“Some Russian air strikes appear to have directly attacked civilians or civilian objects by striking residential areas with no evident military target and even medical facilities, resulting in deaths and injuries to civilians. Such attacks may amount to war crimes,” said Philip Luther, Director of the Middle East and North Africa Programme at Amnesty International.Compare that language with how Philip Luther described Israeli attacks on houses in a nearly parallel report issued last November:
“Israeli forces have brazenly flouted the laws of war by carrying out a series of attacks on civilian homes, displaying callous indifference to the carnage caused,” said Philip Luther, Director of the Middle East and North Africa Programme at Amnesty International.Amnesty uses much more graphic and loaded language to describe Israeli actions.
“The report exposes a pattern of attacks on civilian homes by Israeli forces which have shown a shocking disregard for the lives of Palestinian civilians, who were given no warning and had no chance to flee.”
It gets worse. Amnesty's report about Russia says that they found zero evidence of any military targets among the sites hit. But it admits that Israel did have some military targets even according to their biased investigation:
In several of the cases documented in the report, possible military targets were identified by Amnesty International. However the devastation to civilian lives and property caused in all cases was clearly disproportionate to the military advantages gained by launching the attacks.As I have proven repeatedly, Amnesty was wrong about many of the targets because I was able to document valid military targets in nearly every single case Amnesty mentioned. And Amnesty was wrong about international law ("disproportionate") in the report on Israel.
But with Russia, where Amnesty cannot find a single military target, Philip Luther's language is far less critical and more clinical.
The bias is obvious. As usual.
(h/t Ben)
