Carrying on its long tradition of unfairly attacking Israel, Amnesty International has published another hatchet job masquerading as a serious investigation this week.
The report, “Israel/OPT: Civilian deaths and extensive destruction in latest Gaza offensive highlight human toll of apartheid,” accuses Israel of committing a war crime in its pursuit of Islamic Jihad terrorists in the Gaza Strip last month.
As is the usual fashion when it comes to Amnesty, the 1,300-word denunciation of Israel exercising its legally-sanctioned right to defend itself is replete with hyperbole, distortions and outright lies — the latter demonstrated in Amnesty repeating its well-worn libel that Israel is an apartheid state.
Just because @amnesty says something doesn’t mean it’s accurate, @BBCNews @BBCWorld.
An organization that obsessively delegitimizes Israel, falsely claiming it to be an “apartheid state,” isn’t qualified to make objective judgments on Israel’s military policies.
Try better. pic.twitter.com/XHuzbMq40w
— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) June 14, 2023
Given that Amnesty so clearly has an anti-Israel axe to grind, one would think that reputable news organizations, like the BBC, which prides itself on its commitment to impartiality, would take anything published on the Amnesty website with a pinch of salt.
Alas, not so.
Instead, the BBC has regurgitated almost word-for-word Amnesty’s most damaging allegations surrounding Israel’s role in the May conflagration, including Amnesty’s claim that the IDF mounted “disproportionate air strikes which killed Palestinian civilians.”
Of course, and this should go without saying, there is nothing disproportionate about killing terrorists who are planning to launch attacks on Israeli civilians.
In the piece, ‘Amnesty: Possible war crimes in recent Israel-Gaza fighting,’ the BBC’s Middle East desk correspondent David Gritten quotes at length Amnesty’s repeated claim that Israeli strikes to take out Islamic Jihad commanders were excessive, as well as the NGO’s malicious assertion that the risk to civilians in Gaza was “likely disregarded” by those in Israel who “planned and authorised the attacks.”
While Amnesty may have convinced most journalists that it is an unimpeachable source of information, the BBC should really have examined the organization’s sad and sorry history of getting things wrong or letting its ideologically-driven leanings interfere in conflicts that it apparently knows very little about.
For example, Amnesty was widely criticized last year when it released a report that accused the Ukrainian military of endangering civilians by “establishing bases and operating weapons systems in populated residential areas, including in schools and hospitals” — apparently forgetting that Ukraine was forced to position soldiers in urban areas to avoid being completely overrun by invading Russian troops and to protect those very Ukrainian civilians in the path of Russia’s military.
Unsurprisingly, when Islamist terrorists plant rockets inside and underneath civilian centers in Gaza, Amnesty has very little to say in the way of condemnation.
However, the most worrying aspect of the article is Gritten’s abject failure to probe the veracity of Amnesty’s allegations, as any serious journalist should.
If he had, he would have noted that Amnesty’s claim that Israel started the five days of fighting, is complete and utter fiction. As HonestReporting has repeatedly pointed out, Operation Shield and Arrow was launched in response to a barrage of rocket fire from the Strip after Islamic Jihad terrorist Khader Adnan eventually died in an Israeli prison following a protracted hunger strike in a bid to secure his release.
Gritten also appears to go to great lengths to clean up Islamic Jihad’s image, particularly by not bothering to mention that the group is an internationally-recognized terrorist organization that has been proscribed by pretty much the entire Western world, including the United Kingdom where the BBC is based.
Indeed, Gritten even prominently features the group’s “spokesman” Tariq Salmi saying Islamic Jihad welcomed Amnesty’s report, which “proves that the occupation [Israel] was the one that began the aggression by committing grave crimes.” This, while not mentioning the fact that the group’s sworn goal is the annihilation of the Jewish state using “the Jihad solution and the martyrdom style as the only choice for liberation.”
As an independent organization, Amnesty International is free to publish as many unfair screeds about Israel as it likes.
As a state-funded broadcaster tasked with delivering non-partisan news coverage to millions, the BBC should robustly challenge Amnesty’s biased bilge.
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