Amnesty International calling Israel an ‘apartheid state’ is an unjust slur

While the rest of the world last week remembered the millions murdered in the Shoah on Holocaust Memorial Day, Amnesty International drew up a report based on a biased calumny – Israel is an apartheid state.

To those who support the Jewish people’s right to have their own free, sovereign, and democratic nation, such a charge is not only a deep insult to the Holocaust dead, survivors, and their descendants, but also a skewed misrepresentation.

Under Apartheid South Africa, the black majority did not have the right to vote. In Israel itself all citizens including its growing Arab population can vote, even for parties opposed to Zionism. Around the region are a host of Arab and Islamic states where hundreds of millions are denied such rights.

As for the Palestinian territories there are legitimate security reasons why Israel was forced to build a wall to protect its citizens from Islamist brainwashed suicide bombers blowing up pizza parlours and buses. Israel maintains a free press that is often ferociously (correctly) critical of successive governments’ behaviour towards the Palestinians.

On the coast, activists run an underground network smuggling young gay Palestinians into cities like Tel Aviv, where they can be free. Meanwhile Palestinian governments continue a policy of separate development from their closest neighbour. Take the Covid pandemic, when Israeli scientists were among the first to develop vaccines to fight the virus. These vaccines were offered free of charge to the Palestinian Authority which opted for a Russian variety instead.

And speaking of apartheid, anyone who has travelled in the Arab and Islamic world will note women are often second-class citizens. The maltreatment of religious minorities from the Gulf to Pakistan too could be described as a form of ethno-religious apartheid.

Amnesty is entitled to criticise individual policies of Israeli governments, but the slur of ‘apartheid’ is merely an enabler to those who want to destroy the Jewish state and its people.

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