Seth Mandel: Amnesty International and Balaam’s Talking Ass
There’s a reason for that. The report is a joke. It didn’t take long for people to find the part where Amnesty explained that in order to find Israel guilty of genocide, the organization had to literally redefine genocide.Brendan O'Neill: The genocide lie
The crime of genocide requires intent, which is difficult to prove. Raphael Lemkin, the father of the term, had in mind “a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves” (emphasis added).
The fact that Israel, for example, moved a million civilians out of Rafah before killing a bunch of Hamasniks with very few civilian casualties is representative of Israel’s approach to this war and cannot under any reasonable circumstances even be mentioned in the same breath as “genocide.” Moving civilians out of harm’s way and allowing in regular caravans of food and medicine and other humanitarian items are actions that are mutually exclusive to genocidal intent. Without proof of genocidal intent, such intent can be determined if the only plausible explanation of the state’s actions is genocide. Obviously Israel’s conduct comes nowhere close to meeting that standard.
So Amnesty just changed the definition, insisting that “Amnesty International considers this an overly cramped interpretation of international jurisprudence and one that would effectively preclude a finding of genocide in the context of an armed conflict.”
So Amnesty International dissents from international law. That’s fine. Just be up-front about it: Amnesty is not accusing Israel of “genocide,” it is accusing Israel of a different crime which Amnesty has named “genocide,” just so it could use that word.
Amnesty International accused Israel of genocide and in the process acquitted Israel of committing genocide. It’s an age-old story—just less fun without the talking donkeys.
Here’s the thing: even that would be in keeping with the combatant-civilian death ratio for most modern conflicts. Some studies claim that, from the 1980s onwards, around 75 per cent of deaths in war have been among civilians. Whether the proportion of civilian deaths in Gaza is 60 per cent, as some in Israel claim, or 80 per cent, as Israel’s critics claim, it is normal. Awful, yes. Truly awful. But there is no proof that Israel is carrying out anything other than war. And, what’s more, a war it has every right to fight. It was Israel that was attacked, by an army of Jew-haters, and its decision to crush that army of Jew-haters is understandable and just.Arsen Ostrovsky and John Spencer: How Amnesty International Became a Joke
Accusing Israel of genocide is factually wrong and morally repulsive. It is a gross moral inversion. It was Israel that was subjected to a genocidal attack when the death cult of Hamas indiscriminately slaughtered more than a thousand of its people, and yet it is Israel that is called ‘genocidal’. It was Israel that was targeted by the worst act of racist violence of the 21st century so far – and the worst mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust – and yet it is Israel that is hysterically accused of pursuing the racial extermination of the Palestinians. The West’s activist class that seeks to prove its moral worth by noisily accusing Israel of ‘genocide’ ends up proving nothing more than its own unmooring from truth, reason and decency.
‘Genocide’ is a wildly overused term in the 21st century. Various wars are rebranded as genocides. We hear insane talk of a ‘trans genocide’, which is basically when you fail to use a person’s preferred pronouns. Horrendously, even the mistreatment of animals can be called genocidal these days – who can forget when the moral void that is PETA described your meat dinner as ‘the Holocaust on your plate’?
All this depthless relativism has the effect of minimising the importance of the crime of genocide. But the accusation of genocide against the Jewish nation is even worse. For here, the descendants of history’s worst genocide find themselves reimagined as genocidaires, as the very evil that once stalked them. This is a projection of the sins of Europe on to the victims of that sinning. It is a cynical effort by the European elite to morally absolve itself of the crimes of its ancestors by finding the Jews themselves guilty of the same crimes today. And so are they unburdened of historic guilt, even if the price of that unburdening is truth itself.
Howard Jacobson once asked why Israel, of all nations, is so often called genocidal. It’s because, he said, the aim of such hotheaded activism is not to oppose war but to ‘wound Jews’, to ‘punish them with their own grief’. That’s what I saw in that Led By Donkeys stunt: the further wounding of a historically wronged people by Western activists who value their own continued access to polite society more than they do the security of the Jewish State. The accusation against Israel of ‘genocide’ is not only wrong – it is reckless, cruel, self-serving and deserving of the firmest moral pushback we can muster.
That there have been civilian casualties in Gaza is tragic, but it is also the inevitable consequence of Hamas using its own people as human shields and embedding its military operations in schools, hospitals, kindergartens, and homes. Notwithstanding the complex challenge of operating in such difficult environment, the IDF has gone to extraordinary lengths, not seen in modern warfare, to abide by the principles of International humanitarian law and avoid harm to civilians in Gaza. This has included implementing historic measures to prevent civilian harm, such as advanced alerts to provide early warning and temporary evacuations, daily pauses of fighting, distributing maps to civilians, using precision weapons, as well are facilitating daily provision of aid.
In fact, to demonstrate just how utterly ludicrous Amnesty's accusation of genocide is, one only needs to see that, according to the CIA World Factbook, the population in Gaza has actually increased 2 percent in the last year. This is the very opposite of seeking to destroy, in whole or in part or in any way, a group of people.
Perhaps knowing it doesn't have a legal leg to stand on, Amnesty has resorted to manufacturing its own definition of genocide. Amnesty claims that the universally established and the sole accepted legal definition as outlined in the Genocide Convention of 1948 which requires the existence of intent is an "overly cramped interpretation of international jurisprudence and one that would effectively preclude a finding of genocide in the context of an armed conflict."
It's not just Israel that finds this redefinition ridiculous. In an absolutely scathing rebuke, even Amnesty's own Israel office has totally rejected Amnesty International's report, saying it was a "predetermined conclusion" based on "biased" and "artificial" analysis of the situation in Gaza and "motivated by a desire to support a popular narrative among Amnesty International's target audience."
If anyone is guilty of genocide here, it is Hamas. Not only does Hamas openly state that the destruction of Israel is its ultimate goal, as evidenced in their Charter, it acted out on those intentions on October 7, when Hamas massacred over 1,200 Israelis in a rampage that included raping, burning, mutilating, executing and abducting women and children. We've stood in the kibbutzim and communities in the south of Israel and saw first-hand the death and destruction. That is where the real attempted genocide occurred.
In an interview last year, shortly after the massacre, senior Hamas official Ghazi Hamad admitted that the terror group would repeat the October 7 massacre "again and again" until Israel was "annihilated," openly admitting the group's genocidal intentions. But Amnesty has completely disregarded this, instead absolving and whitewashing the heinous actions of Hamas.
The incoming Trump Administration should declare Amnesty a hate-group and adopt blistering sanctions against them, including withdrawing financial support and any cooperation with government agencies.
Regrettably, Amnesty International, once a storied human rights organization, has lost all credibility, becoming nothing more than a propaganda mouthpiece for the murderers and rapists of Hamas.
