Amnesty slammed for campaign against Segal plan
Jewish leaders have condemned Amnesty Australia for supporting a push to reject Envoy's antisemitism plan.
Amnesty International Australia “is everything that is foul in the sector of so-called human rights organisations”, Executive Council of Australian Jewry co-CEO Alex Ryvchin said this week.
His comments came after the organisation backed a campaign urging the federal government to reject plans to combat antisemitism.
In a media release on November 13, the local branch of the global charity promoted an open letter from a handful of fringe far-left Jewish groups together with other anti-Israel organisations calling for the government to reject special envoy Jillian Segal’s antisemitism action plan.
The letter warned Segal’s plan “risks undermining Australia’s democratic freedoms like freedom of expression” and claims it “conflates antisemitism with legitimate criticism of the State of Israel, threatens freedom of political speech, proposes actions in isolation from addressing other forms of racism and discrimination”.
It urged the government not to adopt the widely-used and respected International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism, strip away dedicated mechanisms to protect Jews, and fold action on antisemitism back into a generic anti-racism framework.
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