by Agnes Callamard, Director, Amnesty International
London, April 9 – Disingenuous critics of this organization accuse us and our allies of placing a lower value on Jewish or Israeli lives than on the lives of others. We reject this patently false allegation, because of its misleading premise. In reality, the fact that a person, institution, or regime targets Jews for violence or abuse makes it more likely that we will rush to defend his rights.
Several examples will illustrate the principle.
The first: the week before last, my organization lamented the death of a Palestinian man serving life imprisonment in Israel, and decried that country’s oppression of Palestinians. He was a writer and a campaigner for Palestinian rights. But that triggered the rabid Zionists, who surged into the replies on X to defend Israeli policies, attacking the deceased Walid Daqqa’s character instead of examining their role in perpetuating the oppression he fought, as if the activities for which he was sentenced diminish his stature in our organization’s eyes – i.e., he kidnapped, tortured, castrated, and finally murdered a nineteen-year-old Israeli man, and he only became a “writer” once behind bars.
The complainers thus fail to appreciate that our taking up the banner of his cause is a function of his victimizing a Jew, and not merely a contrast to other cases when we condemn injustice. Had he targeted someone else, in some other country, we would not even know his name.
Another example: in 2015, this organization voted against a proposal to include antisemitism among the injustices it would work to combat. By itself, one might think that demonstrates only that “Jews don’t count,” as one writer put it. But that was the only phenomenon the organization rejected efforts to combat, a pointed statement that not only will we not oppose Jew-hate, but we will in effect endorse it by pointedly excluding it from a list of evils that demand addressing.
The decision to describe Daqqa as a “writer,” by the way, is of a piece with our colleagues’ choice at The Washington Post, several years ago, to refer to the assassinated leader of the Islamic State, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, a man who endorsed some of the most abusive, murderous, oppressive, genocidal practices on the planet, as an “austere religious scholar” in their obituary for him.
I believe the only reason they refrained from outright descriptions of al-Baghdadi as heroic, virtuous, and valorous, is the lamentable fact that the Islamic State under his rule, for want of opportunity and capacity, never successfully attacked Israel.
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