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Amnesty Internation Inc.
Amnesty International made its name working for “prisoners of conscience,” defined as “people imprisoned solely because of their political or religious beliefs, gender, or their racial or ethnic origin, who have neither used nor advocated violence.” Like most bureaucratic and public policy organizations they’ve suffered mission creep, and most recently have hired a full-time lobbyist whose job it is “to help moderates and progressive members” of Congress to “fight the crackdown on immigrants and racial profiling of Arab Americans.” [The first of the last two quotations is from the lobbyist, the second from the writer for the Washington Post. Hard to tell the difference, isn’t it?] Amnesty International claims nonpartisan concern with acute violations of human rights worldwide. It’s hard to view U.S. immigration policy as one of the world’s acute human human rights issues. AA retains the aura of virtue acquired from tortured prisoners of conscience. They’re leveraging off that aura
and using it for other purposes. The move would no doubt make a good topic for a B-school case study, but I wonder if any of them are worried about bad faith?
Comments
Mr. Kalb writes: “AA retains the aura of virtue acquired from tortured prisoners of conscience. They’re leveraging off that aura and using it for other purposes.” This is true of the open-borders lobby generally. Very often in immigration debates the person on the open-borders side will try to make it seem as though immigrants to the U.S. were all beleaguered refugees fleeing horrible persecution. Posted by: Lawrence Auster on March 7, 2003 1:44 PM |