On Tuesday, Amnesty published an 82-page report titled, ”Automated Apartheid – How Facial Recognition Fragments, Segregates and Controls Palestinians in the OPT.” It would be a mistake to waste any time reading it.
I spent several years researching the output of Amnesty International and in 2019 I published a 200-page analysis of their severe anti-Israel bias. In my report from 2019, I predicted that Amnesty International would soon publicly suggest that Israel was practicing “apartheid,” and sure enough they fell over that cliff in early 2022.
A key point here is that the latest Amnesty report doesn’t contain anything newsworthy. The issue they raise is that, like most security services worldwide, Israel uses facial recognition to help keep the peace, something that shouldn’t surprise anyone.
Israel relies on technology to lessen the impact felt by Palestinians while increasing security for Israelis and Palestinians. Amnesty is not interested in these things, just as Amnesty is not interested in why Israel needs security measures in the first place and the human rights of Israeli civilians. Amnesty simply chooses to put a demonic label on everything that Israel does.
As is often the case, Amnesty’s new attack is relying on “testimony” from individual Palestinian activists or other NGOs, such as Youth Against Settlements and Breaking the Silence. A stream of bad faith actors feeding another bad faith actor. In this scenario, Israel becomes guilty because a bunch of people who hate Israel say so.
The whole report has only been put together so that Amnesty can further embed the false notion that Israel practices “apartheid.” It is part of an ongoing politicized propaganda campaign at which Amnesty is continually throwing a disproportionate amount of its own resources.
Engaging Amnesty’s arguments as if they carry weight is to fall into a rabbit hole and lose the argument before it has even started. The more important issues focus on Amnesty’s toxic motivations and goals, raising the important question about why anyone pays Amnesty any attention at all.
About two decades ago Amnesty dropped some of its recruiting safeguards, such as the rule about not working in your own backyard – Work On Own Country (WOOC). This was a vital means of avoiding conflict of interest from those working in the field. These days, when Amnesty recruits people to monitor Israel’s behavior, they often employ activists with a long history of anti-Israel campaigning.
This employment strategy generated an internal radicalization process. They went rotten from within. A year or two after Amnesty employed a Code Pink activist who had run a boycott Airbnb Campaign, Amnesty ran their own.
This is why it was so easy to predict that Amnesty was going to jump on the “apartheid” bandwagon. If an NGO employs people who all think a particular way, it is only a matter of time before the NGO follows suit.
They are far from alone in this. Many NGOs have become politicized shadows of a once great idea. With activists moving from one NGO to the other, they have all become clones.
Many of these NGOs plan and work in unison. It is why we saw the choreographed dance with B’Tselem, then Human Rights Watch, and finally Amnesty, suggest that Israel practices “apartheid.” It was all to satiate the global campaign that demonizes the Jewish state.
Anyone who does not see that this was a deliberate, coordinated strategy between multiple NGOs is fooling themselves.
These NGOs create material to be used as fodder by the anti-Israel propaganda machine. It does not need to be accurate or factually based. Just as images of Syria from 2014 can go viral as proof Israel is committing atrocities in 2021 in Gaza, anything the NGO says will be repeated by an army of anti-Israel activists.
It is a machine that needs feeding. Which is why Amnesty’s factory of anti-Israel misinformation is in overdrive, seeking new ways to make up ever-increasingly artificial charges with which to bash Israel. Hence the new report.
A few decades ago, Amnesty International did good work campaigning for the release of political prisoners trapped under the rule of despots. These days, Amnesty spends a disproportionate amount of its time demonizing the world’s only Jewish state – and working to undermine Israel’s existence by making up false charges against it.
David Collier is a UK-based Independent Investigative Journalist.
This op-ed is published in partnership with a coalition of organizations that fight antisemitism across the world. Read the previous article by Conrad Myrland.