Does Amnesty International Jersey Group have a bias that ignores Western crimes while promoting those of its enemies?
Often, what someone doesn’t talk about is just as informative — perhaps more so — than what they do
Take, for instance, Jersey’s Amnesty International group. Worldwide, Amnesty’s reputation is pretty admirable. Founded in 1961 to protest the treatment of a group of Portuguese students by the fascist Estado Novo regime, the organisation has grown into a worldwide campaigner for human rights in countries as diverse as Australia, Iran, Yemen, Israel, Norway, the United States and the People’s Republic of China.
A quick look at their Facebook page shows that unlike certain other “human rights organisations” they aren’t afraid to criticise the policies of Western governments and their international allies (such as the UAE, Israel and Turkey). On their website, the six front-page articles address war crimes by UAE troops in Yemen, extrajudicial executions by the Cameroonian army, the anniversary of the death of Chinese democracy activist Liu Xiaobo, the flogging of an Iranian young man convicted of consuming alcohol, messages of solidarity from children across the world to the migrant children locked in cages by the US government, and the death penalty in Sri Lanka.
A pretty broad spread, right? Pulls no punches on criticism of Western governments or their allies, as well as criticising those countries we aren’t so friendly with. It’s done in the true spirit of the idea of human rights — that they apply to everyone, everywhere, regardless of a government’s political or international affiliation. Now, let’s take a look at our local bunch.
Just looking at 2018, nearly a third of Amnesty Jersey’s Facebook posts so far this year have been about Russia. If you add China and Iran, you have 60% of posts so far this year.
As for the US, UK and Australia? Not one. Yemen? Not a peep. UAE? No chance. Israel and Saudi Arabia get precisely one mention each — in a year where we had Saudi kill hundreds with their continued bomb attacks on civilians (including hospitals and weddings), the biggest Palestinian death toll in one day since the 2014 Gaza war, and the “nation-state bill”, a piece of racist legislation dubbed the “apartheid bill” by Arab-Israeli members of the Knesset that enshrines in law segregation between Jews and Arabs and downgrades Arabic from an official language of Israel to merely having a “special status”. How many of these events did Amnesty Jersey think to include in their coverage? Not one. A bit suspect, don’t you think? Let’s take a deeper look.
Since the 1st of January 2016, Amnesty Jersey has posted about the actions of a state actor a total of 182 times (at my count). 41 of those posts were about Russia. 33 were about Iran, 16 were about Syria, and 14 were about China, meaning 104 out of 182 posts — 57% — were about just four of the West’s main adversaries. Saudi Arabia — a head-chopping dictatorship which tortures and executes dissidents and enforces Shari’a law through a notoriously oppressive religious police, and a Western ally — received only 13 mentions, all but one of which related to the imprisonment of a single blogger, Raif Badawi, by the Saudi state. Israel received only 6 mentions, in the whole two-and-a-half year period I covered, despite the massive escalations of apartheid policies in recent years, while the genocide of the Rohingya people in Myanmar got only 4 mentions (AJ mentioned Ukrainian prisoners held by the Russian state more times than it mentioned the literal genocide of hundreds of thousands of people in Myanmar).
Now, I’ve got no issues with the human rights abuses of Western opponents, such as Russia and Iran, being exposed and campaigned against.
Russia is an authoritarian oligarchy, ruled by a political class composed largely of a mixture of former KGB agents and gangsters, while Iran is a head-chopping supporter of international terrorism with a statute book ripped straight from the Middle Ages. This is about a balance of coverage. The perception that Western enemies are the world’s only human rights abusers, and that we and our allies are squeaky clean, can lead down several nasty paths, such as the sanctions against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in the 1990s (estimated to have killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people), the ongoing crippling embargo of Cuba by the USA, and, of course, the 2003 invasion of Iraq (the fallout from which is estimated to have killed over half a million people).
Of course, we aren’t squeaky clean, and never have been. From Australia’s immigrant concentration camp on Nauru, to the Guantanamo Bay internment camp, the CIA’s ‘extraordinary rendition’ (kidnapping) and ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ (torture), America’s own immigrant concentration camps, Israel’s deliberate apartheid policies and massacres of peaceful protesters, and of course, Saudi Arabia’s 7th century Shari’a law (with 7th century punishments to match).
When these violations aren’t talked about, when the West’s own crimes aren’t discussed, then you have a serious imbalance that, consciously or not, pushes a pro-Western, pro-imperialism worldview. Focusing exclusively on the crimes of Western enemies creates a population not only ignorant of the crimes of its own government, but far easier to persuade to fight against a country whose record is perceived as worse than the Western one. At the end of the day, there’s only one place this can lead. War. And none of us want that.
Amnesty Jersey was contacted for comment but so far we have received no response.
