At the Amnesty International Australia Facebook page, after they criticized the US ban on some travelers from some countries, someone asked if they were also against Arab states banning Israelis.
Their response? Not at all!
After people complained, Amnesty removed the post and claimed that it was a mistake:
So Amnesty Australia staffs its official social media accounts with volunteers who know absolutely nothing about what they are talking about? Who think that Arab nations started boycotting Israel after “occupation”? Who think that Palestinians are being displaced from their homes by “illegal settlements”?
And even the apology doesn’t include a specific condemnation of Arab nations. It was just a backtrack saying that freedom of movement is a human right, and that Amnesty won’t speak out against Arab violations of human rights because they only have finite resources.
You know how expensive it is to post a statement on your own Facebook account. It would strain the resources of any multi-million dollar NGO.
Even with this poor apology, we can see that Amnesty will hire people who are reflexively anti-Israel. You will never see any “mistake” that is pro-Israel on any of their social media accounts.
You cannot blame the poor “volunteers” either. They only know what they see from Amnesty, after all, and while Amnesty’s official statements strive to be technically accurate, they know very well that their readers won’t parse the statements to the degree necessary to figure out the truth. Any causal reader of Amnesty and HRW press releases would be convinced, just like this supposed volunteer, that Israel is evil, that Arab nations bravely stand behind Palestinians with their boycott of Israel that began before there was a state of Israel, that “illegal settlements” are displacing hundreds of thousands of Arabs, and that the IDF routinely engages in “atrocities.”
This is the message that Amnesty gives out even if they won’t say it explicitly, and they know very well how their statements are read.
But Arab antisemitism? PA arrests of dissidents? Hamas expelling people from homes? The PLO paying terrorists? No, that cannot be discussed – because there are only so many hours in the day and so many dollars in their budget, and the 741st anti-Israel report takes precedence over any research that might show Arabs as being anything other than poor victims of Israeli brutality.
(h/t Yenta)
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