The Guardian demonizes Israel, again!

Take a look at this headline from an article in the CiF UK news section on December 1st, and at the accompanying picture used to illustrate the article.

The (barely) subliminal message here is perfectly clear; war criminals are Israeli and Israelis are war criminals.  C’est tout.

There is no mention, either in the headline or the body of the article itself of suspected war criminals from other nations: as far as the reader is concerned, this issue applies solely to Israelis.

There is no proper analysis of the manner in which the Law of Universal Jurisdiction has been abused in the UK as part of the lawfare campaign employed by politically motivated extremists to undermine Israel’s legitimacy.

The quoted official from Amnesty International UK, Kate Allen, apparently has no need for the niceties of ‘alleged’, ‘suspected’ or ‘innocent until proven guilty’, let alone some kind of legal basis for her accusations beyond the ‘if I say it, it must be true’ mode of thinking.

“Unless a way of guaranteeing a means of preventing suspects fleeing can be built into the proposals, then the UK will have undermined the fight for international justice and handed war criminals a free ticket to escape the law.”

Of course Amnesty International are old hands in the industry of demonising Israel, as report after report of theirs indicates and off the cuff comments made by some of their officials and partners point to a disturbing institutional culture of anti-Israel bigotry.

Strangely, (or not) Kate Allen’s rigorous standards of proof of guilt when it comes to suspected supporters of terror organisations – those which allow her to partner with Cageprisoners and Moazzam Begg with a clear conscience – appear to screech to a halt where anyone bearing an Israeli passport is concerned.

In the eyes of many, Amnesty International has compromised itself by abandoning principles of universal human rights in favour of radical politics.

“Amnesty International has done its reputation incalculable damage by allying itself with Moazzam Beggand 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.” Salman Rushdie

“Amnesty International, founded in 1961, has become a near-synonym for the defence of universal human rights. That reputation is irreplaceable. Yet through inexplicable insouciance, Amnesty is squandering it. It has collaborated with a group called Cageprisoners, which was established by Moazzam Begg, a British Muslim who is a former inmate at Guantánamo. Cageprisoners is not a defender of political liberty and the welfare of prisoners. It is a defender of radical Islam.” – Times

“Assuming that the far left has not taken control of Amnesty, and that may be a generous assumption, its managers must believe at some level that messianic religion is not a threat to the liberal values of feminism, anti-racism and freedom from tyranny they think they hold.” – Nick Cohen

Unlike the estimable thinkers above, it did not take me until 2010 to recognise the deterioration of Amnesty’s adherence to principles of universal human rights in favour of the employment of human rights language as a means of promoting a specific political agenda.

In the early days of the second Intifada I resigned my by then long-held membership of Amnesty International in protest at its one-sided report of the events taking place in Israel and its failure to address the subject of the human right of Israelis not to be blown to smithereens whilst sitting on a bus or in a café.

Occasionally, I still receive letters from Amnesty asking me to rejoin, but as a citizen of the ‘canary in the mine’ which Israel is, I can assure them that they will not be seeing a shekel from me until they are able to overcome the political bias which prompts them to both ignore the human rights of millions of Israeli civilians and participate in the political campaign of assault upon Israel’s legitimacy as so blatantly expressed in this article.

Of course it comes as no surprise that Amnesty International UK should find a willing partner in the Guardian to perpetuate and publicise its campaign of demonisation.  Both are infected by the same disability produced by an institutional culture of anti-Israel bigotry. Sadly, both are also therefore complicit in reducing the important term ‘human rights’ to baseless, empty rhetoric.

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