The Moral Disgrace of Amnesty International

by Rabbi Yair Hoffman

Last night, Amnesty International’s finally released its report on the vile acts of pure unmitigated evil that was Hamas’ actions on October 7th.  It was supposed to document one of the most horrific terrorist attacks in modern history—a massacre of civilians in their homes, at a music festival, in their kibbutzim. Instead, the organization used this occasion to prosecute its case against the victims’ own country. This choice represents a profound moral disgrace.

Blaming the Murdered Before Naming Their Killers

Before Amnesty International speaks a single word about the men, women, children, and elderly who were slaughtered on October 7, it pivots immediately to accusations against Israel. Occupation. Apartheid. Genocide. These charges appear in the Executive Summary before any description of the horrors that Hamas and Palestinian armed groups inflicted that morning.

Stop and consider what this means. Amnesty produced a report about a massacre of Israeli civilians. The bodies were still being identified. Families were still searching for loved ones taken hostage. And Amnesty’s instinct—its very first instinct—was to blame Israel.

And the Jewish media points to the report as, finally, finally, Amnesty International has printed the truth!  It is a false characterization.  

Imagine a report on a school shooting that opened by detailing the failures of the victims’ parents. Imagine a document about a terrorist attack on, say, a mosque that began by cataloging the target community’s alleged sins. The obscenity would be obvious. Yet when the victims are Israeli, Amnesty sees nothing wrong with framing their murder as context for a broader indictment of their country.

This is simply the weaponization of a massacre to advance a political agenda that Amnesty had already embraced long before October 7th.

The Message Behind the Framing

The structure of the Executive Summary communicates to the reader that the victims were not simply innocent people murdered in their homes but somehow participants in a larger crime for which their deaths provide a gruesome form of accounting.

This framing does not appear by accident. Amnesty’s editors chose to place Israel’s alleged offenses at the very front of a document about an attack on Israelis. They made this choice knowing that the Executive Summary is the only part most readers will ever see. The decision was deliberate, and its effect is to contextualize mass murder in a way that softens its edges and spreads its blame.

The prophet Isaiah warned of precisely this corruption of moral reasoning: “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter” (Isaiah 5:20). Amnesty has done exactly this—transformed an act of pure evil into something requiring “context,” something that cannot

This report was nominally dedicated to documenting what Hamas did on October 7th. This executive summary serves no analytical purpose within the report’s stated scope. It contributes nothing to the understanding of events that morning. It exists solely to ensure that readers cannot contemplate the massacre of Israelis without simultaneously contemplating Israeli guilt.

This is moral extortion disguised as human rights reporting. Amnesty is telling its readers that they may not grieve the victims of October 7, that they may not express horror at what was done to them, without also accepting Amnesty’s predetermined verdict on Israel. Every Israeli burned alive in a shelter must be contextualized as an equal tit for tat. Every child taken hostage must be offset by Amnesty’s accusations of apartheid. The ledger must always be kept in equilibrium.

The insertion of “genocide” language reveals what Amnesty truly intended with this report. It was never meant as an honest accounting of October 7th. It was designed as another front in Amnesty’s campaign to delegitimize Israel. The massacre provided an occasion, and Amnesty exploited it.

The Book of Mishlei speaks directly to this perversion: “He who justifies the wicked and he who condemns the righteous—both are an abomination to the L-rd” (Mishlei 17:15). By rushing to contextualize the attackers while condemning the society of those they attacked, Amnesty has committed precisely this abomination. It has placed its thumb on the scales of justice and called the result righteousness.

Dishonoring the Dead

There is something particularly grotesque about using a document meant to chronicle atrocities as a platform for attacking the society that suffered them. The victims of October 7 were not symbols. They were people with names and families and futures that were stolen from them in acts of deliberate cruelty.  And even in the hospital later on, it was revealed last night that a medical staff member at Shifa Hospital had injected an air bubble into the vein of Noa Marciano a kidnapped victim.  Noa was a former JEP camper at Camp Nageela in Fallsburg, New York.  How utterly pure evil.

Nor was she the only one. Shani Louk was a young woman attending a music festival. Vivian Silver was a peace activist who had spent years driving Gazans to Israeli hospitals for medical treatment. The Bibas family included two small children, redheaded boys whose faces became known around the world. These people did not embody Israeli policy. They were not the occupation, not the blockade, not whatever political grievance Amnesty wished to ventilate. They were human beings, and they were murdered.

To use the occasion of documenting their deaths as an opportunity to prosecute Israel is to dishonor them. It is to say that their suffering matters less than the political points to be scored from it. It is to treat their bodies as raw material for an argument rather than as evidence of an atrocity that deserves to be named without equivocation.

Amnesty could have written a report that simply told the truth about what happened on October 7th. It could have documented the horrors without qualification, without “context” designed to distribute blame, without rhetorical maneuvers meant to implicate the victims’ own country. That it chose otherwise tells us everything we need to know about what Amnesty International has become.

The Corruption of Human Rights

For decades, Amnesty International presented itself as a supposed guardian of universal human rights—an organization that stood with victims regardless of their nationality, their religion, or the political inconvenience of their suffering. The October 7th report demolishes that pretense.

What the Executive Summary reveals is an organization that has lost the capacity to see Jews and Israeli victims as fully human. When Jews or Israelis are murdered, Amnesty’s reflex is not compassion but accusation. Its instinct is not to document suffering but to explain it away, to contextualize it into insignificance, to ensure that no reader can feel the weight of what happened without also feeling the weight of Amnesty’s grievances against the Jewish state.

This is political advocacy wearing the mask of humanitarianism. Amnesty has transformed itself from a witness into a prosecutor, and the accused is always the same: Israel, regardless of who holds the knife.

 The tragedy is that the organization has revealed itself incapable of responding to Jewish suffering with the same moral clarity it brings to the suffering of others. October 7 was a test, and Amnesty failed it utterly.

When Hamas militants went door to door murdering families, Amnesty reached for its file on Israeli offenses. When the bodies were still being counted, Amnesty was constructing the narrative that would ensure Israel shared the blame.

Isaiah’s lament echoes across the millennia to describe what Amnesty has become: “Justice is turned back, and righteousness stands far away; for truth has stumbled in the public squares, and uprightness cannot enter” (Isaiah 59:14). An institution that was built to uphold justice has instead driven it away. A body that claimed to speak truth has caused truth itself to stumble.

Yes, when terrorists burned people alive in their safe rooms, Amnesty saw an opportunity to remind the world of its genocide accusations.

An organization worthy of its stated mission would have produced a report that honored the victims by telling their story without political embroidery. It would have recognized that some atrocities are so terrible that they must be allowed to stand on their own, uncomfortably, without the false comfort of distributed responsibility. It would have understood that blaming the victims’ country in the same breath as documenting their deaths is not balance but obscenity.

 In doing so, Amnesty International demonstrated that its commitment to human rights extends only so far as the border of Israel, where it stops, turns around, and begins issuing accusations. The victims of October 7 deserved better. The cause of human rights deserved better. And the world deserved an Amnesty International that had not yet abandoned its soul.

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