Thursday, January 09, 2025
Elder of ZiyonOne of the more popular T-shirts that came out of the anti-Israel encampments was based on a scrawl done by a Columbia University student on a university notice to the encampments: "I Aint Reading All That Free Palestine."
This message that facts don't matter is also Amnesty International's mantra.
When Amnesty Israel rejected the Amnesty International report accusing Israel of genocide, it wrote a long, reasoned essay describing the methodological flaws in the Amnesty conclusion. It harshly criticizes Israeli actions in Gaza - and makes some major mistakes of its own - but it truly destroys Amnesty's argument.
Amnesty pretends to look at alternatives to its genocide hypothesis in order to reject them. Amnesty Israel calls those out as not serious:
AI Israel is concerned that the alternative hypothesis sub-chapter in the report is unconvincing and written in a precarious way. In specific, it fails to genuinely represent important arguments that provide context, alternative explanations and other facts in regard to Israel’s conduct and intentions. The proper way to go about writing such a subchapter is to play the devil’s advocate as candidly as possible, or rather ask someone internal (or, even better, someone external) to write this part with all seriousness, providing gravity and real thought into the alternative hypothesis, all of this in order to avoid self-misleading, cherry-picking and other fallacies. Unfortunately, we believe that this is not the case in this report. What we have, instead of a serious analysis, is a straw man – a weaker, unserious version of the alternative hypothesis, which makes an easy target, but serves poorly as a method to deal with such important issues. Some arguments were not discussed while some were mentioned but immediately dismissed or belittled. Moreover, the analysis section that compares between the hypotheses is totally lacking, and is merely claiming that the report’s hypothesis is more convincing, to the point that it is the only one that makes sense – without actual proper discussion and scrutiny.
Amnesty Israel creates its own anti-Israel hypothesis whose very existence disproves Amnesty's thesis that there is no reasonable alternative hypothesis to genocide.
It is important to note that refuting an accusation of genocide does not necessarily entail proving that other hypotheses are more reasonable, but rather that they are reasonable enough to cast doubts on the genocide hypothesis, hence to prove that it is not in fact the only reasonable explanation to the actions of the perpetrators. This high bar is not inadvertent but rather intentionally designed to keep the crime of genocide harder to prove.One such hypothesis that we will examine here is what we dub as “the disregard hypothesis” – that is: Israel was pursuing military goals while showing blatant disregard to Gazans’ lives, but without an intent to destroy the group as such.
I disagree entirely with Amnesty Israel's own hypothesis. Yet if Israel's actions can be explained as merely blatantly disregarding the lives of Gazans - which is in fact Amnesty Israel's belief - that blows up Amnesty's entire argument that there is no other reasonable explanation for Israel's actions outside an intent to murder Gaza civilians.
And Amnesty Israel proves it: Israel's use of artificial intelligence to determine targets shows that it is targeting militants, allowing humanitarian aid into Gaza is inconsistent with genocide, Israel treated "safe zones" with more care than clear military targets, Israel assisted in the polio vaccination campaign, Israel uses expensive accurate missiles instead of cheap artillery with less accuracy, and:
Amnesty International's decision to suspend its Israeli branch for violating its newly made up policy of maintaining "operational coherence" looks even worse when you read Amnesty Israel's critique, because it means that Amnesty could not answer the criticisms even from its own people. It could not tolerate debate within its organization.Hamas’ strategy to embed itself within civilians can explain the massive devastation at residential areas, hospitals, schools etc, rather than the intent to destroy these areas and facilities as such.
It instead said to AI Israel, "I aint reading all that free Palestine." Amnesty is acting like the tinpot dictators it was originally meant to expose and oppose. Debate is not tolerated at Anesty; only slavishly following the dictates of its leaders.
Amnesty has lost all credibility - except among the types of people who proudly who wear those T-shirts bragging about their ignorance.
(h/t Daled Amos)
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"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022) |
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