Why Amnesty won’t get another penny of my money - The Jewish Chronicle

The people at Amnesty International’s fundraising department stopped telephoning me around five years ago. But until then they had been pretty persistent in their calls, and I get it; it’s easier to gain traction with someone who has previously shown an interest in your work than to cold call someone who might know nothing about it.

And I had done more than show a passing interest in its work. I joined the organisation’s Cardiff branch when I was 16, and for the next two years, before I left for university, I attended Amnesty’s weekly meeting at a Quakers Meeting House in the city, with a devotion that was almost religious. Every Saturday morning I would, with the same fervour, sit at the 1980s pine table in my parents’ kitchen and spend hours hand writing letters to despotic regimes across the world imploring them to release their prisoners of conscience. I could not bear to think of human beings being imprisoned, and far worse, for their political beliefs. I still can’t.

When I arrived at Manchester University and opened my first bank account I set up a monthly standing order to Amnesty International. Two years later, my brother joined me at Manchester and before long he was running the university’s Amnesty chapter. The charity’s “Write for Rights” campaign posters adorned the walls of the grotty student houses where we lived in Moss Side and Hulme. Like many Jews of our generation, the descendants of people who had survived mass murder in Europe – in our case because our mother had been hidden in a convent as a baby – Amnesty International was an unequivocal force for good, its commitment to stand with the victims of human rights violations, whoever they were, wherever they were and its steadfast political independence, uncomplicatedly laudable.

And then, things started to get complicated and unlaudable, in a way that is exemplified by Amnesty’s announcement last week that it was suspending its Israeli chapter for rejecting its “genocide in Gaza” report.

It is the latest outrage from this organisation which, far from being politically independent, has slowly mutated into one of the most ideologically driven NGOs on the planet, with a fixation on Israel that is now unhinged.

Let’s run through the greatest hits: it has libelled the Middle East’s only democracy, saying Israel practises apartheid; it shared a Valentine’s Day post targeting Israel, claiming it’s waging a “war on love”, conveniently forgetting that same-sex love is effectively illegal in the Palestinian territories; it has employed staff who make antisemitic jokes and then promoted them; it urged the United Nations not to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, undermining, you could say, the very reason for Amnesty International’s existence, the human right not to be abused because of who are or what you believe.

And it described the death of a Palestinian terrorist in an Israeli jail as “heart-wrenching”, referring to him as simply as a “writer”. Walid Daqqa became a “writer” during his 38-year prison term. He was behind bars because he was responsible for the kidnap and murder of Israeli solider Moshe Taman in 1984. Before shooting him dead, his killers gouged out his eyes and castrated him. Moshe was 19, not much older than me when I wrote those impassioned Amnesty letters at my parents’ pine kitchen table.

Is this once-great organisation set up by a Jew in 1961 – I know, I know – aware it has been dubbed “Antisemitism International”? When you are as pickled in the brine as some at Amnesty clearly are, do you care what your detractors say, even when those detractors include people like me who were once among your most fervent supporters?

When I was talking about this column to a fellow Jewish journalist, she remarked that it’s not as if there aren’t plenty of other countries in the world on which this human rights organisation can focus. But, actually, that’s not quite the problem. Amnesty International has written damning reports about the appalling human rights records of Iran and China, among other abhorrent regimes.

No, the problem is the one with which we Jews and our allies are now so wearily familiar: it’s Amnesty’s repeated and inordinate focus on this one tiny country – a country around the size of my native Wales, as it happens – that is surrounded by very big ones that want to annihilate it.

I tried to explain all this to my final caller from the organisation’s fundraising department a few years back. And you know what? I felt listened to. Especially when I said it would never get another penny of my money.

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Amnesty International