More than a month after releasing a biased anti-Israel report, Amnesty International’s U.S. Director declared that Israel shouldn’t exist “as a state for the Jewish people.”
Addressing the feminist group in Washington D.C. on Wednesday, Amnesty’s U.S. chief Paul O’Brien said that that his organization was “opposed to the idea — and this, I think, is an existential part of the debate — that Israel should be preserved as a state for the Jewish people,” Jewish Insider and other media outlets reported.
O’Brien, who is not Jewish, also claimed that majority of American Jewish do not want Israel to remain a Jewish state, but want it be “a safe Jewish space” with “core Jewish values.”
The Times of Israel reported Amnesty official’s remarks:
An Amnesty International official reportedly said that the organization is opposed to Israel continuing to exist as a Jewish state.Paul O’Brien, the human rights monitor’s US director, later denied making the comments.“We are opposed to the idea — and this, I think, is an existential part of the debate — that Israel should be preserved as a state for the Jewish people,” O’Brien reportedly said in a luncheon with the Women’s National Democratic Club in Washington. (…)O’Brien’s initially reported comments immediately drew a torrent of condemnation from Jewish groups.“If there was any doubt about Amnesty’s credibility as a legitimate voice of authority, it is now abundantly clear that they are firmly entrenched in the cadre of extremist anti-Israel provocateurs,” William Daroff, the CEO of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, said Friday in an interview. Earlier he had tweeted that O’Brien’s remarks were outrageous. “It is clear that their true vision is a Middle East without Israel as a Jewish state.”
O’Brien’s remarks questioning the existence of Israel as a Jewish States comes after Amnesty’s UK office released a report accusing Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East, of being an “apartheid state.” The 300-page reported was repleted antisemitic libels and propaganda peddled by the Palestinian terrorist groups, the analysis of the document showed.
The Jerusalem-based watchdog NGO Monitor, which reviewed the Amnesty document, found that it “manipulates and distorts international law, Israeli policy, and events on the ground, as well as denies the Jewish people their right to sovereign equality and self-determination.”
The NGO Monitor’s analysis exposed the deep-seated hostility Amnesty activists like O’Brien hold towards Israel. The Israeli watchdog concluded that the report “can be considered antisemitic according to the IHRA definition of antisemitism, which notes that: ‘Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.’”
O’Brien tired to backtrack, but his remarks clearly reveal how Amnesty has morphed from being a human rights group to a leftist ideology-driven outfit. “Taking a position on whether and how an established state should continue to exist is unusual for organizations with responsibilities limited to monitoring compliance with international laws governing freedoms and human rights,” The Jerusalem Post noted on Saturday.
Israel blasts Amnesty’s ‘false & antisemitic’ report
CLICK HERE FOR FULL VERSION OF THIS STORY