Showing posts with label Amnesty. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Amnesty. Show all posts

B'Tselem shows it is much more honest than HRW, but not quite honest enough

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B'Tselem just released its own slick website to show detailed statistics behind every single death during Operation Protective Edge two years ago.

This mirrors Amnesty International's similar website which is filled with absolute lies, as I've documented exhaustively.

To its credit, and in contrast with Amnesty, B'Tselem actually made attempts to be accurate. There was serious research behind this initiative.

The research was still biased. For example, many or all of those  who were killed in a beach cafe bombing were members of the Abu Rish Brigades of Fatah, but B'Tselem identifies them all as "did not participate in hostilities," which implies that they were civilian without B'Tselem saying so.

The bottom line is that B'Tselem identifies about one third of those killed as having participated in hostilities, with another 46 of those killed not having been determined if they were or not.

The Meir Amit Intelligence Center had identified (at last count) about 48% of those that they counted as being militants, but they had a lot more that had not been determined as of their last report.

The statistic I would like to see is the percentage of those killed who were either terrorists or who were killed during the targeting of legitimate military targets. That number would show how many were killed for no apparent reason which is really what the "human rights" NGOs are trying to imply was the case with the majority. But as we have seen, many of those killed were being used as human shields by Hamas or other groups.

B'Tselem's data should be enough to get a good idea of that number; unfortunately it isn't visible in database format so such a task would be arduous. (Anyone who wants to volunteer to work on that, please contact me!)

I looked at the death of a two-year old child, the first infant to be killed during the war:
Muhammad Khalaf 'Awad a-Nawasrah. 2 years old, resident of al-Maghazi R.C., Deir al-Balah district. Killed on 09 Jul 2014, in al-Maghazi R.C., Deir al-Balah district, by gunfire from an aircraft. Did not participate in hostilities. Additional information: Killed at home with his family.

And who was his uncle?

Salah 'Awad Hussein a-Nawasrah. 22 years old, resident of al-Maghazi R.C., Deir al-Balah district. Killed on 09 Jul 2014, in al-Maghazi R.C., Deir al-Balah district, by gunfire from an aircraft. Participated in hostilities, member of the military wing of Hamas. Additional information: Killed at home with his wife and his two nephews.
So a woman and two children were killed because they were effectively used as human shields by a Hamas terrorist. Their deaths are regrettable - but fully justified under the Geneva Conventions assuming that he was an important enough target. That is a judgment call based on what a reasonable military commander would choose based on the best information he or she has at the time.

Even if B'Tselem's statistics were 100% correct, and I don't think they are, I believe that a little digging would show that the vast majority of civilians killed in Gaza died because they were in proximity to terrorist targets - the victim of Hamas' policy of using the civilians of Gaza as human shields.

That is not a statistic that B'Tselem would want to publicize because their goal is to demonize Israel, not to show that it wages war against terrorists in a way that is compliant with international law.

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.@Amnesty changes Abu Jame story, but still blames Israel

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Last year Amnesty International came out with a page on the one-year anniversary of the Gaza war (advertising their very inaccurate Gaza Platform) with its usual combination of lies and half-truths.

One of the charges they made was that Israel deliberately targeted family homes for no reason except to murder entire families. Here's what they wrote:

I pointed out that by the time that they wrote this report it was already well-known that in fact there was a Hamas military commander who was killed in that airstrike, something that Amnesty purposefully hid from its readers.

We know that Amnesty hid is because it was known that 26 people were killed in the strike, not 25.

Here was what B'Tselem wrote about the Abu Jame home in 2014:


I published photos of Sahmoud and pointed out that he had a huge funeral, indicating his importance to the terror group.


I wrote at the time that it is still reasonable to ask whether the 25 family members killed indicated a violation of the principle of proportionality in war, and that Israel was investigating it.

But this proved that Amnesty knowingly misrepresented the circumstances of the incident.

This year, Amnesty put out another report on the anniversary of the Gaza war, and once again trotted out the Abu Jame family as an example of Israeli war crimes. But this time it admitted that Sahmoud was killed too:

Although Israel has not released any information on the attack, its apparent target was Ahmad Sulaiman Sahmoud, a Hamas operative, who died in the strike. The families said he was not in the building at the time but may have been in the vicinity. If Ahmad Sulaiman Sahmoud was the intended target, the attack was disproportionate and a potential war crime. It should have been apparent that a large number of civilians were in the house, and the attack should have been cancelled or postponed. 
So they changed their charge from "Israel obviously targeted civilians" to "Israel should have been more careful when targeting militants." Yet they still claim "war crime."

We don't know the circumstances of the targeting of the home. But what we do know is that Amnesty was wrong to assume in 2015 that Israel had no military target, and they are wrong to assume in 2016 that Sahmoud was the only reason that Israel targeted the home. After all, if the Abu Jame family lied to Amnesty about whether they were harboring a Hamas terrorist (whether voluntarily or not) they would also lie about whether there were any command centers or weapons caches hidden in their house, which would make it a valid military target if either Sahmoud was a high-enough level Hamas operative or if the targets were of sufficient value.

Amnesty declared Israel guilty while apparently hiding some exculpatory evidence. And now they are declaring Israel guilty even with that evidence. This only goes to prove that Amnesty knows that it wants to damn Israel and it creates and modifies the narrative to achieve that aim.

It is also telling that Amnesty chose to highlight the Abu Jame family again. If Israel had routinely attacked family homes in Gaza, as Amnesty charged last year and the year before, surely they could have found other houses without any terrorists being targeted?

Yet last year Amnesty tried to do exactly that on the anniversaries of many Israeli attacks, and for virtually all the cases I was able to find a legitimate target.




Fact: Homeowner Essam is a fighter for the Al Aqsa Martyr's Brigades of Fatah. His nom de guerre is Abu Mustafa.



Fact: Two Islamic Jihad militants were killed in the same attack, including a family member.





Fact: A family member was a Hamas militant, even though Amnesty investigated this themselves and couldn't figure that out.



Amnesty's lies were demolished by me last year about Israel's supposed indiscriminate bombing of houses - and therefore they are moving the goalposts without correcting the older reports and tweets that slander Israel. This new report even links back to the old Amnesty report that gives the slander of indiscriminate bombing, a report that has not been corrected despite the fact that Amnesty clearly is aware of the facts by now, as evidenced by their grudgingly adding the fact that terrorist Ahmad Sahmoud was killed at the Abu Jame home.

If you still need evidence that Amnesty is more interested in bashing Israel than in reporting the truth, you are simply not willing to listen.

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Amnesty's new communications director wants to restore the caliphate, supports terrorists

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Osama Saeed Bhutta has joined Amnesty International as communications director, after leaving Al Jazeera earlier this year.

Here are some of his qualifications to become a major official at a human rights NGO:

Bhutta supports the idea of a restored caliphate across the Muslim world, claiming that it would be completely compatible with human rights.
There is no point in comparing the political form a caliphate might take to those in centuries past. Institutions such as the British monarchy or the papacy have existed for centuries, but bear little resemblance today to what's gone before. A restored caliphate is entirely compatible with democratically accountable institutions.

But what about the issue of sharia? Opposing it is apparently also one of the western world's .... Terms such as "sharia" and "caliphate" have important meanings to Muslims quite different from the distorted connotations they often carry in the west. The aim of Islamic law, contrary to popular belief, is not punishment by death or amputation of body parts. It is to create a peaceful and just society, with Islamic scholars over centuries citing its core aims: the freedom to practise religion; protection of life; safeguarding intellect; maintaining lineage and individual rights. This could be the basis for an Islamic bill of rights.
So, does Osama Saeed support the idea that Jews and Christians pay a poll tax if they live in Muslim countries? After all, that is Sharia law, is it not>?

Does he support equal rights for gays? Does he think they should be hanged? Or somewhere in between?

Let's be clear. The much-lauded Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam signed in 1990 did not call for freedom of religion, equal rights for women, equal rights for gays, freedom to leave Islam, freedom of expression (it explicitly says there is no right to disparage Islamic prophets,) and so forth. It is fundamentally opposed to everything Amnesty pretends to stand for.

In another article, Saeed writes "Mr Blair has attacked the idea of the caliphate - the equivalent of criticising the Pope." Really? A Muslim 'umma with a billion people under a theocratic rule is similar to the Pope today?

Saeed also wrote this in 2006:
Imam Anwar Al-Awlaki was originally hounded in the US becuase two of the 9/11 bombers happened to pray at his mosque. Many of my Muslim readers will either know him personally or have heard his lectures. He preached nothing but peace, and I pray he will be able to do so again.
Alwaki, by 2006, had claimed that the FBI or Mossad was behind 9/11, and he told his followers to never cooperate with law enforcement in reporting Muslims who support terror attacks. And Alwaki was already known to have had far closer ties to the 9/11 hijackers than just having them as members of his mosque. Oh, and this person who "preached nothing but peace" also had expressed support for suicide bombers killing Jews.

So Amnesty is hiring someone who calls Hamas suicide bombings "martyrdom operations," who is almost certainly against equal rights for gays, who supports Muslim supremacism within a new caliphate run by sharia law, and who openly supported someone who was known to have undeniable terror ties.

Wouldn't it be nice if some reporter would actually ask Amnesty's new communications director very specifically if, when there is a contradiction between the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Sharia law, which he would support?

(h/t Petra)

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Amnesty's Twitter followers don't care about dead Jews

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Here are the number of retweets for recent Amnesty International tweets from their @AmnestyOnline account:

-Ireland’s ban on abortion violates human rights – ground-breaking UN ruling - 174
-I fled war in Syria, was attacked in #Germany: Report on failure to tackle hate crime rise - 127
-GOOD NEWS! Torture survivor Yecenia Armenta now free in Mexico - ends 4 years of injustice - 113
-Bahrain shatters façade of reform with persecution of opposition leader @ariel_plotkin oped - 109
-UN: Shameful pandering to Saudi Arabia over children killed in Yemen conflict - 154
-Nowhere safe: Refugee women on the Greek islands live in constant fear - 60
-Malawi: Killing spree of people with albinism fuelled by ritual practices/police failures - 260
-Two Syrian refugees are first at risk of forced return to Turkey under #EUTurkeyDeal: Tell @imouzalas to STOP this! - 124
-Evidence counters UK claims that no British-made cluster munitions used in recent Yemen war - 219

It is very clear that AmnestyOnline can count over a hundred of its followers to pretty consistently retweet nearly every tweet of theirs, no matter how obscure the topic.

With one exception.

Amnesty released a fairly strong statement about the Tel Aviv bombing (although it also couldn't stop itself from warning against Israel engaging in "collective punishment." How many people retweeted that statement from this account since yesterday?

Israel/OPT: Tel Aviv attack displays total disdain for human life - 37 retweets

Amnesty International's Twitter followers apparently care far less about Jews being murdered than any other human rights issue on Earth.

This is not the first time that Amnesty's followers showed a marked indifference to dead Jews. Last November Amnesty tweeted a similar message against killing Israelis, and it received only 46 retweets.  Yet a general anti-Israel tweet in the midst of the knife attacks weeks earlier received nearly triple that amount.

During the Gaza war, an Amnesty tweet against the US providing Israel with fuel gathered over 1500 retweets. The daily tweets that Amnesty did last summer on events that happened in Gaza a year earlier routinely gathered 100-200 retweets.

The pattern is consistent: Not only does Amnesty tweet far more against Israel than against people trying to kill Israelis, but its fans don't give a damn about dead Israelis the few times that Amnesty decides to pretend to be "even handed" and condemn the terrorists.

It is hard to escape the conclusion that most of Amnesty International's active online fans either don't care about dead Jews or that they feel that slaughtering Israeli civilians is justified and should not be condemned as much as, say, Bahrain persecuting an opposition leader.

(AmnestyUSA's fans does not show the same overt bias as its international Twitter account followers do, the AmnestyUSA  tweet about the attacks garnered 148 retweets, which is about average for that account.)
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