Amnesty International - As useful, necessary and effective as the UN!

Amnesty has recently published their annual human rights report.

As might be expected from any self-respecting human rights organization, most of their time and attention is spent on countries where it is at all possible to publish such reports, gather support for their position and possibly even influence public opinion. Countries where public opinion matters.

The US, for example. Or Israel.

The US are the prime target. It must be so nice to know that the bad tidings you're bringing will be lapped up by your soulmates in the local media. It may even compensate for the knowledge that real, true monsters (who also get mentioned, albeit not nearly so extensively as the US) will never even bother to read what you so carefully put down in words. And no newspaper is going to care about what you wrote about systematic murder and starvation in China and North-Korea. There's no gain.

But in America, where people care about mistreatment of prisoners (and it does happen, and it is a problem that should be dealt with) there is a market for this product. It sells, and its spin-offs sell as well.

Amnesty gets to feel important again for a little while.

But wether they realize it or not, Amnesty is destroying the credibility it once had. By equating countries like the US and Israel to countries like China, Iran and North-Korea, it is losing all perspective, and sane people all over the free world take notice.
People living in the US cannot reconcile what they read in Amnesty's report with what they see and hear in their environment. And they'll take their experience over Amnesty's ravings any time. They will stop placing faith in whatever else Amnesty has to say.

By being unable or unwilling to differentiate between countries meaning well but making mistakes on the one hand and autocracies on the other, between misdeeds perpetrated by rogue individuals on the one hand and prescribed by government institutions on the other, Amnesty has made itself a predictable tool of the very regimes it claims to fight, and a hindrance to the countries that have the the will and the power to combat those regimes.

No one is arguing the US are above the law. No one is even arguing allowences should be made. What is wrong is always wrong.
But by comparing the US (and unfavourably too) to China, Amnesty is not helping the case and cause of victims of abuse, rape, torture and murder worldwide. It is detracting and distracting from it.