by PAUL RICHARD HARRIS
Amnesty International logo Image/Wikipedia
Amnesty International’s reputation was built on standing up for victims. While sometimes outside viewers might have thought the victims were getting what they deserved – they put themselves in stupid situations, they were inherently bad people, and so on – AI nevertheless came to their rescue. Well, they wrote stuff about coming to the rescue; they didn’t actually show up on white horses with their banners unfurled on the breeze.
But over the past week, two reports out of Amnesty cause me to question who it is that has purchased AI’s soul.
With the whole world watching, Israel unleashed a hugely disproportionate assault on Gaza last year. And in a story two days ago, AP reported:
The human rights group Amnesty International said in a report Thursday that Palestinian militants committed war crimes during the 2014 Gaza conflict by killing both Israeli and Palestinian civilians using indiscriminate projectiles.
The report comes after two other reports issued in late 2014 that accused Israel of war crimes for attacks on multistory civilian buildings and Palestinian homes during the war.
The 50-day Gaza war left more than 2,100 Palestinians dead, mostly civilians, according to Palestinian and U.N. officials. On the Israeli side, 66 soldiers and six civilians were killed.
Amnesty claims that they conferred with an ‘independent munitions expert’ who told them that 13 Palestinians killed in a Gaza refugee camp died because of an errant Palestinian rocket. To be fair, Amnesty has also condemned Israel for the brutality of last year’s assault.
But the conclusion of the report accusing Gaza of war crimes is an exercise in fatuous stupidity. Essentially, it concludes that you can’t misbehave just because someone is misbehaving toward you. In other words, when Israel attacks you with highly sophisticated weaponry, you must simply stand there and take it if you can’t return fire with equal sophistication. Well, that seems pretty reasonable.
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