Terrorist fan Vittorio was in bed with Amnesty. Literally.

We've already blogged a bit about Vittori Arrigoni, the terrorist supporter who was killed on Friday.

Well, it turns out that he had a girlfriend, Claudia Milani:

Claudia Milani (R), girlfriend of Italian activist Vittorio Arrigoni, visits his mourning tent in Gaza City April 17, 2011.

And it turns out that she is the "coordinator of Israel/Occupied Territories section of Amnesty International/Italy," and as such she gave a talk at an "Israel Apartheid Week" event advertised by Amnesty last month.

Her Facebook page shows that she is "friends" with such illustrious Israel haters as Greta Berlin, Adam Shapiro, Max Ajl and Ken O'Keefe.

Isn't it interesting that Amnesty (and HRW's*) activists are so much more friendly with people who want to destroy Israel than they are with people who love Israel?

And, given that Amnesty is supposed to be concerned with human rights issues that are totally antithetical to the daily actions of Hamas, are there any Amnesty members who are bothered the least bit by this?

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*Before she closed off her Facebook page, I saw that Sarah Leah Whitson from HRW's "friends" were very similar. I regret never doing a screen capture.

Amnesty International says I acted "deplorably"

On Monday, I noticed that the murdered terrorist supporter Vittori Arrigoni's girlfriend worked for amnesty International but she seems to have had close relationships not only with Arrigoni but also with other rabid haters of Israel. I asked:

Isn't it interesting that Amnesty (and HRW's) activists are so much more friendly with people who want to destroy Israel than they are with people who love Israel?

A reader sent that link to Amnesty for a response. Their answer:

We reject absolutely any suggestion that our organisation has a bias against Israel. As you will see from reading our report (attached) on the Israeli attack on Gaza in December 2008 and January 2009, for example, we condemned the human rights violations and possible war crimes committed by Palestinian armed groups as well as by Israel. It is also worth noting that this is the only report prepared by human rights researchers who were on the ground in southern Israel and in Gaza during the fighting.

Indeed the first report from Amnesty International’s researchers was to expose extrajudicial killings carried out by Hamas under cover of the Israeli offensive. We have condemned on numerous occasions rocket attacks by Hamas and others against Israeli civilians targets in southern Israel and just last month profiled the case of Gilad Shalit as our prisoner of the month in a national newspaper (attached).

Our concern is solely the protection of human rights. We have condemned, and will continue to condemn, the Israeli state and its armed forces for repeated, gross violations of the human rights of Palestinians living in the Occupied Territories and in Israel. Likewise, we have condemned, and will continue to condemn Hamas, Fatah and other armed Palestinian groups for deliberate attacks on civilians and for failures to protect human rights in those areas of the Occupied Territories they are responsible. Protagonists on both sides would do well to examine what they are doing rather than assume any criticism of them is motivated by bias or prejudice.

Finally, if I could say this. It is absolutely legitimate to raise questions about Amnesty International's policies and priorities, indeed we welcome it as a valuable contribution to our own thinking. However, I think the site you link to is acting in a deplorable manner by using the tragic death of Mr Arrigoni to personally target his girlfriend, a woman who is right now coping with the loss of a loved one in unbelievably tragic circumstances. I realise it is not your site and you merely wished to raise a legitimate point, to which I am happy to respond, but I wished to place that on the record.

Yours,



Justin Moran
Communications Co-ordinator
Amnesty International Ireland
E-Mail: jmoran@amnesty.ie
Tel: 01 863 8300 Ext. 8334
Mob: 085 814 8986
www.amnesty.ie

Of course, Mr. Moran did not address the main thrust of my question: why do so-called "human rights" organizations' members seem to have closer relationships with activists whose focus is to destroy Israel than with anyone who could be remotely described as Zionist?

Arrigoni was not, as I have written, a human rights activist nor a peace activist by any definition of the term. Obviously Amnesty's employees can have relationships with whomever they want. But Arrigoni was a supporter of Hamas and an avowed anti-Zionist. Are any Amnesty employees friends with members of Likud, or with Jewish residents of Judea and Samaria?

Somehow, I doubt it.

In fact, Amnesty itself has no problem partnering with organizations that are explicitly dedicated to Israel's destruction. If Amnesty accepts ab initio that the destruction of the Jewish state is a legitimate position, it is difficult to accept their argument that they are not biased against Israel. There s no real difference between organizations that advocate replacing Israel with another de-facto Arab state and those who want to ethnically clean the Middle East of all Jews, no matter what word games they play with liberal-sounding concepts like "one state for all people."

If Amnesty supports the existence of Israel as a Jewish state, let them say so explicitly. If they do that, they'd lose a lot of their "friends" very, very quickly.

(As far as my acting "deplorably," I had never heard of Claudia Milani until Monday, and I simply looked at her history once I saw her name. I would have done the same had I known about her while Arrigoni was alive. I see no reason why her previous activities should be off-limits once she becomes a public personality, just because she is grieving over the death of her Hamas-loving boyfriend. Amnesty being more concerned over my blog post than over the relationships their employees have with people who want to see Israel wiped off the map seems a bit misplaced.)

UPDATE: Harry's Place notices Arrigoni's relationship with Milani as well, and acts equally "deplorably." (h/t habibi)

Why is Amnesty hosting a Hamas apologist? (Michael Weiss)

An op-ed in The Telegraph by Michael Weiss of Just Journalism:

When Amnesty International sacked the brilliant feminist Gita Sahgal for pointing out the obvious human rights bloomer in her organisation’s partnership with Moazzem Begg – a man who, the Telegraph reveals today, was once claimed by the US authorities to be “a confirmed member of al-Qaeda” – the official Amnesty explanation was that Begg was a swell guy. The unofficial rationale, I suspect, was that, as a former Guantanamo Bay detainee, he hated the Bush administration even more than Amnesty did.

But now Amnesty has taken the next step in its easy-breezy attitude towards religious fundamentalism. The celebrated NGO has cosied up to a Hamas-friendly magazine based in London known as Middle East Monitor Online (MEMO). On May 23, Amnesty’s Human Rights Action Centre will co-host what promises to be a ripping debate on “Complicity in Oppression: Does the Media Aid Israel?” The other co-hosts are MEMO and the Palestine Solidarity Campaign.

In case you aren’t familiar with the vagaries of British Islamism, let me provide a short course.

MEMO is run by one Dr Daud Abdullah, the deputy secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain and a signatory of the Istanbul Declaration. This gothic document states that it is the obligation of the “Islamic Nation” to “carry on jihad and Resistance” against Israel and to fight “by all means and ways” any “foreign warship” attempting to block arms smuggling to Hamas, which, last time I checked, was still a terrorist organisation according to EU and UK law.

Though it’s true that “all means and ways” could refer to a strongly worded Facebook campaign, try running those semantics by the Royal Navy, which blocks arms smuggling to Hamas.

MEMO has published some sterling contributions to the discourse of social justice in the Middle East. Take Khalid Amayreh, who in a MEMO essay entitled “Netanyahu’s Lebensraum” described all Israelis as “pathological liars from Eastern Europe, who lie as much as they breath oxygen”, an accusation which at the very least is unfair to the Sephardim.

Just last week, the MEMO website presented Sheikh Raed Salah’scontemplation on “The ‘Jewish state’ and us”. By “us”, Salah means a very select group, since his cod-history of Zionism argues that “Israel has never negotiated with the Palestinians”.  (MEMO thinks the Palestinian Authority, as led by Mahmoud Abbas and Salam Fayyad, is illegitimate because of its negotiations with Israel.)

More interesting than Salah’s history is his CV. He’s the leader of the Islamic Movement in Israel and an ex-con who did two years in the clink in Israel for raising money for Hamas. Salah thinks Jerusalem is the designated capital of the new Islamic caliphate and in 2007 he was charged with incitement to violence and racism for suggesting that Jews use the blood of gentile children to bake bread.

So who is coming to this wondrous festival on media tendentiousness? A cohort including former Guardian associate foreign editor Victoria Brittain and former BBC Middle East Correspondent Tim Llewellyn.

Here’s Llewellyn on the subject of veteran White House Arab-Israeli peace negotiator Denis Ross: “What a lovely Anglo-Saxon name! But Denis Ross is not just a Jew, he is a Zionist, a long-time Zionist… and now directs an Israeli-funded think tank in Washington. He is a Zionist propagandist.”

Can this really be the natural constituency of Amnesty International? Why not ring them up and ask: +44 (0) 20 7033 1500.

Amnesty would no doubt argue that the Human Rights Action Center is public space available for rent.

However, they state that "The rooms are open to the public and are available for hire by organisations working in the field of human rights and social justice."

Exactly how does the extremist MEMO, which is explicitly dedicated to disseminating pro-Islamic, pro-Palestinian Arab propaganda, get defined as such an organization?

I would love to see Hadassah or a similar Zionist organization try to book space at the HRAC, say for a conference on medical care for Ethiopian Jews in Israel, just to see what Amnesty would do.