Amnesty, morally corrupted? Hal G.P. Colebatch
https://www.spectator.com.au/2018/05/amnesty-morally-corrupted/
When Amnesty International concerned itself with campaigning on behalf of individual and identifiable political prisoners of regimes of whatever political colour it did some real good.
However, it now appears to have become an expensive exercise in wholesale and futile virtue-signalling, with some highly dubious choices of targets. If it is still campaigning for individual prisoners, one doesn’t hear much of this.
Kate Allen, UK Director of Amnesty International (the world’s third-biggest Amnesty Organisation), would-be Labour politician and long-time former mistress of extreme leftist and anti-Israel activist Ken Livingstone, appears to have had much to do with radical changes in Amnesty’s policies and political colour in Britain. Acccording to Wikipedia, ‘Allen undertook a major restructure.’
She was quoted in the International Express of May 7 on planned demonstrations at President Trump’s proposed British visit: ‘We and thousands of our supporters will very definitely be making our voices heard. In the 15 months of his presidency we’ve seen a deeply disturbing human rights rollback.’
Huh? I do not believe there is one single instance of ‘human rights rollback’ that can be blamed on Trump. His attempted crackdown on illegal immigration has nothing whatever to do with human rights, but with stopping the law of a democratic nation being flouted and damage being done with impunity to its polity, economy and identity. The accusation is not only false but will achieve nothing good. Amnesty, in Britain at least, appears to have gone from being a respected and effective defender of persecuted individuals to being just another bunch of virtue-signalling creeps.
Instead of self-righteous self-advertisement, Amnesty might concentrate on helping known individuals, such as, among innumerable others, Asia Bibi, the poor Christian village woman sentenced to death in Pakistan for the ‘blasphemy’ of an altercation with her Muslim fellow village women after she inadvertently drank from a Muslim cup. Brave lawyers and officials who have tried to intervene for her have been murdered. Then there is Dr Shakil Afridi, sentenced to 33 years in a Pakistani prison, whose ‘crime’ was helping locate the hiding-place of Osama bin Laden. Pakistan and other Muslim countries have innumerable horrific and tragic cases. Maybe Amnesty is helping them, but I haven’t heard of it.
Obviously, the semi-savages controlling much of Pakistan’s judicial process would not be impressed by anything Amnesty might say to them directly. But they might have their minds concentrated if Amnesty pressed its own Western governments to re-think their huge, multi-million dollar aid grants to Pakistan.
The same applies elsewhere. There are estimated to be 27 million literal slaves, many of them children, in the backblocks of India, in Mauritania and other hellholes. We haven’t looked at Iran and its population of political prisoners yet. And Amnesty UK boasts of mobilising ‘thousands’ to demonstrate against Trump! Obscene is hardly the word.
We know the US, particularly aspects of the prosecutorial system, has grave faults. This has nothing to do with Trump who is trying to clean up the system. Amnesty might be able to do some good if, as it used to, it were to pick out individual victims of injustice even in some US jails and provide them with legal counsel. It seems, however, to have plumped for the large and empty gesture.
Moreover, Trump is trying to fight the spreading cancer of censorship of speech and ideas. Amnesty should look to him as an ally. In any case, despite its faults, the US remains the greatest bastion of our imperilled freedoms.
When Britian is looking to six-year prison terms for religious ‘hate speech’ (which really means criticism of Islam) one would think Amnesty UK should be gearing up to fight a battle much nearer home. For that matter, we can see work for it in Turnbull’s Australia in the QUT students’ case, where at least one student was extorted into paying $5,000 to avoid six-figure action, for having done what in a sane polity would be regarded as nothing wrong.
In Britain anti-Semitism at some universities and elsewhere has become increasingly blatant and violent, with Israeli passport-holders denied access to academic posts or publications by caitiff faculty members.
Amnesty is demanding a ‘comprehensive arms embargo’ on Israel. This is monumentally stupid and if per impossible, it somehow achieved its purpose and disarmed the Israeli population, would leave about half the Jews in the world with their throats bare to the butcher’s knife. Note it does not merely ask for a ban on unpleasant weapons like flame-throwers, but a ban on all arms. It makes no demands for disarmament on those who have attacked Israel repeatedly since the day of its foundation. Has Amnesty failed to notice that Israel is the only country in the world surrounded by enemies sworn to its annihilation?
Anyway, these days, it’s Israel that sells billions of dollars’ worth of military equipment to the world. Its only significant foreign source of arms, apart from Germany for submarines, is the US which is committed to a 10-year, $38 billion military aid deal, and collaborates with Israel on the development of missile defence. Amnesty has progressed from useful and widely-respected real-world activism to toxic fantasy.
Amnesty declares aggressively, ‘The time for symbolic statements of condemnation is now over. The international community must act concretely and stop the delivery of arms and military equipment to Israel.’ With superbly bad timing, this statement coincided with mass rocket-attacks on Israel, as well as fires in the south caused by incendiary kites launched from Gaza. Amnesty is trying to ruin Israel’s economy (and destroy the livelihood of many Palestinians) with a world-wide campaign against buying goods made in the ‘occupied territories’. It is also attacking the Israeli occupation of Jerusalem, its capital since thousands of years before Islam. Further, Israel is the only truly functioning democracy in the region, and alone respects religious freedom. Amnesty, faithful to the anti-Semitic package-deal, accuses it of torturing children,
It seems only the US and Israel are condemned collectively by Amnesty now. Never mind that Christianity and Judaism have almost, or entirely, disappeared in Muslim countries, and in the Middle East Christianity is now protected in Israel alone (Syria and Lebanon had large Christian communities not long ago).
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