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Amnesty Lied About Israeli ‘Genocide’ — the Media Gladly Joined In

Copies of Amnesty International’s report named “Israel’s Apartheid Against Palestinians: Cruel System of Domination and Crime Against Humanity” are seen at a press conference at the St George Hotel, in East Jerusalem, February 1, 2022. REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun

Amnesty International’s latest significant report, “‘You Feel Like You Are Subhuman’: Israel’s Genocide Against Palestinians in Gaza,” is in keeping with the organization’s long history of hostility towards Israel — and accuses the Jewish State of genocide in Gaza.

According to Amnesty, its report:

documents Israel’s actions during its offensive on the occupied Gaza Strip from 7 October 2023. It examines the killing of civilians, damage to and destruction of civilian infrastructure, forcible displacement, the obstruction or denial of life-saving goods and humanitarian aid, and the restriction of power supplies. It analyses Israel’s intent through this pattern of conduct and statements by Israeli decision-makers. It concludes that Israel has committed genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.

Amnesty’s conclusion, however, is categorically wrong.

Amnesty Redefines Genocide

Having already resorted, in 2022, to formulating a totally new definition of what it calls “the crime of apartheid,” Amnesty has changed the definition of genocide to suit its predetermined conclusions.

Despite this, the coverage of Amnesty’s genocide report demonstrates how too many journalists are not prepared to exercise their own critical thinking.

The media commonly suffer from the “Halo Effect,” whereby journalists cite non-governmental and so-called human rights organizations like Amnesty, treating them as beyond reproach and assuming their information is authoritative.

This effect is exacerbated by the need for the media to get the story out quickly. It’s unlikely that a journalist would spend their time properly reviewing the substantial 296-page Amnesty report. So, Amnesty’s talking points in its six-page press release summary or statements at a press conference will be what appears in the media.

And the news cycle moves quickly. By the time those who wish to respond to the report in-depth will have finished reading it and issuing a response, the Amnesty story will be over. The impact of the report, however, and the genocide charge, will last much longer, becoming part of the media narrative, as Israel comes under sustained assault from multiple sources seeking to delegitimize its right to self-defense and even its right to exist.

NGO Monitor did manage to obtain the Amnesty press release in advance, noting in its preliminary analysis that the six-page, 2,500-word embargoed summary “highlights the absence of substance and the dominance of slogans and myths. Following previous practice, the press release declares Israel to be guilty of genocide, regardless of the reality in Gaza. This basic paradigm is evidenced by Amnesty’s highly selective use of ‘evidence,’ including fundamental omission of facts that do not support its political line, and the blatantly manipulative discussion of civilian casualties.”

This discussion of civilian casualties is taken up by Salo Aizenberg, who notes Amnesty’s avoidance of addressing the combatants killed figure and the resulting civilian/combatant ratio would have shown evidence of the IDF’s precision targeting, thus eviscerating Amnesty’s report.

NGO Monitor also noted that Amnesty had “made an embargoed text of the report and a lengthy press release available to select journalists in an attempt to ensure favorable media coverage. Although under no obligation to adhere to Amnesty’s embargo, journalists who cover Amnesty’s report should avoid this manipulation and incorporate detailed critical analysis.”

It appears that ship has already sailed as media outlets, including Associated PressCNNReutersAFPBBCThe GuardianWashington Post, and Sky News, jump on the story.

Amnesty Israel Rejects the Report

So, it’s unlikely that any international press will do the extra legwork to question Amnesty’s malleable definition of genocide. It’s also unlikely that any will sit up and take notice of the press release (Hebrew) issued by Amnesty’s Israel branch.

While still highly critical of Israel’s actions in Gaza, Amnesty Israel states it “does not accept the claim that genocide has been proven to be taking place in the Gaza Strip and does not accept the operative findings of the report.”

Haaretz, meanwhile, which is followed religiously by foreign media, reports on a joint statement from several members of Amnesty Israel and Jewish members of Amnesty International who:

argue that report’s “artificial analysis” — especially with regard to the widespread destruction in Gaza, which allegedly indicates a genocidal intent — suggests that the authors “reached a predetermined conclusion — and did not draw a conclusion based on an objective review of the facts and the law.”

“From the outset, the report was referred to in internal correspondence as the ‘genocide report,’ even when research was still in its initial stages,” the Jewish employees reveal.

“This is a strong indication of bias and also a factor that can cause additional bias: imagine how difficult it is for a researcher to work for months on a report titled ‘genocide report’ and then to have to conclude that it is ‘only’ about crimes against humanity. Predetermined conclusions of this kind are not typical of other Amnesty International investigations.”

The joint statement further stated that the report “is motivated by a desire to support a popular narrative among Amnesty International’s target audience,” and that it stems “unfortunately, from an atmosphere within Amnesty International of minimizing the seriousness of the October 7 massacre.

“It is a failure — and sometimes even a refusal — to address the Israeli victims in a personal and humane manner.” According to the Jewish staff, the international organization also “ignored efforts to raise these concerns.”

But will Western and foreign journalists take any notice?

Holocaust Appropriation

It says much about a journalist’s mindset when the Holocaust is appropriated to subconsciously associate Israel’s actions in Gaza, which Amnesty is claiming to be genocide, with the very real Nazi genocide against the Jewish people.

Sadly, both the Associated Press and The Guardian went down that road in their stories on the Amnesty report.

The Guardian even went as far as to preempt Israeli reaction to the Amnesty report, claiming it would “generate accusations of antisemitism,” effectively accusing Israelis and Jews of weaponizing antisemitism in bad faith.

AFP didn’t even bother to include any Israeli reaction to the report beyond the boilerplate line: “Israel has repeatedly and forcefully denied allegations of genocide, accusing Hamas of using civilians as human shields.”

The Washington Post quotes Paul O’Brien, executive director of Amnesty International USA who says: “What the law requires is that we prove that there is sufficient evidence that there is [genocidal] intent, amongst all the other complex intents that are going to exist in warfare.”

And this is the crux: The death toll and destruction in Gaza can be explained as an inevitable and tragic outcome of a war where Hamas have done everything possible to put Gaza’s civilian population in harm’s way. And Israel has taken every precaution to avoid civilian casualties, while still allowing humanitarian aid to cross into Gaza.

The inevitable result of Amnesty’s approach is to turn every war into a genocide, thereby stripping the word of its true meaning.

Israel’s actions are not those of a state that shows intent to commit a genocide, and to charge Israel with such a crime shows just how divorced from reality Amnesty International and its cheerleaders are.

Sadly, the international media have given an unquestioning platform for this libel.

The author is the Managing Editor of HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.

The post Amnesty Lied About Israeli ‘Genocide’ — the Media Gladly Joined In first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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‘The Jewish Spirit’: Holocaust Survivors, Freed Israeli Hostages Gather at Auschwitz for ‘March of the Living’

Holocaust survivors, relatives of Israeli hostages, and survivors of Hamas captivity marched together at Auschwitz for the annual March of the Living on April 24, 2025. Photo: Chen Schimmel

Oswiecim, Poland — Holocaust survivors, relatives of Israeli hostages, and survivors of Hamas captivity marched together at Auschwitz, the infamous former Nazi concentration camp in Poland, for the first time on Thursday, joining Israeli President Isaac Herzog in the annual March of the Living.

The march from Auschwitz I to Auschwitz II-Birkenau — the Nazis’ largest death camp where 1 million Jews were murdered during World War II — took place on Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day and included 80 Holocaust survivors, many of whom were also death march survivors, to mark 80 years since the liberation of the camps. 

March of the Living president Phyllis Greenberg Heideman addressed the survivors, who were seated next to the gate bearing the notorious inscription, “Work sets you free.”

“It’s a strange thing to say, but we welcome you to Auschwitz,” she said. “You are the true heroes. We will treasure your legacy forever.”

Almog Meir Jan and his mother Orit. Almog was rescued by the IDF on June 5 during the Arnon Mission. Photo: Chen Schimmel

Standing outside the crematoria and gas chambers at Auschwitz I, recently released hostage Eli Sharabi said, “The Holocaust was unlike anything else — we will never forget and never forgive.”

“But our presence here is the triumph of the Jewish spirit. The Jewish people sanctify life, not death. I endured horrors in enemy captivity, but I chose life. That gives me hope to get up each morning and begin rebuilding,” he added. 

Sharabi, whose wife and daughters were murdered during Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, was released in February after nearly 500 days in captivity. His emaciated appearance as he was paraded through Gaza on his release led to comparisons with concentration camp survivors. 

Pro-Israel influencer Shiraz Shukran broke down after seeing Sharabi. The two embraced for several minutes. “Seeing him in real life, in this place, just made it all suddenly seem very close. This is no longer something that happened 80 years ago; it’s continuing until this day,” Shukran told The Algemeiner.

Pro-Israel influencer Shiraz Shukran embracing former hostage Eli Sharabi. Photo: Debbie Weiss / The Algemeiner

In remarks to reporters prior to the march, Herzog called the return of the hostages a “universal human imperative.”

“With a broken heart, I remind us all that although after the Holocaust we vowed, ‘Never again,’ today, even as we stand here, the souls of dozens of Jews again ‘yearn within a cage,’ ‘thirsting for water and for freedom,’ as 59 of our brothers and sisters are held by terrorist murderers in Gaza, in a horrific crime against humanity,” Herzog said, referring to the hostages kidnapped during Hamas’s Oct. 7 invasion who remain in captivity.

His Polish counterpart, President Andrzej Duda, said the march was “a dramatic call of ‘never again.’ No more hatred, no more discrimination, no more antisemitism.”

He called for “all wars in the Middle East to end,” and for a two-state solution, which he said was the “most rational solution [to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict] that gives hope for achieving stable and lasting peace.”

The two leaders signed the visitors’ book and laid a wreath at Auschwitz’s Black Wall, where the Nazis executed prisoners.

At the march’s opening ceremony, the head of the Republican Jewish Coalition, Matt Brooks, lit one of six candles — representing the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis — and addressed rising antisemitism in the world.  

“Jews all over the world fear walking streets with a kippah and it’s unacceptable. College students are being attacked verbally and physically,” he told The Algemeiner. 

He praised US President Donald Trump for “combating this scourge.”

“There’s a new sheriff in town. It’s my hope the rest of the world can look to him to see how to support and defend the Jewish community against these vile attacks,” he said.

Matt Brooks, chief executive officer of the Republican Jewish Coalition, with Malcolm Hoenlein, vice chairman emeritus of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. Photo: Debbie Weiss / The Algemeiner

In Block 5, where thousands of victims’ eyeglasses are displayed behind glass, Laly Dery told a delegation of Israeli teenagers from the national civil service about her son, Sgt. First Class (res.) Saadia, who fell in battle in Gaza in June.  

“Just like my son, who served the country with every fiber of his being, you have earned the enormous privilege of serving the state of Israel,” Dery said. 

Derai’s words resonated with Sara Bisan, the only member of the national service delegation not wearing an Israeli flag. Instead, Bisan wore the distinctive multi-colored flag of the Druze community to which she belongs.

“I feel her pain, and it hurts,” Bisan said, reflecting on the death of her own friend from the northern Druze village of Kfar Yarka, who was also killed in Gaza.  

“But our people, the Druze and the Jews, share a lot, including a love of Israel. I also feel that serving the state of Israel is a privilege,” she added.

Sara Bisan. Photo: Debbie Weiss / The Algemeiner

Twelve thousand participants marched the 1.7 miles from Auschwitz to Birkenau for the main ceremony, which was cut short this year due to heavy rain.

As thunder echoed overhead, released hostage Agam Berger played the theme from “Schindler’s List” on a 150-year-old violin rescued during the Holocaust. Daniel Weiss, a survivor from Kibbutz Be’eri whose father was murdered on Oct. 7 and whose mother was abducted and later killed in Gaza, performed a musical rendition of the psalm Shir Lamaalot alongside her.

The Lord will guard you from all evil; He will guard your soul,” Weiss sang, his voice quavering.

The post ‘The Jewish Spirit’: Holocaust Survivors, Freed Israeli Hostages Gather at Auschwitz for ‘March of the Living’ first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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French Far-Left Party Calls for Ban on Israeli Pop Star Eyal Golan’s Paris Concert

Eyal Golan. Photo: Screenshot

France’s leading far-left party has called for the cancellation of Israeli pop star Eyal Golan’s upcoming concert in Paris, describing him as “a true mouthpiece for supporters of genocide” in Gaza.

In a statement released on Wednesday, the La France Insoumise party (LFI — “France Unbowed”), led by leftist Jean-Luc Mélenchon, urged the National Assembly — the lower house of the French Parliament — to ban Golan’s upcoming concert, claiming that he “should not come to sing the praises of genocide in Paris.”

“We call for a broad mobilization to prevent this event from taking place,” LFI lawmakers wrote in the statement, referring to Golan’s concert scheduled for May 20. “We ask the prefect to ban it immediately.”

“No one should come to Paris to sing hymns to the genocide of the Palestinian people,” the statement continued.

According to the party, the 54-year-old singer called for “the extermination of the Palestinian people” in a social media post the day after the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on October 7, 2023, in which he wrote, “Leave no soul alive.”

LFI also said that Golan “repeated the statement a week later, before receiving support from far-right minister Itamar Ben-Gvir,” who serves as Israel’s national security minister.

In their statement, LFI lawmakers claimed that Golan’s concert, expected to gather more than 4,500 people, “constitutes a real voice for genocide supporters.”

“France cannot tolerate such an unnecessary insult to the thousands of Gaza victims and their loved ones,” the statement read.

In response to these accusations, Liam Productions, the event organizer, denounced the push to cancel Golan’s concert as antisemitic and expressed their eagerness to meet the Jewish community in France, promising a “unifying and special evening.”

“On Holocaust Remembrance Day, as we remember the consequences of staying silent in the face of hate, far-left parties in France seek to boycott an Israeli artist simply because he is Israeli,” the statement read.

“This is not freedom of expression — it is antisemitism disguised as morality. The people of Israel will not be silent, will not apologize, and will not stop singing.”

Mélenchon and his party have a long history of pushing anti-Israel policies and, according to Jewish leaders, of making antisemitic comments — such as suggesting that Jews killed Jesus, echoing a false claim that was used to justify antisemitic violence and discrimination throughout the Middle Ages in Europe.

The French diplomat has been criticized by French Jews as a threat to their community, as well as to those who support Israel.

Mélenchon has previously described the French Jewish community as “an arrogant minority that lectures to the rest.” He has also urged the French government to recognize a “Palestinian state.”

In the wake of the Hamas onslaught on Israel, Mélenchon and his party issued a statement calling the attacks “an armed offensive by Palestinian forces” in response to the ongoing Israeli “occupation.”

Last year, Mélenchon openly expressed support for Hezbollah on social media, as the Iran-backed terrorist organization based in Lebanon continued to clash with Israel.

“Mass killing in Lebanon by Netanyahu’s invading army,” Melenchon wrote in a post on X, referring to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “The toll is getting worse by the hour. Full support for the national resistance of the Lebanese.”

France has experienced a disturbing surge in antisemitic incidents since the Oct. 7 atrocities, with 1,570 anti-Jewish hate crimes recorded last year.

The total number of antisemitic outrages last year was a slight dip from 2023’s record total of 1,676, but it marked a striking increase from the 436 antisemitic acts recorded in 2022, according to a report by the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France (CRIF) — the main representative body of French Jews.

“LFI has given antisemitism a political endorsement,” CRIF president Yonathan Arfi told the French publication Le Point last year. “We observe this toxic porosity between criticism of Israel and the ostracization of French Jews. The Palestinian cause becomes a license to hate.”

In late May and early June, antisemitic acts rose by more than 140 percent in France, far surpassing the weekly average of slightly more than 30 incidents.

The report also found that 65.2 percent of antisemitic acts last year targeted individuals, with more than 10 percent of these offenses involving physical violence.

The post French Far-Left Party Calls for Ban on Israeli Pop Star Eyal Golan’s Paris Concert first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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Trump Signs Seismic Executive Order on Foreign Funding in Higher Education

US Secretary of Education Linda McMahon shakes hands with Annette Albright next to US President Donald Trump during an event to sign executive orders in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, DC, US, April 23, 2025. Photo: Leah Millis via Reuters Connect.

US President Donald Trump has signed a seismic executive order to strengthen federal law which colleges and universities have long circumvented to avoid reporting donations they receive from illiberal foreign governments and individuals.

“Protecting American educational, cultural, and national security interests requires transparency regarding foreign funds flowing to American higher education and research institutions,” Trump said in the order, which was signed in the Oval Office in the presence of the Secretary of Education Linda McMahon on Wednesday. “It is the policy of my administration to end the secrecy surrounding foreign funds in American educational institutions, protect the marketplace of ideas from propaganda sponsored by foreign governments, and safeguard America’s students and research from foreign exploitation.”

The executive order noted that during Trump’s first term in office, the Education Department launched investigations of 19 higher education institutions suspected of concealing foreign donations and any undue influence the immense sums may have gained the country from which they originated — inquiries that led to the disclosure of $6.5 billion worth of unreported gifts. The Biden administration, he said, “undid” that work, “hindering public access to information on foreign gifts and contracts.”

The remainder of the order enumerates enforcement duties delegated to McMahon, which include reversing Biden-era policies which countenanced lax observance of the law — Section 117 of the Higher Education Act (HEA) of 1965 — updating the public on the department’s findings, and impounding federal funds appropriated to institutions that continue to shroud their foreign donations behind a veil of secrecy and corporate spin.

“Unfortunately, in the last four years, the Biden administration undermined the structures the president built to do this critical work, allowing nations like China and Qatar to funnel billions of dollars to US universities with little to no oversight,” McMahon said in a statement. “This financial infiltration enabled foreign governments to steal taxpayer-funded intellectual property and reshape how our elite campuses teach about Israel and the Middle East.”

Foreign money in higher education is an issue to which scholars and nonprofit groups have called attention for years, arguing that it is an instrument of hostile powers that aim to distort US foreign policy by exposing students to propaganda or other ideas which undermine faith in liberal values such as free markets, limited government, and freedom of the press. Some of it is used to rehabilitate the reputations of authoritarian governments, a tactic which, experts argue, effectively converts the openness of American society into a force of its own self-subversion.

For example, according to the 2017 National Association of Scholars (NAS) report “Outsourced to China: Confucius Institutes and Soft Power in American Higher Education,” the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) for years planted “Confucius Institutes” at universities across the US, teaching students that Taiwan is Chinese territory while censoring darker moments in the regime’s history, such as the Tiananmen Square massacre that killed thousands of Chinese citizens. The institutes, the report added, came with substantial financial benefits, such as extra funds for the University at Buffalo’s Asian studies department and “opera costumes and materials in the lobby of Binghamton University.”

At other times, the Confucius Institutes were allegedly used as bases from which to conduct espionage and theft of American research and intellectual property.

NAS president Peter Wood told The Algemeiner on Thursday that Trump’s executive order is the right move, but that higher education will “resist” complying with it.

“What is at stake here is not just compliance with a good accounting principle. What is really at stake is the contempt with which many college and university presidents regard America’s national interest,” Wood said. “Allowing our universities to become beholden to the Chinese Community Party endangers Americans. The National Association of Scholars has helped to track the theft of intellectual property, the duplicity of American researchers, and the diversion research programs all under the influence of Chinese funding. China is far from the only source of such subversive funding, but it is by far the largest source.”

He added, “President Trump’s forceful executive order will go a long way towards curing this problem. We can be under no illusion, however, that America’s colleges and universities will cheerfully comply. They have a long record of ignoring lawful requirements for such disclosure and they are now more eager than ever to demonstrate their defiance of America’s laws. In light of other executive orders against [diversity, equity, and inclusion] and other forms of academic malfeasance, dozens of prominent research universities are openly declaring that they intend to resist.”

NAS has recorded copious data on foreign funding of higher education, notably in the Foreign Donor Database it created in 2024 that led to the uncovering of vast sums the Qatari government had pumped into American universities — Cornell University received over $322 million, for example, from the Qatar National Research Fund between 2015 and 2018 — to promote pro-Hamas propaganda.

Alex Joffe, anthropologist and editor of BDS Monitor for Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (SPME), told The Algemeiner that Qatar has “given billions to universities, including to share their Middle East studies program which then in turn develop and disseminate K-12 curriculums which are dramatically anti-Israel, antisemitic, and pro-Islamist.”

The donation of billions of unreported dollars to US institutions of higher education is strongly correlated with an erosion of liberal democratic norms and increased antisemitism on college campuses, according to a 2023 report by the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP) titled, “The Corruption of the American Mind.”

From 2015-2020, the report noted, schools that accepted money from Middle Eastern donors had, on average, 300 percent more antisemitic incidents than schools that did not accept such donations. The largest donor it named is Qatar, which former US President Joe Biden described in 2022 as a “major non-NATO ally.” From 2014-2019, Qatar gave American universities a striking $2.7 billion in undocumented funds.

Additionally, students attending universities that received foreign funding witnessed antisemitism “significantly more often” than those attending schools that did not.

“A lack of transparency in funding reporting occurred in tandem with antidemocratic norms and antisemitism across American institutions of higher education,” the report said. “A massive influx of foreign, concealed donations to American institutions of higher learning, much of it from authoritarian regimes with notable support from Middle Eastern sources, reflects or supports heightened levels of intolerance towards Jews, open inquiry, and free expression.”

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.

The post Trump Signs Seismic Executive Order on Foreign Funding in Higher Education first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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