March 17th, 2009 by NGO Monitor Staff | Category: Amnesty International, International Humanitarian Law, Lawfare

March 16, 2009

To:
Prof. Dr. M. Cherif Bassiouni
Prof. Dr. Alex Boraine
Prof. Dr. Antonio Cassese
Mr. Luc Côté
Justice Richard J. Goldstone
Ms. Hina Jilani
Prof. Dr. Salomón Lerner Febres
Mr. Dumisa Ntsebeza
Prof. Dr. Stelios Perrakis
Prof. Dr. Paulo Sergio Pinheiro
Ms. Mary Robinson
Prof. William A. Schabas
Ms. Yasmin Sooka
Mr. Desmond Travers
Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu
Mr. Ralph Zacklin

We are deeply disappointed that you are a signatory to Amnesty International’s and Crisis Action’s March 16, 2009 letter entitled, “Gaza: World’s Leading Investigators Call for War Crimes Inquiry,” promoting another one-sided campaign against Israel. The comparison between Hamas’ deliberate attacks on Israeli civilians and Israel’s response in self defense is blatantly immoral.

Reducing the violence and tension in the Arab-Israeli conflict is a vital objective. However, highly politicized NGOs that claim to promote human rights, but are in fact fuelling the conflict, play a counterproductive role, as documented by NGO Monitor.

Amnesty International has waged a biased campaign against Israel, with numerous false, misleading, and unsubstantiated claims.  In their reports, Palestinian terror and the difficult decisions Israel must take to provide legitimate self-defense in response to the more than 8000 rocket attacks on its population are ignored.

During the fighting in Gaza, Amnesty and other NGOs issued more than 500 statements, many of which, like this letter, exploit legal terminology and erase Hamas violations of international humanitarian law, such as the extensive use of human shields.  (Pointedly, we note that your letter makes no mention of Hamas, using instead, the generic phrase “Palestinian armed groups”.)   These reports are a central part of the “soft power” war being waged against Israel, in parallel to the “hard power” rocket and terror attacks, and reflect an ideological bias which also gives excessive attention to this conflict. Amnesty’s February 23, 2009, report entitled “Fuelling conflict: Foreign arms supplies to Israel/Gaza,” called on the UN Security Council to “[i]mpose immediately a comprehensive…arms embargo on Israel, Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups . . .” Amnesty’s equation of the transfer weapons to Israel for legitimate defense, with clandestinely smuggled arms to a genocidal terrorist organization, is defamatory, immoral, and absurd.

In parallel, Amnesty and others remained silent on many extensive human rights abuses occurring around the world during this same period. For example, on December 27 (the start of the operation), 189 villagers were massacred by Ugandan rebels in the Congo. Yet, none of the major NGOs reported on this incident until weeks later, if at all. This is clearly a failure of the human rights framework.

The same pattern was evident in Amnesty’s reporting on the 2006 Lebanon war, as well as its call for “investigations” and accusations against Israel of “calculated and cold-blooded murder” that helped promote the myth of a “massacre” in Jenin in 2002.   During the height of the Palestinian suicide bombing campaign from 2000-2004 as well as the thousands of rockets launched against Israeli civilians since the Disengagement in 2005, there was no outcry or calls for “war crimes inquiries” from Amnesty or the “world’s leading investigators,” nor were they “shocked to the core” by these despicable acts of Palestinian terror that maimed and killed thousands.

As long as politically motivated and biased NGO petitions continue to be promoted in this manner, the goal of universal human rights will continue to recede.

Prof. Gerald M. Steinberg
Executive Director, NGO Monitor