ZGram - 5/29/2002 - "Editorial on Amnesty International"

[irimland@zundelsite.org]

ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny

May 29, 2002

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

When I showed Ernst Z=FCndel today's Toronto Globe and Mail editorial 
about Amnesty International's blustery report, he said 
contemptuously:  "Not a word about Guantanamo Bay!"

Off comes another undeserving halo: 

When Amnesty International was besieged - for decades! - by all kinds 
of prominent people from various countries, even many former "enemy 
states", to speak up on behalf of Rudolf Hess, Hitler's Deputy and 
certainly a Prisoner of Conscience who had his freedom violated since 
1941, Amnesty International did not lift one little finger on his 
behalf.  This morally=03-tained agency that likes to cast itself as a 
defender of all the politically persecuted underdogs and is 
constantly straining to seize the moral high ground - was not swayed 
to help Hess in 45 years!

Likewise in the Zundel case where a man known as a lifelong pacifist 
again was denied his freedom of speech by judicial persecution 
because the Canadian Holocaust Lobby kept shrieking like the 
proverbial banschee (sp?) on a spit.  Let no one say that Amnesty 
International didn't know.  The agency was repeatedly approached on 
Zundel's behalf.  Thousands of letters, emails, phone and fax calls, 
even personal representations were made - nada! 

So here we are today.  Some stone age dictators, we are now told, 
were swayed - by bribes by any chance? - to release and pardon their 
victims as a result of letter writing campaigns, but what we get is 
smoke and mirrors. 

Amnesty International likes to cast itself as the Defender of the 
Underdog because that brings the goodies in - that keeps the swanky 
offices and hefty salaries.  But Amnesty International sat on its big 
fat butt for 20 years without as much as a reply in Zundel's case 
except to mutter piously that revisionists were nowhere persecuted in 
reality and only fancied being victimized - and when the public and 
financial donors pressure became too great, and Amnesty's one-sided 
engagement for trendy leftist causes and people became too glaring - 
they acted:  By changing their "rules of engagement"!

Those "worthy of support" all of a sudden had to be the politically 
correct (!) Marxists, the anti-colonialists, those embroiled in the 
Third World liberation struggle.  On the other hand, those struggling 
against buckets of lies and on behalf of historical truth, those 
nationalist and ethnic freedom seekers for their race and for their 
kin still did not qualify. 

Not even those "threatened by genocide" were deemed possessing the 
necessary qualifying criteria for support.

Amnesty International has a clearly visible political agenda.   Tens 
of thousands of well-meaning financial contributors have been conned. 
Very little effective, fair, politically neutral work has been 
accomplished by those hypocrites!  You might - might! - get help if 
you are leftist, marxist, anti-imperialist, anti-colonialist.  It 
also helps if you are colored. 

If you are a German or European ethnic, struggling for white rights 
and liberation from emotional and mental abuse, you are plain out of 
luck.  Rudolf Hess rotted in solitary confinement for 47 years, only 
to be murdered in captivity by extra-judicial execution.  What a 
disgraceful, monumental sham!

Israel will continue to torture, and the Guantanomo outrage will go on. 

Proceed with caution as you read the editorial below.

[START]


Wednesday, May 29, 2002

Toronto Globe and Mail | Amnesty's beacon

Editorial

If they bother to read its newest compendium of human-rights abuses around
the world, which they probably won't, critics of Amnesty International will
be disappointed. Amnesty has drawn some heat lately, particularly among
some of Israel's more outspoken supporters, who have accused the
organization of being blinkered and partisan. The broad, neutral sweep of
Amnesty's annual report for 2001 shows otherwise. Nobody gets off the hook.

Amid the report's generally bleak 300 pages, which focus extensively on the
West's willingness to trade rights for security after the Sept. 11 terror
attacks, a smattering of good news can be found. In some of the world's
harshest dictatorships, prisoners of conscience were freed, death sentences
commuted and restrictions on freedom of expression slightly eased.

As to why, Amnesty cites the efficacy of its letter-writing campaign on
behalf of "adopted" prisoners, a core strategy throughout its 50 years of
work. During the first five months of 2001, for instance, 19,500 Amnesty
members in 188 different countries dispatched a torrent of e-mail on behalf
of eight such prisoners facing torture. Three have since been released.

Dwarfing such victories, however, is the larger picture: extrajudicial
executions in 47 countries, legally sanctioned state killings in 27 others,
disappearances in 35, torture and ill treatment in 111, the detention of
prisoners of conscience in at least 56.

Much of that abuse occurs in far-flung places that Amnesty's critics have
never visited, and never will. Easier to recognize is the changed legal
landscape in some Western nations as a result of Sept. 11, manifest in new
laws that define new crimes and impose new restrictions on civil liberties.

The liberty-versus-security saw-off is nothing new. But as Amnesty notes,
the difference this time is that "it was not autocratic regimes but
established democracies that took the lead in introducing Draconian laws."
Leading the charge was a panicked United States, where more than 1,200
suspects, almost all of them foreigners, were secretly scooped up. Not far
behind were Britain and Canada, both of which have passed laws that could
severely undermine the right to a fair trial.

=46rom the Middle East, the news, as usual, is far worse. A long list of
violations is placed at Israel's door: torture, arbitrary arrest and
detention. But Amnesty is no less critical of the Palestinian Authority,
particularly its treatment of suspected collaborators, at least 20 of whom
"were killed or found dead in circumstances which suggested they had been
extrajudicially executed." Systemic human-rights violations are also
chronicled in Middle Eastern countries as disparate as Egypt and Iraq.

Elsewhere in the world, conspicuously China and Russia, the global
antiterrorism campaign has been exploited to stifle political dissent at
home.

Connecting all this is Amnesty's core belief that nobody, anywhere, should
be arrested or abused for exercising his or her innate right to free
speech. Once again, the best hope -- often the only hope -- for tens of
thousands of political prisoners who would otherwise be forgotten deserves
a salute. From all of us.

[END]

(Source:  www.globeandmail.com )

=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D

Thought for the Day:

"Torture is a sad albeit at times necessary part of war."

-Bernie Farber, Executive Director (Ontario), Canadian Jewish Congress