It’s only a joke

I visited the home page of Amnesty International (AI) today. The featured topic was a vote entitled: “Who's got the worst human rights record?” The nominees are: Darth Vader, Hobgoblin (of Spiderman fame) and … Vice President Dick Cheney.

Covering themselves by claiming it's only a joke (21% of the respondents voted Cheney at the time of my visit) AI states:

All joking aside, the U.S. government, once perceived as a beacon of hope and justice, no longer leads the world on human rights.

The continuing allegations of U.S. torture, use of secret prisons, ghost detainees, and indefinite and unconstitutional detention at Guantanamo calls into question the U.S. commitment to fight torture and adhere to international law. The U.S. now lacks the credibility needed to improve human rights abroad.

By violating some international laws, the United States undermines all international law and promotes the idea to other countries that some laws are acceptable to ignore in the pursuit of "security."

While I was there, I did a site search using the word “Lebanon.” The result was 1,830 hits. The majority were archival entries castigating Israel for its “disproportionate” attacks on the terrorist group Hezballah during last summer’s war. I couldn’t find a single mention of the current Lebanese army attack on the Palestinian slum (oops, sorry, “refugee camp”) outside Tripoli. I guess attacks against Palestinian terrorists and their supporters are only “human rights abuses” when Israelis defend themselves.

The New York Sun reports that NGO Monitor has conducted a study of AI's findings over the past year.

Using a detailed and sophisticated qualitative model for comparing relative resources devoted to the different countries, this report clearly shows that in 2006, Amnesty singled out Israel for condemnation of human rights to a far greater extent than Iran, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Syria, Egypt, and other chronic abusers of human rights.

Think about that for a moment. The "goto" source for the MSM when "human rights abuses" are in play is AI. And AI thinks that a liberal democracy's "abuses" warrant significantly more coverage than a rogue's gallery of real ME abusers.

But not to worry. After all, their biased, sanctimonious, and hypocritical positions on the Middle East make AI the only joke worth laughing at.