 pmYankev says:
You’re right. My bad.
February 21, 2010, 6:13 pmorca says:
Here’s Amnesty International’s reponse to documents Hamas recently filed with the u.N.:
Amnesty International considers that it is clear from this response by the Hamas de facto administration that it has failed to mount any credible investigations into serious violations alleged to have been committed by its forces. In particular, the documents submitted by Hamas fail to address adequately the firing of indiscriminate rockets by Palestinian armed groups into southern Israel.
The Goldstone Report found that “these attacks constitute indiscriminate attacks upon the civilian population of southern Israel and that, where there is no intended military target and the rockets and mortars are launched into a civilian population, they constitute a deliberate attack against a civilian population. These acts would constitute war crimes and may amount to crimes against humanity”
http://tinyurl.com/yaonl5y
Can you point out Amnesty International’s anti-Israel bias in that statement?
February 21, 2010, 7:09 pmJohn Moore says:
AI is suffering from some NGO version of O’Sullivan’s Law. The sort of people who populate NGO’s tend to be trans-national progressives, and also tend to strongly dislike the US. That AI was captured by them is hardly surprising – it would be a shock if they hadn’t been. I’ve seen the same thing with MSF. A number of NGO’s refused to work in Afghanistan because, basically, the US was in control, so it wasn’t the politically correct thing to do.
When you go to those NGO conventions, you don’t want to be seen as a running dog lackey of the Yankee imperialists, after all!
February 21, 2010, 8:08 pmAnonsters says:
Well, that comment certainly contributed a metric poo-ton to substantive conversation.
February 21, 2010, 11:39 pmRicardo says:
Um, MSF left Afghanistan in mid-2004 when five of its staff were brutally murdered. Ironically, the Taliban claimed credit for these murders and accused MSF of being a tool of the United States. Like many NGOs, they are subject to politicized attacks on both sides.
As far as I know, Salman Rushdie is right on the substance of his attack on AI. I’ve also seen them focus increasingly on the U.S. and Israel after 9/11. As with Human Rights Watch, they do good work in certain areas but this is being crowded out and overshadowed by things like AI’s association with apologists for radical Islam.
Amnesty was founded long before the blogosphere as an organization devoted to publicity campaigns for prisoners of conscience. They would publicize cases of people being unjustly imprisoned for political reasons and encourage people to pressure their own governments as well as other people of influence to press for the release of these prisoners. So I’m not sure how one determines whether or not Amnesty “won” the release of a prisoner. Their work is not to work directly with governments to get prisoners released but to keep people’s attention focused on certain specific cases so that they do not become victims of the news cycle and fade out of public consciousness.
It’s not Amnesty, but I will say one very recent contribution Human Rights Watch made was to investigate and publish a report on illegal prisons in Beijing being maintained by corrupt provincial officials in China to house critics and protesters. The lazy mainstream media are all too content to publish feel-good articles about how there are so many Starbucks outlets and malls in China these days and isn’t it just wonderful how much progress there has been.
It should be an embarrassment to just about every media outlet in China that one of the most hard-hitting and critical pieces of investigative journalism to come out of there in recent years didn’t come from them. Their own correspondents seem content to “investigate” a story by talking to expats and English-speaking government officials rather than doing real journalism.
February 22, 2010, 2:29 amYankev says:
How are your quote and your question responsive to my pointing out that my country is the US of A? Rather than point out the subtle biases in your quote, I will point out that the fact that Amnesty may occassionally criticise Arab governments or terrorist groups does not change the fact of their fundamental anti-Western (including anti-Israel) bias, down to their disgraceful participation in the second Durban conferences, which, like the first one, quickly degenerated into hate fests on the evils of Jews and Judaism. Amnesty protested the anti-semitic statements of the first conference after the fact, but tellingly refused both to abstain from the second conference and to petition in advance against the second conference repeating the outrages of the first.
As to its substantive reporting, Amnesty’s bias has been well documented elsewhere and I feel no obligation to do your research for you.
February 22, 2010, 9:44 amorca says:
You’re an American who hates Amnesty International because they didn’t protest in advance possible anti-Israel sentiments being expressed at a future meeting?
Perfectly reasonable position.
Not shrill at all…
February 22, 2010, 9:57 amYankev says:
I never said I hate AI. You did. Statements that Judaism is a hateful religion or that Jews are controlling the world are not anti-Israel, they are anti-Semitic. By the time AI was asked to join in a petition to prevent the hijacking of this conference by anti-Israel and anti-Semitic statements, planning sessions had already taken place that made it clear that those statements were a certainty, not a possibility. And my disappointment of AI, as I pointed out, is based on their attitudes toward the west generally, not just toward Israel.
Nice try, though. Why are you wasting everyone’s time by distorting what I said? Do you think we are too stupid to see through it or only too stupid to point it out? Responding to you is a waste of time.
February 22, 2010, 10:41 amorca says:
I guess I’m confused. You don’t like Amnesty International because they sometimes find fault with America and Israel?
February 22, 2010, 10:48 amMiriam says:
Orca, step up to the plate. What are your country’s crimes?
February 22, 2010, 12:38 pmsubmandave says:
“[AI] has lost the ability to distinguish right from wrong.”
I conjecture that many AI supporters feel that as long as they can still distinguish right from left there is no problem.
February 22, 2010, 12:40 pmYankev says:
That’s not what I said, is it?
At last we agree on something.
February 22, 2010, 12:53 pmSF Alpha Geek says:
AI’s anti-Israeli (more broadly, anti-Western) bias is pretty clear if you read their whole “Cast Lead” report – their “tendentious interpretations of international law” create some sort of weird moral equivalence where, if you’re a member of a modern state and terrorists start shooting at you from inside a populated area, if you attempt to end the threat to your territory by shooting back effectively, you’re just as bad as the terrorist in the first place.
The entire tenor of the report is “Look at how bad Israel is, oh, by the way, Hamas did some bad things too, they should both be ashamed, although by word count, Israel should be far more ashamed.”
To reach that conclusion, they take some strange positions on the law of land warfare:
“artillery shells carrying white phosphorus – not previously used in Gaza – which should never be used in densely populated areas.” (Really, is there a specific, unreferenced in the report treaty obligation Israel has, or is this just another tired NGO claim that “in our opinion, x can never be proportional, so, since our opinion should have the force of negotiated and settled law, x is against CIL?”)
“It [AI] calls on Israel . . . to end its blockade on the Gaza Strip, which is collectively punishing the entire population.” (Nice riff on the word punishing – “punishing” the civilian population in the IL sense (for example, through reprisals) is not the same thing as taking an action for legitimate military purposes that, as a side effect, causes suffering in the civilian population.)
Equating Israel’s defensive actions with the indiscriminate targeting of civilians with rockets fired from civilian population centers is either so naive that it strains credulity, or is bad faith on the part of AI.
February 22, 2010, 1:09 pmYankev says:
I agreee fully, but I long ago stopped giving Orca the benefit of the doubt, so did not take the time to compile this information. In my experience Orca is not open to argument, persuasion or change of opinion, and I saw no reason to be Orca’s Google slave (not sure who coined that term but it has been used before on VC and is certainly apt here). IAC, thanks are due to you for documenting these examples for anyone who cares to actually think about the issue. My prediction — Orca will find some way to spin them, ignore them, or both.
cf Jonah, 4:11. And also many cattle.
February 22, 2010, 2:13 pmorca says:
How much criticism of America and Israel do you think Amnesty International should engage in each year then?
This seems to be a word count issue with the impartial bias detectors…a ballpark figure would be fine.
February 22, 2010, 4:23 pmYankev says:
As much as justified by their actions and no more.
How much exaggerated, unrealistic, slanted, out of context or unjustified criticism of America and Israel do I think Amnesty International should engage in each year?
None.
You seem to enjoy beating up strawmen. Be sure to wear gloves – the straw can be annoying if it gets under your fingernails.
Rhetorical question — why do I bother? (Loud sigh.)
February 22, 2010, 5:07 pmorca says:
Perhaps you could provide us with a link to some “out of context or unjustified” criticism of America or Israel by Amnesty International?
Everything I see by them are rather dry recitations of testimony provided to them and any confirmation they were able to perform like this:
On 27 December 2008, the first day of the Israeli military offensive against Gaza, scores of
civilians were killed within hours of the beginning of the air strike campaign. Among the
casualties were a large group of students from the UNRWA Vocational Training Centre,
located in the UNRWA compound in the centre of Gaza City. At about 1.20pm a missile
struck the street outside the training centre, where a group of students who had just left the
centre after an exam were waiting in the street outside the UN compound for UN buses to
return to their homes in different parts of the Gaza Strip. Eight students, aged 17 to 20, were
killed and some 20 others were injured, one of whom died three days later.
And this:
In the afternoon of 2 January 2009, at about 4pm, a rocket struck the home of the Ben
Avraham family in Ashkelon. Hagai Ben Avraham was in the shower, on the second floor of
his house, when the warning siren sounded and his children called him to hurry to the
fortified room on the ground floor. As he was running downstairs, a rocket exploded on the
roof of the house, just above the spot where he had stood seconds before, destroying most of
the roof and of the top floor of the house.
http://tinyurl.com/y8g5tce
February 22, 2010, 5:44 pmYankev says:
If I did, you would not care. Many instances of distorted or unjustified criticism have occurred and their occurrence has been well documented; do your own research. The UNWRA school incident you cite may or may not be one of them. You could start by finding out whether there were Hamas military activities or emplacements in or around the UNWRA school; it wouldn’t be the first time. If there were, you have one example right there.
February 22, 2010, 7:11 pmorca says:
In other words, you can’t cite any actual instances of “out of context or unjustified” criticism of America or Israel by Amnesty International and your dislike of it is irrational.
February 22, 2010, 7:18 pmJSinAZ says:
Gee, Orc – what part of “Google slave” did you not understand?
February 22, 2010, 10:42 pmorca says:
If you have to use Google to find some proof of Amnesty International’s imagined Anti-American and anti-Israel bias, you really you really don’t know what you’re talking about, do you?
February 23, 2010, 12:11 amYankev says:
LOL. Thanks, Orca, I needed a good laugh.
I have seen many instances over the years, each one documented. I do not want to rely on memory and risk posting an inaccurate or partially accurate account.
There’s lots out there. You can find it if you look. You won’t look, and if someone else does look and posts it, you will discount it no matter how conclusive.
“May the false accusers be deprived of hope . . . “
February 23, 2010, 9:30 amYankev says:
Orca gets confused very easily. He said as much earlier. He now claims that research as an aid to memory is a sign that one does not know what one is talking about. This seems to prove that Orca is confused and is the first instance I can find of his actually backing up one of his statements.
February 23, 2010, 9:37 amJSinAZ says:
I feel generous.
Orc, try googling these phrases in a Google search box: “Amnesty International” “Al Dura”. You will find tidbits such as:
February 23, 2010, 2:23 pmroger danielson says:
No way Amnesty is anti semitic my friend. Supporting Palestine and being anti-semitic are not the same thing…
July 11, 2010, 2:55 pm