{"id":965,"date":"2014-07-25T15:18:37","date_gmt":"2014-07-25T14:18:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/?p=965"},"modified":"2014-07-25T15:18:37","modified_gmt":"2014-07-25T14:18:37","slug":"amnesty-lost-its-way-long-ago","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/amnesty-lost-its-way-long-ago\/","title":{"rendered":"Amnesty lost its way long ago"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>This article appeared today in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thejc.com\/node\/120893\">the Jewish Chronicle<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><strong>Imagine Israel without guns or ammunition, without Iron Dome, as helpless before the armed fanatics of Hamas as Jews had been for centuries. Of course we can\u2019t imagine such a thing. But Amnesty International can.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Its response to the current fighting in Gaza is a campaign to \u201cstop the arms, stop the killing\u201d &#8212; and Amnesty is concerned about only one side. They write \u201cThe death toll is rising as rockets rain down on the citizens of Gaza \u2026 nobody is safe from the indiscriminate bombing. Israel says it\u2019s targeting \u2018Hamas operatives\u2019 but most of the dead are civilians.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>No mention of Hamas rocket attacks, terrorist infiltrators, attack tunnels, the right of self-defence, nothing. Israel \u201csays\u201d it\u2019s targeting Hamas fighters, but Amnesty thinks Israel is lying.<\/p>\n<p>Amnesty calls \u201con the UK government to halt the supply of arms to Israel.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>This view has a long history in Amnesty.<\/p>\n<p>Four years ago, I ran as a candidate for the Board of Amnesty\u2019s UK Section, which has a quarter of a million members. Though only a small fraction of them voted in those elections, I placed fifth out of the ten candidates, four of whom were elected. And I ran on platform explicitly critical of Amnesty\u2019s views on Israel.<\/p>\n<p>Amnesty lost its way a long time ago when it turned against Israel. They\u2019re not alone in that view, which is shared by many in the UK and elsewhere. But it doesn\u2019t have to be that way. Amnesty remains a democratic organisation where the members can change policies.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Amnesty won the Nobel Peace Prize for good reason. It does fantastic work in defence of human rights. It should not be allowed to sleepwalk its way into irrelevance with these kinds of stupid and uninformed positions on Israel and Palestine. Amnesty needs a wake-up call now.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This article appeared today in the Jewish Chronicle. Imagine Israel without guns or ammunition, without Iron Dome, as helpless before the armed fanatics of Hamas as Jews had been for centuries. Of course we can\u2019t&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-965","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-jewish-chronicle"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/965","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=965"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/965\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":966,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/965\/revisions\/966"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=965"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=965"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=965"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}