Bouncing off my own post yesterday, Alex proposes the Amnesty rule:
I don’t think I’ve ever seen this happen when B actually had a point – time after bleeding time, it followed this exact course. I therefore intended to declare this as a law, like Godwin’s Law. The Amnesty rule – anyone who asks “why doesn’t Amnesty speak out on X?” is lying.
This goes for Human Rights Watch as well. Though I couldn’t find it yesterday, I’m sure I’ve done posts before either here or at Prog Gold on this subject, showing some rightwinger bozo that no, AI doesn’t just criticise the US or Israel and yes, has actually spent more time campaigning on some cause or other he pulled out of his ass and never wrote about before or since…
It’s worse when this sort of thing comes from alleged lefties, masking as honest critics of Amnesty or whatever other human rights organisation which dared to criticise one of their hobby horses, when whatever miniscule amount of dirt that can be brought up is blown up out of all proportions but what AI actually does is completely ignored. Rightwing critics are bad enough, but relatively honest in their hatred of AI; the motivations of their supposedly leftwing “critics” is much more petty. Flying Rodent put it best, back when the whole sorry Gita Sahgal mess first came to light:
This excerpt represents the clearest statement of what I believe has motivated this whole sorry affair – a small group of like-minded journalists and bloggers determined to crush Amnesty, in the insane belief that a spontaneous uprising of somebody else will magic a deus ex machina human rights organisation into existence… that will say nasty things about Noam Chomsky.