Steinberg slams Amnesty in ZFA briefing
"Their goal is elimination of Israel..."
NGO Monitor’s founder and president Gerald Steinberg, and senior legal advisor Anne Herzberg, did not hold anything back when condemning last week’s Amnesty International report that accused Israel of being an apartheid state, during a webinar hosted by the Zionist Federation of Australia on Sunday.
“This is all part of a process that goes back about 20 years to the Durban Plan of Action, which was meant to celebrate the end of apartheid in southern Africa, but instead was hijacked in order to demonise Israel,” Steinberg said.
“It’s another attempt to recreate it … and their goal is still the elimination of Israel, because if you single out Israel, and you use this kind of language – the word apartheid more than 400 times – then that is your goal.”
Noting that Amnesty’s last AGM report showed that its annual income was £334 million last financial year, he added, “but who provides that money, and decides where it is directed – it’s all very mysterious, and it’s in an industry which has no oversight.”
He believes the level of “obsession with Israel” is a sign of desperation by Amnesty, and that they are “vulnerable”.
“So I’d encourage people in Australia to take a close look at their structure there … and then say to them, there are many other opportunities to promote human rights, and this [report] is not one of them, and these are the reasons why. I think that would have an effect, because it’s important to continue to put the onus on them.”
Herzberg said Amnesty “refuses to say who wrote their report, so nobody has any idea”.
But what she finds “particularly troubling” is that it “is going to be used to harm Jews in the Diaspora, increasing harassment to Jewish students on college campuses, and kind of [encourage] boycotting, or deplatforming, campaigns”.
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