In a brief Q+A with Time magazine that mostly dealt with his views on disengagement, former refusenik and cabinet minister Natan Sharansky made a very articulate criticism of Amnesty International and its recent controversial report on human rights:
I have very serious criticisms of Amnesty. There is no moral clarity. It doesn’t differentiate between what I call fear societies and free societies. In the democratic world, there are violations of human rights, but they are revealed and dealt with. In a fear society, there are no violations of human rights because human rights just don’t exist. All citizens are deprived of those rights. Amnesty International says it doesn’t support or oppose any political system, so it ends up with reports that show a moral equivalence between, for example, Israel and the terrorist regimes that attack it.
The Washington Post takes a similar view.
