In June 2026, a group of human rights and humanitarian professionals calling itself EiGHT delivered a submission to Australia’s Royal Commission on Antisemitism, drawn from the first-hand accounts of more than seventy people inside the world’s major rights and aid organizations — Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Médecins Sans Frontières, Save the Children, Oxfam, and others.
Its sixty-three pages are the first extensive insider account of how the sector operates when the subject is Jews.
The findings are consistent across organizations, functions, and continents: complaints about antisemitism produce no consequences; retaliation and non-disclosure agreements used against staff who raise them; Jewish employees excluded from the discussions that concern them; senior leaders publicly modeling hostility toward Israel and Jews; and methodological failures in published work that propagate outward through media, academia, and the courts into public life.
Running through all of it is a single institutional habit. On matters touching Israel and antisemitism, the sector applies its own principles — universalism, neutrality, evidentiary rigor — with a slant. Complaints of antisemitism trigger debates over definition rather than investigations. Israeli and Jewish victims receive systematically less attention and empathy than victims in comparable contexts. Antisemitism, alone among bigotries, is treated as uniquely disputable and politically inconvenient.
The report gathers this evidence overwhelmingly from the inside: its Slack channels, its dossiers, its leaked emails and its exit interviews.
That’s bad enough. But as we’ve seen over the years, it is not surprising — because that is how these organizations and their top officials act towards antisemitism in their public pronouncements as well. These organizations, whose entire warrant is the equal moral standing of every human being, cannot condemn an attack on Jews the way they condemn an attack on anyone else. The condemnation, when it comes, arrives with an asterisk. The clearest proof is in the cases where the condemnation is real.
On 18 November 2014, two Palestinians murdered four worshippers and wounded eight at a synagogue in West Jerusalem. Amnesty International’s statement opened exactly as a human rights statement should: “Nothing can ever justify such an abhorrent attack on worshippers in a synagogue. The deliberate killing of civilians must be utterly condemned.” That is a flat condemnation, and it demonstrates that Amnesty is entirely capable of producing one for murdered Jews.
Having produced it, Amnesty spent the rest of the statement taking it back. Within three paragraphs the document had pivoted to Netanyahu’s promised “heavy hand,” to punitive house demolitions, to collective punishment, to “a spate of unlawful killings of Palestinians,” to settlers attacking olive harvesters, and it closed on the demand that Israel hold accountable “anyone who attacks civilians on either side.” 128 words to condemn the attack; 330 words to warn against how Israel might respond.
A massacre of Jews at prayer had become an excuse to denounce the Jewish state.
Another statement, a year later on 20 November 2015, followed the same architecture.
It opened cleanly — “there can be no justification” for the attacks, “deliberately attacking civilians is contrary to one of the most fundamental principles of international law and can never be justified” — and then folded the murdered Israelis into a ledger that ran through house demolitions, “a pattern of unlawful killings by Israeli forces,” extrajudicial executions, and settler attacks, balancing the dead against the conduct of the state they belonged to.
In both statements the clean condemnation is real, and in both it is a hand extended and then withdrawn. It’s a real shame about the victims, but there are two sides to every story!
Now look at the condemnations Amnesty produces when the victims are not Jews. When a white nationalist murdered fifty Muslims at prayer in Christchurch in March 2019, Amnesty widened the frame — to Islamophobia across Europe, to Le Pen and Farage and Brexit, to Trump and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The widening ran entirely toward the killer’s side, enlarging his guilt into a movement’s, and it never once paused to weigh the murdered worshippers against the conduct of any government they belonged to.
When two men murdered a migrant stopping for water near El Paso in 2022 — having, they said, mistaken their victims for wild animals — seventy human rights organizations signed a letter that named the dead man and the children he left, traced the killing to a “dangerous trend” of white-supremacist violence, invoked the El Paso massacre three years earlier as precedent, and demanded the government answer for the policies that let such violence “thrive.” The state conduct they criticized was the state’s failure to protect the victims.
Every widening ran on the victims’ behalf.
Only when the victims are Jews does the scope of the condemnation get narrowed, not widened. It includes a “but,” implicit or explicit. That is the asterisk.
The asterisk cannot be explained by the identity of the attacker, and the proof is Pittsburgh. In October 2018 a white nationalist — the sector’s least ambiguous villain, the figure it condemns without hesitation for Christchurch and El Paso — murdered eleven Jews at the Tree of Life synagogue.
Unni Karunakara, former international president of Médecins Sans Frontières, responded that blame “must be shared by Zionists like Netanyahu for enabling white nationalists like Trump.” The post was later deleted; the EiGHT submission preserves the screenshot. An attack with no Israeli policy anywhere in its causal chain — a synagogue in Pennsylvania, a gunman animated by hatred of a Jewish refugee agency — was routed back to Netanyahu regardless.
The perpetrator was precisely the kind the sector condemns cleanly. The asterisk appeared anyway, because the only constant it tracks is the identity of the victim.
Amnesty’s own conduct confirms that the asterisk is a choice rather than a reflex. In the middle of that Christchurch essay, the author pauses to recall Pittsburgh: “when a white supremacist entered a synagogue in Pittsburgh and shot dead 11 worshippers.” The reference is clean — named killer, named crime, no pivot, no balancing paragraph. Amnesty can narrate the murder of Jews without an asterisk when the murdered Jews are a supporting example in an essay whose subject is the suffering of Muslims.
The plain condemnation is available. It is withheld only when the Jews are what the story is about.
The report documents a second form the asterisk takes, and Kenneth Roth performed both forms in a single morning. Twelve hours after two gunmen murdered fifteen Jews at a Hanukkah celebration on Bondi Beach in December 2025, Roth — who ran Human Rights Watch for thirty years — posted that “attacks on civilians are never justified regardless of the cause,” a sentence that enters a cause onto the scale in the same breath it condemns the attack.
Twenty-two minutes later he attacked Netanyahu for connecting the massacre to Australian policy, spending his one substantive invocation of antisemitism that day on defending the “genocide and apartheid” charge against Israel from any association with the killing of Jews. And within days he was attacking Australia’s antisemitism envoy for “cheapening the concept” of antisemitism by linking anti-Israel protest to the murders.
There are the two flavors of the asterisk in one man’s response to one atrocity: the Jews had it coming, and the Jews are too sensitive about it. Both place the Jewish victim, rather than the killer, as the problem in the sentence.
Condemning antisemitism, when it happens, always carries a qualifier — either the Jews provoked the attack or the Jews are exaggerating it — and both qualifiers do the same work, which is to withdraw from Jews the flat, unconditional defense that a human rights organization exists to extend to everyone. Not one Jew can read what Amnesty or Ken Roth or Unni Karunakara writes and think, “they are on our side.” Because they aren’t.
Just as EiGHT documents internally, these “human rights” leaders must be dragged kicking and screaming to write half-hearted public condemnations of Jews being murdered, and even then they must always add that one caveat - don’t forget the Jews are just as bad, too.
Read together, the private evidence and the public evidence describe one movement, deciding case by case and attack by attack that the Jews don’t quite deserve the same presumption of human rights that all other people do.
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