Where’s the Coverage? Amnesty International Breaks its Own Rules
A recent search of Google News for “Amnesty International” turned up:
About 2,820 results (0.32 seconds)
Since this organization is an element in so much news coverage, Amnesty International certainly warrants some scrutiny. Watchdog organization NGO Monitor examined AI and released a report entitled “Breaking Its Own Rules: Amnesty’s Researcher Bias and Government Funding.”
The AI statute clearly expresses “impartiality and independence” as “core values” and states that:
AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL … systematically and impartially researches the facts of individual cases and patterns of human rights abuses.
Despite this commitment to “impartiality,” NGO Monitor found that:
Amnesty hired anti-Israel activist Deborah Hyams as a researcher in the “Israel, Occupied Palestinian Territories and Palestinian Authority” section.
Hyams has an extensive background in radical anti-Israel activism:
•In 2001, Hyams volunteered as a “human shield” in Beit Jala (near Bethlehem), to deter Israeli military responses to recurrent gunfire and mortars targeting Jewish civilians in Jerusalem.
•Hyams employs demonizing language regarding Israel: In 2008, she was signatory to a letter claiming Israel is “a state founded on terrorism, massacres and the dispossession of another people from their land.” Hyams also statedin 2002 that “[some] of Israel’s actions, all the way back to 1948, could be called ‘ethnic cleansing’.”
•In a 2002 Washington Jewish Week article, “Hyams said that while she does not condone suicide bombings, she personally believes they ‘are in response to the occupation.'” In another instance she defended violence stating “occupation is violence…and the consequence of this action must result in violence [against Israelis].”
•Hyams has worked for some of the most radical political advocacy NGOs in the Arab-Israeli conflict, including the Alternative Information Center (AIC), Jews for Justice in Palestine and Israel (JPPI), Rachel Corrie Foundation, and Ma’an Network. Any of these affiliations should have been a red flag for Amnesty.
Was any of this information about Amnesty International bias covered by the elite media? By the popular press? By anybody other than Jewish or Israeli news outlets? You guessed it, NO.
Not only was this demonstrated anti-Israel bias ignored, editors and producers continue to cite AI thousands upon thousands of times as a credible source. Where’s the judgment? Where’s the journalistic integrity? And, when it comes to the persistent anti-Israel partiality exhibited by Amnesty, where’s the coverage?
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