Amnesty International Chooses Allegiance to Democrats Over Human Rights
The group reflexively backs terrorists and terror-friendly politicians to malign Israel for defending itself.
In December 2024, Amnesty International released a deeply flawed report accusing Israel of committing genocide in Gaza without providing numbers of the Palestinian death toll. They didn’t even bother to cite the impossibly high statistics gathered by Hamas’ Ministry of Health in Gaza.
Without reading the report, one can tell where Amnesty’s biases lie, simply by looking at candidates whom they have supported as an organization. Every single one of the candidates is a Democrat. Many are far-left, including members of the socialist “Squad.”
It is clear that Amnesty International has become a political organization merely by virtue of its donation to the Democratic National Committee, which coordinates party activities and promotes the Democratic platform. It was a small donation of $280, but that’s $280 that doesn’t go to upholding human rights.
The following candidates and groups are listed in descending order of donation amount. Aside from their $10,023 gift to the Kamala Harris presidential campaign, all of Amnesty’s donations are small but they symbolize an allegiance to left-wing causes and candidates above an allegiance to human rights.
Surely, Amnesty knows a donation of $6 or $25 is meaningless in terms of impact, but the group wanted so badly to support the leftist agenda and to provide candidates with their stamp of approval that they did so symbolically. The group decided that giving several donations of $100 or less to different political campaigns—where money doesn’t go far at all—was a better use of its donors’ money than spending the money in Gaza—where it claims there’s a genocide, and where the money would go much farther to provide food or medical aid.
After the Harris campaign, Amnesty’s next largest donation was to the Ravi Bhalla campaign. Bhalla is the current mayor of Hoboken, New Jersey, who said during a debate that the United States must “encourage our friends in Israel to exercise restraint in their response” and that the United States must be aware that “those responses have, at times, been inconsistent with our values as Americans.”
In short, Amnesty International donated $1,700 to the campaign of someone who either believes that fighting terrorists is “inconsistent with our values as Americans”—or refuses to admit that Hamas members are terrorists in the first place.
The next largest recipient of Amnesty dollars ($260) was squad member Cori Bush, who lost her congressional primary. Several media outlets, including NPR and the Associated Press, blamed Bush’s loss on “pro-Israel groups.” Bush herself even threatened America-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) by name and generically warned other groups that “they need to be afraid”—presumably of AIPAC’s influence.
Bush’s radicalism went too far for the voters of St. Louis, including on Israel, which she labeled an “apartheid” state and falsely accused of “military occupation” in her statement on October 7th, 2023. In the statement, she also said she was “heartbroken” by the violence in “Palestine,” before mentioning Israel, where violence actually occurred that day.
Nasser Beydoun received $100 from Amnesty International. He insultingly called Vice President Kamala Harris “a Zionist, just like [President] Joe Biden,” and admitted to posting “F*** them both” on social media. He also said that ending the “occupation of Congress” is a prerequisite for ending the “occupation” in “Palestine.”
Squad member Jamal Bowman, a recipient of $75 from Amnesty International, falsely claimed there is no evidence of rape or the decapitation of babies in the October 7th, 2023 massacre in Israel. He also claimed there is a “genocide” in Gaza and accused his opponent, George Latimer, of “siding with big money and power to buy the district from the people,” a classic anti-Semitic trope associating Jews with greed and amorphous power.
While $75 is a negligible campaign contribution, it is notable that Amnesty International believed it was more important that that $75 go to a political campaign than to help people facing what they call a “genocide.”
Ilhan Omar received just $25 from Amnesty International, but that $25 is clearly a stamp of approval and would have gone farther in a third-world war zone. Omar was removed from the House Committee on Foreign Affairs following tweets with anti-Semitic tropes that showed her hatred for the only democracy in the Middle East. She apparently never learned her lesson. In May, Omar called Jewish students facing rampant anti-Semitism at Columbia University “pro-genocide.”
Blue No Matter Who
Amnesty’s apparent blue-only donation policy is not unique to 2024. As an organization, the disparity between what Amnesty gives to the two major parties is glaring, as shown on this graph from OpenSecrets.
Credit: OpenSecrets
Since 1996, Amnesty has given to Republicans in only two years. In the more generous of the two years, Amnesty gave a measly $500.
If Amnesty were a genuine human rights organization, it would have criticized Hamas for fudging death toll figures in the Gaza war, maximizing deaths on their own side and hiding weapons in schools and homes.
It would also recognize that Israel fighting this war in response to the most devastating attack in the country’s history is not only not genocide, but actually detracts from the significance of the word. Genocide is what is happening in Sudan, in the Xinjiang region of China, and what happened in Iraq under the reign of ISIS—not in a war in Gaza between a country who takes every precaution to save civilians on the other side and Iran-backed terrorists.
