Thread by @KyleWOrton

There has been some surprise about Amnesty International's report attacking #Ukraine for defending itself against #Russia, but, under the banner of "human rights", the group has been a hard-Left, anti-American/Western activist organisation for quite some time. A short 🧵

#Israel and her supporters have been, entirely fairly, most prominent in saying "we told you so" about Amnesty International. When AI jumped on the "apartheid" slander earlier this year, they were quite clear it was because it was popular with the far-Left

https://twitter.com/KyleWOrton/status/1489501470022115330

In calling #Israel an "apartheid" and racist state, making tendentious if inexplicit comparisons with the Nazis, Amnesty International was channelling the #Soviet active measures campaign from the 1970s, one of its most successful such operations.

https://twitter.com/KyleWOrton/status/1555394501815975937

Antisemitism is surely a factor in Amnesty International's singling out of Israel—on the far-Left there is at best a blindness about antisemitism and quite frequently an active embrace of it—but the deeper reason Israel comes in for abuse is its close association with America.

In 2005, Amnesty International called Guantanamo Bay "the GULAG of our time". In 2010, the group forced out the head of its gender unit, Gita Sahgal, when she objected to the group flat-out advocating for a supporter of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda.

To demonstrate the point about Amnesty International targeting Israel (and now Ukraine) primarily for their close association with America, rather specific aspects of these states, look back to the 1970s, when the Shah's Iran was the closest and most powerful ally in the region.

In late 1976, Amnesty International produced a report declaring that the human rights situation in the Shah's Iran was "unprecedented": this was at a time when the Cambodian killing fields, overseen by China's Khmer Rouge proxies, were in full operation.

Amnesty claimed there were up to 100,000 political prisoners in Iran's jails, a figure fed to it by Communist and Islamist extremists agitating against the Shah from abroad. The real figure was 3,000 and "political prisoners" included actual terrorists.

https://twitter.com/KyleWOrton/status/1555669126760337410

Amnesty International's 1976 report claimed there was systematic torture and even rape by SAVAK in the Shah's prisons, and that thousands of people had been killed. This was not true: 1,500 people were executed in the Shah's long reign (1941-79), again most were actual terrorists

The Shah's response to the 1976 Amnesty report was unprecedented for a non-democratic government: the prison system was opened in full to inspection by the Red Cross. Presented with evidence of some mistreatment, the Shah implemented firmer laws that stopped this entirely.

As one might predict, Amnesty did not issue a follow-up report noting its earlier mistakes or crediting the Shah for the reforms of the prison system. It simply let stand the earlier lies, helping set the international atmosphere for the Revolution.

https://twitter.com/KyleWOrton/status/1555671100763377665

It will be of little consolation to #Ukrainians that this dangerous nonsense from Amnesty International assisting the invader trying to obliterate their country is not, fundamentally, about them, and is rooted in the group's abiding hostility to #America. But there it is.