A senior Amnesty figure has compared Israel with terrorist group Islamic State.
Kristyan Benedict, Amnesty’s campaigns manager in the UK, tweeted on Wednesday: “Israeli regimes [sic] response to our Gaza report: Amnesty is ‘a propaganda tool for Hamas & other terror groups’ (#JSIL?)”
“#JSIL” is used on Twitter to compare Israel with terrorist organisation Islamic State by replacing ‘Islamic’ with ‘Jewish’ in the group’s common alias, ISIL.
Amnesty responded in a statement: “This tweet was made in a personal capacity by a member of staff. It’s being investigated internally. We take issues of social media misuse very seriously.”
The Jewish Leadership Council said: "For the campaigns manager of Amnesty International to compare Israel to the Islamic State raises serious concerns about Amnesty’s own partiality and discernment.
"To impart such a pernicious smear whilst tweeting a link to an article in the Jewish media only serves to increase the offence caused.
"This is not the first time Kristyan Benedict has shown grave misconduct when carrying out his professional duties. Without internal action being taken, we must seriously question Amnesty International’s sincerity in preventing the misuse of social media by its staff.
"We expect Amnesty International’s staff to comply with their existing, internal guidelines for the use of social media, which would surely consider this comparison beyond the pale."
Mr Benedict also caused a Twitter storm in December 2012 when he posted about three Jewish MPs during a parliamentary debate about violence in Israel and Gaza.
He wrote: “Louise Ellman, Robert Halfon and Luciana Berger walk into a bar…each orders a round of B52s … #Gaza”. The B52, an alcoholic drink, was named after a kind of long-range US bomber.
Following complaints about that tweet, Amnesty said it was “ill-advised and had the potential to be offensive and inflammatory but was not racist or antisemitic. The use of dark satirical humour to highlight the MPs’ political views was inappropriate and offensive.”
