(Updated December 11, 2024)
As CAMERA readers know, last week Amnesty International published yet another biased anti-Israel screed. The Washington Post covered the report under the headline, “Amnesty says Israel committing acts of genocide in Gaza. Here’s what to know.” (December 4, 2024, by Louisa Loveluck and Missy Ryan.)
The Post story is replete with significant omissions, and the arrogant and presumptuous headline only serves to make these omissions even more egregious.
To start, take Paul O’Brien, the executive director of Amnesty International USA. The Post quotes him extensively:
Amnesty concluded that Israel’s stated strategy does not preclude acts of genocide.
Such acts “can be the means through which a military strategy is accomplished,” said Paul O’Brien, executive director of Amnesty International USA. “What the law requires is that we prove that there is sufficient evidence that there is [genocidal] intent, amongst all the other complex intents that are going to exist in warfare.”
Paul O’Brien
O’Brien said the group’s finding, the first of its kind by a major rights organization, should compel policymakers to rethink their support for Israel.
The group is calling on the United States, Israel’s main financial and diplomatic backer, to halt arms sales. “It’s important because the genocide is ongoing and will continue unless steps are taken to stop what’s happening on the ground,” O’Brien said.
But before this war even started, in 2022, this same Paul O’Brien has said that his organization doesn’t support the existence of Israel as a Jewish state, and he even had to apologize for claiming that American Jews don’t think that Israel needs to exist. Those comments should have disqualified him from working or opining on this issue. But for some reason, to the Post, that doesn’t qualify as “what to know,” and isn’t necessary to evaluate his claims.
Indeed, any information that would indicate Amnesty’s bias is missing from this article, including the fact that Amnesty’s own staff members in Israel rejected the report’s conclusion. One staffer told Haaretz (as quoted in Times of Israel), “from the outset, the report was referred to in international correspondence as the ‘genocide report,’ even when the research was still in its initial stages.” As that staffer indicated, this strongly suggests that the report’s conclusion was pre-determined.
The Post doesn’t tell its readers that Amnesty refers to Israel’s defensive war as an “offensive,” or that Hamas has promised that, if given the chance, it will repeat the October 7 attack. Instead, the Post tells readers, “Israel’s government says it is fighting a war of self-defense following the Hamas-led attacks on Oct. 7, when militants killed some 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and dragged another 250 hostages back to Gaza.” Israel’s government “says”? This is not a mere claim. It’s uncontestable that Israel was attacked on October 7, 2023. Israel is fighting a war of self-defense. This is historical revisionism happening in real time. Amnesty clearly wants people to forget who started this war – and, it would seem, the Post is happy to assist.
Amnesty claims that its report “situat[es] [the Israeli authorities’ policies and actions in Gaza] within the broader context of Israel’s unlawful occupation, and system of apartheid against Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and Israel.” But the Post doesn’t deem worthy of the label, “what to know,” the fact that Amnesty’s claims of apartheid were themselves debunked, including by CAMERA as well as by others. The ADL called those claims not only false but “irresponsible.”
The Post also props up the Amnesty report by claiming that, “parts of Gaza [are] on the brink of famine.” The source for this claim is their own reporting from November 9, but their previous reporting mischaracterizes the report of the Famine Review Committee (just as PBS did). The Post’s November 9 article says, “the Famine Review Committee … said that starvation, malnutrition and deaths due to malnutrition and disease were ‘rapidly increasing’ there.” But the FRC report actually says, “The developments outlined above indicate the need for a new IPC analysis. However, it is already abundantly clear that the worst-case scenario developed by the analysis team is now playing out in areas of the northern Gaza Strip. It can therefore be assumed that starvation, malnutrition, and excess mortality due to malnutrition and disease, are rapidly increasing in these areas. Famine thresholds may have already been crossed or else will be in the near future.” (Emphasis in original.) The FRC report assumes, but does not conclude based on data, that famine is occurring.
Strangely, although the current, live version of the article on the Post’s site does not include this key quote from the FRC report, an older, archived version does.
Agnes Callamard, Secretary General of Amnesty International (center)
The most egregious omission, however, is that in an article about Amnesty accusing Israel of genocide, the Post doesn’t think that “what to know” includes the fact that Amnesty has unilaterally changed the definition of genocide in order to attempt to make it fit it the situation in Gaza. “What did Amnesty say?” the Post asks itself, answering, in part, “in its 296-page report, the rights group detailed a series of military and political actions — from individual airstrikes to government decisions — that have caused death and serious bodily or mental harm on a massive scale. Taken together, the group said, Israeli [sic] was deliberately inflicting on Gazans conditions meant to bring about their physical destruction, in whole or in part — the internationally recognized definition of genocide.”
But as human rights lawyer Arsen Ostrovsky and military expert John Spencer wrote in Newsweek, “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.’” Law professor and Foundation for Defense of Democracies Senior Fellow Orde Kittrie straightforwardly told Fox News Digital that Israel’s “policies and actions do not fit the legal definition of genocide.”
There is no such thing as a war that doesn’t involve civilian casualties, but the existence of civilian casualties, even a large number of them, is not evidence of intent to commit genocide. Making the leap from civilian casualties to the Holocaust-inverting claim that Israel is committing genocide, as Amnesty does, is an attempt to undermine Israel’s right to defend itself. Amnesty has chosen to take the side of the terrorists who committed the October 7 attack and who have made clear that, if given the opportunity, they would do it again. And by publishing a fluff piece essentially promoting Amnesty’s biased report, the Post is helping.