Tuesday, August 06, 2019
Elder of Ziyon
Hey, Amnesty hasn't come out with a new video demonizing Israel for at least three weeks, so of course they are overdue.
Off the top of my head, here are only some of the lies and misrepresentations in the video:
1. Israel doesn't "transfer" people to the territories. People move there voluntarily. This is not a violation of the Geneva Conventions routinely invoked to target Israel that says "The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies."
2. Israel haters knew that invoking Geneva wasn't nearly as clear cut as they pretended, so the Arab states specifically wrote the Rome statute to mention "indirect" transfer - a law written only for Israel. European powers went along with this hijacking of international law to target a single state. This makes the Rome Statute a travesty of international law.
3. Even that travesty doesn't extend to travel companies working wherever they want to. That is Amnesty's own obsession. There is nothing illegal there, and in fact to demand that travel companies discriminate against Jews is far more immoral. (Israeli Arabs who live across the Green Line aren't considered "settlers" and there are thousands of them.)
4. Amnesty implies that Jewish settlements displace Arabs. Outside of Hebron, every settlement is in areas Arabs never lived. In Hebron, every single house that Jews live in was purchased legally.
Any displacement of Arabs because of them building houses illegally is done with permission of Israel's Supreme Court. I've never seen Amnesty (or anyone, for that matter) seriously counter the legal arguments that are in Supreme Court decisions.
5. Jews live under fear as well. Ever hear of suicide bombers? Amnesty never spent nearly as much time on Palestinian terror as on Jews building houses.
6. Gaza, and Area A, are not under military occupation in any legal sense. Occupation requires "boots on the ground" in every legal definition before people started making up new rules for Israel and Israel alone. Even Amnesty has admitted that the definition of occupation is only "as long as the occupying forces are still present in that territory and exercise final control over the acts of the local authorities." This does not at all apply to Gaza or Area A, which have their own local authorities who do not answer to Israeli military officials.
7. Amnesty's obsession with Israel means fewer resources on real human rights issues worldwide. It does not have unlimited resources, which means that Amnesty makes the conscious decision every day to divert money and time from the millions of people worldwide who actually have their lived threatened every day towards demonizing Israel. In short, Amnesty's obsession with Israel endangers untold numbers of other people worldwide who need the political support from a major human rights organization.
