.@Amnesty's "Gaza health workers" also happened to be terrorists

Amnesty's Gaza Platform says:

Last September I reported that all three people killed were Islamic Jihad terrorists.

Here is the martyr poster for 'Aatef Saleh al-Zameli. Note that he is not wearing scrubs. He's in uniform. 

The name of the "nurse" killed was actually Yousef Ahmad Sheikh al-Eid. Here is his Islamic Jihad martyr poster:

The "paramedic" Yousef Jaber Darabih was also a proud member of the jihadist terror group:

If these three terrorists were using an ambulance as a means to protect themselves and weapons from attack - and given that every single one of them is a member of Islamic Jihad, this seems likely - then they were the ones performing war crimes. It also indicates that the Gaza Ministry of Health was not only working closely with the Al Qassam Brigades to use their ambulances to transport terrorists and probably weapons, but they also worked with Islamic Jihad.

I wrote then that neither the UN nor any "human rights" NGO will investigate that war crime. And I was 100% right. 

Amnesty had an entire year to research the people killed like I did in September. But Amnesty is not interested in spending any time or money to exonerate Israel. No, they spent probably hundreds of thousands of dollars building a platform and producing associated materials and videos to blame Israel for crimes that it simply did not commit.

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Another lie by Amnesty International. Why are they respected by anyone?

In the Jerusalem Post, Philip Luther, the director of Amnesty International’s Middle Eastern and North African program, responded to NGO Monitor's criticism of the "Gaza Platform."

"We are not claiming that the Gaza Platform itself, on its own, gives you a conclusion in every case about whether a war crime was committed or not. It is not able to do that; we are not claiming to do that,” Luther says.

Actually, Amnesty does claim that the tool proves Israeli war crimes.

Here are two screenshots from the beginning of the video, made by Amnesty, touting the purpose of their Gaza Platform:

If the tool doesn't prove any individual case is a war crime, how can Amnesty claim that the tool proves Israel committed war crimes? Does Amnesty believe that a bunch of unproven allegations based on lying sources somehow becomes more accurate when you put a pretty face on top of lies?

Yet another lie by Amnesty, and more proof that the platform is meant not to illuminate but to obscure.

All my posts proving Amnesty bias and lies about their Gaza Platform can be seen here.

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Amnesty's blood libel against the IDF (update)

Amnesty International created a publicity film for its newly released"Gaza Platform" which I have proven uses inaccurate data meant to bash Israel. under the pretense of being noble.

The film includes this section that is a complete, provable lie.

:

Watching that video you would think that there was only one minute and nine seconds for the family to flee the house. Amnesty put up a timer and everything! It must be true! There's no way that a family can escape in such a short amount of time; we must have witnessed their deaths.

But if you look at the original video itself things aren't quite so clear. Look at the smoke on the side of the house and listen to the background noises - there is a clear edit at 1:16. (It is more obvious at fullscreen.)



The edit proves that there was more time than 1:09 shown in the Amnesty timer. Making this video a lie.

How much was edited out?

From The Independent, July 13, 2014:

A video has emerged showing the extraordinary “knock on the roof” technique used by the Israeli military to warn Palestinian civilians of an impending missile strike.

The footage was uploaded to YouTube yesterday by the Gaza-based Watania news agency, and shows from extremely close quarters a small missile striking the roof of a house across the street.

According to the caption, around 15 minutes later – though most of this time has been edited out of the final clip itself – two fully-armed missiles from an F16 jet strike one after the other, blasting the front of the house away and sending a cloud of debris and rubble into the air.

When the dust settles, the full extent of the damage is slowly revealed, with only the exposed back half of the home still standing.

The Watania agency reported that the home in this case belonged to Samir Nofal, who was able to get out in time along with his family and neighbours.

The 15-minute gap in the video was also reported by the New York Daily News, The Daily Mail and CNN.

(Watania's description, however, says that Israel called the homeowner first, waited 15 minutes for the "roof knock," and the larger bomb was 5 minutes later after the family was safely out of the house. Only The Telegraph got it right, showing how lazy reporters are in copying others' stories. )

Perhaps, you might say, this is an innocent mistake. Somehow Amnesty saw this video without the explanation that was easily available in major news outlets and in the YouTube video that they edited to create their propaganda film.

Perhaps it is possible, but every one of those stories quoted Philip Luther, Middle East and North Africa Director at Amnesty International, saying how Amnesty is against the "roof knock" procedure. Amnesty, like any large organization, follows its news coverage closely. They read each of these news stories that emphasized that the video edited out several minutes of inactivity.

The only conclusion is that this little propaganda film was knowingly deceptive. Amnesty knows the truth and chose to create a film that strongly implies that Israel cruelly bombed houses that they knew still  had civilians inside scrambling to grab their belongings.

This is a blood libel.

Amnesty's on-screen timer is the exact same kind of deception that the entire Gaza Platform propaganda is. They are overlaying their own spin and lies on top of flawed information and presenting it as if it is more accurate than what had been seen before.

But all that Amnesty has proven is that it has no credibility. To Amnesty, bashing Israel is far more important than little details like truth and accuracy.

The Gaza Platform data also includes in many cases the an insulting term for the IDF - it calls the army the "IOF," or "Israel Occupation forces," a term used up until now exclusively by Arab media and Arab NGOs. Now Amnesty has adopted that derogatory term as its official terminology, further proving that Amnesty is not an unbiased source.

Amnesty has a halo around it as a reliable, major human rights NGO. Any fair observer, looking at only the evidence I have compiled over the past three days, must conclude that it Amnesty is a travesty. 

Every day that they refuse to apologize for and correct this consistent pattern of lies, deception and bias is more proof of that very bias. Newspapers issue corrections, but that is beneath Amnesty.

Amnesty is well aware of my posts which have been tweeted to them hundreds of times, and others including myself have emailed them asking for comment, which they have ignored.

To Amnesty, truth is sometimes just an inconvenience that gets in the way of a good story.

Their donors might be interested in knowing this.

If I am wrong in a single one of my accusations, I invite Amnesty to respond,. I promise to print their response in full.

UPDATE: Amnesty replaced the video with another. Details on their new deceptions here.

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Amnesty's true colors revealed with fake civilians, even fake children, in their "Gaza Platform" tool

Yesterday I reported that Amnesty International is releasing today an online application, The Gaza Platform,  to do graphical analysis on Israeli attacks in Gaza.

And that Amnesty's partners in gathering data were, to be blunt, liars.

The official release of the Gaza Platform is today, with a free event at Amnesty UK this evening.

Perhaps no example shows how unreliable this tools isi than the incident recorded by the tool here:

At around 1:50 am on Saturday, 19 July 2014, Israeli warplanes targeted a group of civilians sitting in front of their houses in Al Ladadwa Street in Khan Younis city. Nine people, including three children, were killed and another two were moderately injured. Three of those who were killed were brothers; Mohammed Reda Salhiyya, 22; Mustafa Reda Salhiyya, and 21, and Wasseem Reda Salhiyya, 15. Another two brotherswere killed: Yahya Al Surry, 20, and his brother Mohammed, 17. The other four were residents of the area and were identified as: Mohammed Mostafa Salhiyya, 32; Ibrahim Jamal Nasser, 13; MohammedAwad Nasser, 25, and Rushdy Nasser, 25.
SOURCE:
Al Mezan

PCHR has the same description of victims as civilians with similar ages within the application.

Only one problem: every victim was a terrorist..

Here is a martyr poster for every victim.

According to this poster, every single one of these people were members of the Abu Rish Brigades. Including the 15-year old boy and 17-year old boy.

What about the 13-year old Ibrahim Jamal Nasser? Well, he wasn't really 13:

I reported on all of these last August. But Amnesty apparently spent much more time and money to create an application to bash Israel than to Google the names of the "civilians" - a simple exercise that would prove that the Al Mezan Center and PCHR are completely unreliable when they claim that dead Gazans are civilians.

The identification of victims as civilians is the key for Amnesty's stated use of this tool as a means to prove that Israel engaged in war crimes. As I have just again proven, the application is based on completely unreliable data where the number of civilians and children were inflated by these "human rights organizations" for their own political purposes.

Every reporter that parrots Amnesty's press release should be emailed and tweeted with this post as well as my post from yesterday to show Amnesty's true colors. 

There are scores of people I documented as being members of terror groups that PCHR and Al Mezan called "civilian." The Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center has done a much more rigorous job documenting how many of these supposed civilians were really members of terror groups.

Amnesty ignores any evidence that contradicts its pre-determined verdict. Amnesty's release of the Gaza Platform is proof that Amnesty's goal is pure anti-Israel propaganda, and truth is the victim.

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Bashing Israel? Amnesty has an app for that (update x2)

Tomorrow, Amnesty plans to officially release a graphical tool that has no purpose except to bash Israel.

From the leaked press release:

An investigative online tool mapping Israeli attacks in Gaza during the conflict of July and August 2014 has been unveiled by Amnesty International and Forensic Architecture today. Its purpose is to help push for accountability for war crimes and other violations of international humanitarian law.

The Gaza Platform enables the user to explore and analyse data about Israel’s 2014 military operation in Gaza. The preliminary data currently plotted on the Platform, which will be updated over the coming months, already highlights a number of patterns in the attacks by Israeli forces that indicate that grave and systemic violations were committed.

“The Gaza Platform is the most comprehensive record of attacks during the 2014 conflict to date. It allows us to piece together more than 2,500 individual attacks, illustrating the vast scale of destruction caused by Israel’s military operations in Gaza during the 50-day war last summer,” said Philip Luther, Director of Amnesty International’s Middle East and North Africa Programme.

“By revealing patterns rather than just presenting a series of individual attacks, the Gaza Platform has the potential to expose the systematic nature of Israeli violations committed during the conflict. Our aim is for it to become an invaluable resource for human rights investigators pushing for accountability for violations committed during the conflict.”

The platform is a map of Gaza where you can graphically zoom in on many Israeli strikes, or search for names or specific types of attacks.

The data comes from PCHR, Al Mezan Center and Amnesty.

We've already documented many cases where all of those groups defined people killed in Gaza last summer as civilians even when terror groups have claimed them as fighters.

Which means that this is putting a pretty face on biased, flawed and often lying data.

But its slick interface means that causal users will not doubt that the actual research behind it is based on lies.

For example, Amnesty says that Israel struck the house of Alaa Barda without saying that he was a Hamas terrorist.

And the only purpose for the huge investment by Amnesty into this project is to flatly accuse Israel of war crimes - something that even the biased UNHRC Davis commission was careful not to say:

While a vast amount of multimedia information, including testimony, photos, videos and satellite imagery, is still being processed, the Gaza Platform currently shows that more than 270 Israeli attacks were carried out using artillery fire during the 2014 conflict, killing more than 320 civilians. The repeated use of artillery, an imprecise explosive weapon, in densely populated civilian areas constitutes indiscriminate attacks that should be investigated as war crimes.

The press release also includes this howler:

“We see this project as a first step towards more effective conflict monitoring efforts, supported by collaborative platforms that facilitate the sharing of data between witnesses on the ground, organizations, and citizens worldwide.”

Yet Israel is always the first and usually only target of these "innovative" tools. Will Amnesty do the same research into Saudi airstrikes in Yemen? Of course not, because they don't put the same resources into Yemen, and it is more dangerous to be there than it was to be in Gaza last summer.

Unless Amnesty incorporates data that comes from the Meir Amit Terrorism Center and from the IDF that responds to these accusations of indiscriminate attacks, it is nothing bu a propaganda tool. Amnesty is not interested in the truth - all the data comes from biased, anti-Israel sources and there is no mechanism to impartially investigate them. As Amnesty itself says, they have already determined that Israel is guilty, now they are working hard to manufacture slick presentations to fool people into thinking that their Israel bashing is based on real science and statistics and not hate.

One more thing: earlier this year, Amnesty decided that they can't mount a campaign against antisemitism because, well, they don't have the resources to campaign on everything. But they have the money and time to spend on a slick anti-Israel application that is based on data that is inherently and provably biased.

(h/t Daniel)

UPDATE:
Amnesty's tool says:

At approximately 21:00, an Israeli warplane launched a missile at a number of Palestinian civilians in Khuza’a village, east of Khan Yunis, killing 2 of them: Mohammed Barham Abu Draz, 24; and ‘Essam Ibrahim Abu Ismail, 23.

This is Mohammed Barham Abu Draz, a member of the Al Qassam Brigades:

UPDATE 2: Here's Amnesty's video touting the product:



Their assertion that the Gaza Platform "proves' Israeli war crimes is another lie. It adds no new information to what has been known and it parrots flawed information.

The only thing it proves is that Amnesty is knowingly dishonest.

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