Amnesty International's "Genocide" Hypocrisy
Amnesty International appears hesitant to use the word “genocide”—except when referring to Israel’s defensive war
Since 2020, Amnesty International USA has only written one report about ongoing genocide—and it's about a genocide that isn’t.
Amnesty calls the actual genocide occurring in Sudan a “conflict” and the Uyghur genocide “massive and systematic abuses.” Yet when it comes to Israel’s defensive war against terrorists—which military analysts have praised for mitigating civilian casualties—following the October 7 civilian massacre, Amnesty is quick to declare it a “genocide.”
This is patently false. John Spencer, chairman of urban warfare studies at West Point’s Modern War Institute, wrote that Israel has taken “more precautions to prevent civilian harm than any military in history—above and beyond what international law requires and more than the U.S. did in its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.” But any effort at all to avoid civilian harm should make it abundantly clear that no genocide is happening.
Not only is the war in Gaza not a genocide, but the United States and its allies’ militaries would “be extremely reluctant to employ these techniques because of how it would disadvantage them in any fight with an urban terrorist army like Hamas,” Spencer writes.
Essentially, Israel has chosen to not fight terrorists as aggressively as it could, risking the deaths of more innocent Israelis to minimize Palestinian civilian casualties.
That's the opposite of genocide, which the United Nations defines as “killing members of the group,” (among other things) “with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group." The U.S. State Department has similarly rejected accusations of Israel committing a “genocide.”
Contrast that with the systematic violence in Darfur, Sudan, which mainstream media outlets everyday observers get right when they label it “genocide.”
Not Amnesty International. In the group's latest Sudan report, published August 3, 2023, the word “genocide” appears just one time, and not in reference to human rights violations: “The ICC [International Criminal Court] issued arrest warrants for President al-Bashir for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide."
Another section labeled “Cycles of Violence in Darfur,” and subtitled “War Crimes and Civilian Suffering in Sudan” refers merely to "extreme violence," again omitting genocide. It's the same in the group's 2022 report on “conflict-related sexual violence” in South Sudan.
The implication is that extreme violence directed by the government against its own ethnic minorities is not a genocide. So what is it?
Hypocrisy Across the Board
Nor is this omission limited to Africa. A search for "Uighurs" (also spelled Uyghurs) and "genocide" on Amnesty International’s main website—an infamous and ongoing genocide by the communist Chinese government—yields a single, completely unrelated result for genocide in Myanmar.
Even that link only describes the Uyghurs' situation as a “serious human rights violations,” even though the U.S. government, the Canadian government and mainstream think tanks all call it genocide. That word is used only to name the crime for which the United Nations will be investigating China, but Amnesty does not outright say that a genocide is happening..
Of the three Amnesty International reports that mention the Uyghurs, just one focuses on them, and none call their ethnic cleansing a "genocide." Amnesty's strongest condemnation of China's treatment of the Uyghurs is “systematic state-organized mass imprisonment, torture and persecution amounting to crimes against humanity.” Disturbingly, the latest report comes from June 2021, suggesting that Amnesty has forgotten these millions of victims.
Instead of dedicating resources to covering actual genocides or situations at risk of becoming genocide, Amnesty International has chosen to target Israel, a country whose military makes sacrifices in to save civilian lives on the other side. By dialing down its focuses on actual genocides in favor of a war between the world’s most moral army and terrorists in support of the latter, Amnesty is playing directly into the terrorists’ hands and abandoning civilians it claims to support—and in whose name it raises money.
