A Left-Wing Wolf in Sheep's Clothing: NZZ Considers Amnesty Int'l
If you needed more evidence of the bad influence of radicalised BS coming out of academia, consider the 'human rights' NGO for a moment
While we’re on the topic of NGOs and their outsized, as well as malignant, influence, let’s talk about…Amnesty International.
Translation, emphases, and [snark] mine.
Nice-Looking Façade, Radical Left-Wing Core: Amnesty International Can No Longer be Taken Seriously
The human rights organisation portrays Germany as a racist state with brutal police officers. That is outrageously absurd [orig. hanebüchen].
By Marc Felix Serrao, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 29 April 2025 [source; archived]
Amnesty International: this is an organisation that you often encounter in the form of young people who approach you in the street and ask for financial support—for human rights, for minorities, and against state despotism. They almost always seem likeable and worthy of support. The impression is deceptive.
Amnesty International is an organisation that, behind its friendly and committed façade, is increasingly advocating radical positions of so-called post-colonialism [if you read German and have the time, go for this one—it’s a rather devastating review of Pankaj Mishra’s recent book about the Middle East—a deconstruction (pun intended) of how that author wishes to render Israelis into Nazi slaughterers]. Amnesty’s recently published annual report for the years 2024 and 2025 is a fine example of this. Specifically: the chapter on Germany. Or more precisely: its alleged development towards a xenophobic police state.
Bad State, Poor Asylum Seekers
‘Racist and anti-immigration rhetoric’ was omnipresent in Germany in 2024, it says, especially after the knife attacks in Mannheim and Solingen, which were ‘presumably’ carried out by perpetrators from Afghanistan and Syria, respectively. This rhetoric then also influenced German legislation. A security package from the outgoing coalition government had linked criminality with racist attributions. In addition, benefits for asylum seekers had been disproportionately reduced.
The passage in the text is exemplary. One excessive and sweeping claim follows the next. Sometimes the sources are missing, sometimes the organisation refers to unnamed ‘civil society’ actors [no need to do any of these in the parallel universe of what the powers-that-be wish you to believe].
If you look at the legislation from last autumn, there is no evidence of racism, to say nothing about an exaggerated [by what standards?] reduction in state benefits for asylum seekers, which are still generous by international standards. The coalition of SPD, Greens, and FDP, which was on the verge of collapse at the time, was only able to agree on a timid attempt to somehow control the continuing poverty migration into the country. In response to the erosion of public safety, the government came up with nothing better than a ‘knife ban’ on buses and trains and at public festivals [that was done in Vienna, too, and the effect is…expectably negligible].
While Amnesty International simply accuses the German public of ‘racist rhetoric’, the organisation ignores facts that could disrupt its narrative of the creepy majority society and the harassed ‘people seeking protection’. For example, the ‘alleged’ perpetrator of the Mannheim attack, Sulaiman A., has long since confessed to having injured several people with a knife in his hatred of ‘non-believers’, including a young police officer who was fatally wounded.
Blank Space: Hatred of Jews
The gaps and one-sidedness are particularly noticeable when it comes to the war in Gaza. Amnesty International has long accused Israel of committing ‘genocide’ against the Palestinians. The term appears dozens of times in the current annual report, almost always with reference to the Jewish state. The terrorist organisation Hamas gets off comparatively lightly. At the beginning there is talk of ‘terrible crimes’, but later in the text the massacres of families, the elderly and infants by the Islamist fanatics are merely ‘deadly attacks’.
Amnesty International also expresses its outrage at length about the alleged injustice done to ‘pro-Palestinian’ demonstrators in Germany—who, on closer inspection, were and are in very many cases simply hard-core anti-Semites. There is talk of ‘anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian’ sentiments on the part of German authorities without any evidence, of ‘excessive’ violence by police officers, of ‘disproportionate’ entry bans for participants in a ‘Palestine Congress’, which turned out to be an international meeting for Israel-haters [so much for freedom of speech, I might add].
Hatred of Jews, which is also rampant in Germany, from the problem neighbourhoods of major West German cities to the country’s universities [it’s an interview with two Jewish students, and the most absurd part of it is that there’s not a shred of countervailing voices left, it would seem], plays no role in Amnesty International’s report. The term ‘anti-Semitism’ appears once—in the form of a criticism of a definition of anti-Semitism that goes too far for the organisation.
Amnesty International, founded in London in 1961, once had a good reputation: as an organisation that stood up for the rights of all oppressed people. Presumably there are still employees and supporters today who have this noble task at heart and who do not understand it to mean a destructive ‘no borders’ policy or one-sided agitation against a small country surrounded by enemies of a minority that has been persecuted for thousands of years. But one can and should ask these people how they can reconcile their commitment to this organisation, which has been abandoned by all good spirits, with their conscience [couldn’t resist the value-judgement, eh?].
A repair would be desirable, but is unlikely. Once the evil spirit of post-colonialism has worked its way to the top of an organisation, the whole thing can hardly be saved.
Bottom Lines
This is what happens if society permits George Lukács’ theorem of reification—the creation of a new, if artificial, reality™ by invoking, mantra-like, its existence.
Needless to say, this is both absurd and agit-prop in its purest forms.
But taking this kind of BS seriously—which is what one must do, if only because legacy media is pretending (?) it is doing its jobs—comes with the real risk of falling into these kinds of rabbit holes.
More about the absurdity masquerading as GN/NGO funding and their role may be found here:
Still, having known tons of people (many in academia) who take NGOs such as AI seriously, as well as several who work at such places, I do wonder what kind of person one would have to be to work there.
My personal take is that GO/NGOs attract those people who, for reasons connected to virtue-signalling and indoctrination, don’t want to work for the gov’t. Needless to say, the GO/NGO aspect is the flip side of big gov’t, and the former can’t exist without the latter (although I think the latter can’t exist without outside pressure groups either).
In the end, believe in lies, commit atrocities. We’ve seen this pattern, like, forever, and our time is not different from the past.
Amnesty International is just another imperial tool, just like Jihadis. They perform their assigned duty. Germany is controlled by structures set up by the Empire, from media to deep state structures and everything in between. Empire has its own destructive logic, utterly alien to the rest of us. EU, Euro and the rest of European integrationist institutions were architected to serve Empire, not Europeans. This nature can be easily discerned by looking at the fruits of their labor. From wokism, zero carbon to replacement level immigration, needless wars, covid,…, these are all vectors in the war on all of us. Gifts of Empire. Imagine East India company still existing and being in charge of the West.
Post WWII Germany was supposed to be thoroughly de-industrialized. The only reason it wasn’t was the existence of the Soviet Union. Once the CCCP disappeared we’ve entered into a new era. Empire had no reason to be nice, to allow rising standards of living. "Good times” had to come to an end.
There is a lot that is wrong regarding Amnesty International, and many angles it can be attacked from. First it was all about prisoners of conscience and perhaps also political prisoners, then became generally more anti-torture, then it focused strongly on death penalty anywhere and anytime, and then it started being obsessed with stuff like “access to abortion”. However, this fanatical pro-Israel screed says much more about NZZ than about AI, I am afraid, especially at the current time. In the parallel universe of post-war German-speaking countries, a rare feat was achieved: everybody from “far left” to “far right” is “standing with Israel”. Even more fascinatingly, nobody is bothered with this uniformity of thought... but then again, maybe this comes naturally to the German psyche. I am reminded of a pretty good description of how this insane consensus was carefully imprinted into the said psyche in a newspaper I am normally not too impressed with:
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2025/jan/30/israel-and-the-delusions-of-germanys-memory-culture
»The flip side of west Germany’s accommodation of Nazis was what Améry called an “obtrusive philosemitism”. (...) But the philosemitism was also a strategic mode of self-regard. Writing from Jerusalem in April 1961, Hannah Arendt reported that the Germans present at the trial of Adolf Eichmann, were “displaying an unpleasant overeagerness and finding absolutely everything wonderful. Enough to make you throw up, if I may say so. One of them has already flung his arms around my neck and burst into tears.”
In his writing on the trial of Eichmann, the scholar Daniel Marwecki described how visions of Israel as a new embodiment of Jewish power also awakened dormant German fantasies. A report by the West German delegation to the Eichmann trial marvelled at “the novel and very advantageous type of the Israeli youth”, who are “of great height, often blond and blue-eyed, free and self-determined in their movements with well-defined faces” and exhibit “almost none of the features which one used to view as Jewish”. On 7 June 1967, after the six-day war, the newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung greeted Israel’s victory with an editorial titled “Der Blitzkrieg Israels”. This phrase, associated with the Nazi assault on Europe, was then emblazoned on the front pages of Die Zeit and Der Spiegel (which commented on German blood donations for Israel with “Aryan blood flowed for the Jews”). The newspaper Die Welt regretted German “infamies” about the Jewish people: the belief that they were “without national sentiment; never ready for battle, but always keen to profit from somebody else’s war effort”. The Jews were in fact a “small, brave, heroic, genius people”.
Axel Springer, whose eponymous company publishes Die Welt, and who was among the major postwar employers of superannuated Nazis, boasted after the six-day war that he had published Israeli newspapers in Germany for six days.«
Arendt’s “enough to make you throw up” is indeed a perfect description of the phenomenon.