Amnesty mistakes

VCritiques of Amnesty International’s predictable report attempting to further delegitimise Israel as an apartheid state, both in your newspaper and elsewhere, would be more effective if they dealt with specifics, rather than generalities.

The best strategy to expose Amnesty’s true agenda is to turn the spotlight on the ongoing abuses and persecution by the Palestinian Authority itself, against its own people, about which Amnesty is tellingly silent.

Two Arab organisations have done just that in recent reports, which deserve to be widely disseminated internationally.

The Palestinian NGO ICSPR (International Commission to support Palestinian Rights) and ARIJ (Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism) in reports on Jan 29 2022 and December 14 2021 respectively, detail the arbitrary arrests, torture and even murder of activists, lawyers, journalists and others falling foul of what they describe as the dictatorship, in every sense, of the PA.

Further, they report that in every case these arrests are accompanied by a violation of procedures supposedly guaranteed by the Palestinian Basic Law, 2003. The admirable Jerusalem-based journalist Khaled Abu Toameh documents this to bring the situation to wider attention. He says that the Biden Administration does not seem to be concerned with human rights violations, and unless wrongdoing can be pinned on Israel, it could not care less.

He questions what else do Blinken and the rest of the international community need to hear before they stop trying to empower such abusive governance, and instead heed the voices of these Palestinians. What, indeed?

Danny Pine

London NW3

asked all 195 countries in the world to give up their national, religious and cultural identities, including crosses, crescents, stars etc, I suspect Israel would happily comply.

But which countries would agree to be first in the queue? Dr Merv Lebor

Leeds