Friday, July 17, 2015
Elder of Ziyon
Its latest tweet is about the Gaza beach incident where four boys unfortunately were killed:
Wounded boy carried as 4 children on Gaza beach killed by Israeli missile: http://t.co/65rNI3jQUD #50Days4Gaza pic.twitter.com/XDGnKYZfzL— AmnestyInternational (@AmnestyOnline) July 16, 2015
As usual, their link to their Gaza Platform does not go to the specific incident. The platform does not seem to include a way to link to specific events altogether, which is a major shortcoming for something that is meant to be a useful research tool.
In order to preclude the charge of bias, the Gaza Platform includes, in some cases, a link to Israel's investigation of the same incident.
However, the creators of this expensive piece of anti-Israel software apparently never tested that feature. Because every link to an Israeli investigation is broken and causes a nearly incomprehensible error message.
Isn't that interesting? A professional platform, ostensibly for research purposes, with sophisticated features, just happens to break when one attempts to use it to find the other side of the story. The coders didn't bother to test part of their platform that just happens to contradict the entire point of the platform.
But that isn't the only issue. While Amnesty's'platform integrates the words of two biased, anti-Israel sources (Al Mezan and PCHR) directly into the platform, even if the links to the Israeli response worked, they raised the bar considerably for reading them because the platform forces people who want to read the other side of the story to jump through hoops - to download a PDF file and to find the specific incident within that document.
They hand-feed the anti-Israel propaganda, but they make Israel's response difficult or impossible to read.
But it is even worse. Al Mezan and PCHR wrote their reports in real time and could not, even if they wanted to, determine who is a civilian and who is a militant. All of the information available to researchers in the platform was written within a day of the incidents, so any new facts that have been uncovered since then - facts that almost always put the IDF in a better light - are ignored. (Amnesty is not the only organization that did this, of course - the UN did the same.)
There is a year's worth of research, some done by me but most of it formally documented by the Meir Amit ITIC, that is being consciously ignored by Amnesty and the Gaza platform. The Davis Commission included data from the Meir Amit center in its report - but Amnesty decided that they didn't want the world to see that there was another side to the story.
Moreover, the Israeli Military Advocate General has access to crucial information that is unavailable to Amnesty's chosen sources, information that directly relates to the legal issue of whether war crimes were committed. Amnesty decided first that Israel was guilty of war crimes, and only then created a product that was written specifically to prove it.
Amnesty's claims of being fair and impartial have been torn to shreds by their commitment to this one-sided project and 50 days of demonizing Israel on their social media accounts.
Next week we will look at the people Amnesty chose to write this example of data propaganda masquerading as an unbiased research tool. And you won't be surprised to learn that the people behind it weren't chosen for their technical skills, but for their hate for Israel.
