Why Our Institutions are Falling for the Omnicause

A deep dive into what has happened at Amnesty International

Growing up, there were certain institutions that seemed to be on the side of good. Institutions that could be trusted. One was the UN. Another was the BBC. A third was Amnesty International.

Jews have a kind of superpower created by necessity: we are more aware of the way the winds are changing. As a community, we have to be on our guard. Over the years, we have seen some of our most trusted institutions being hollowed out by dangerous ideologies. They are becoming dangerous to us, dangerous to the world.

Often these ideologies converge into what is known as the omnicause: a group of seemingly contradictory ideas – trans rights/ extremist Islam/ pro Palestine/ environment obsessive/ anti West – that have staged a kind of predatory takeover.

Many Jews have long noted Amnesty International’s Israel obsession – just a few days ago it demanded that the proscription of violent group Palestine Action should be lifted - but in recent weeks the way the organisation has changed attracted wider opprobrium.

This happened when the UK branch put out a report calling all sorts of feminist organisations – including a rape centre for women funded by JK Rowling – parts of an ‘anti-rights ecosystem’. Rowling has offered to fund legal action against the charity from those named in the report.

Below is an extended version of a feature I wrote for The Telegraph, which helps explain the change in Amnesty and other organisations.

Photo by Nikolas Gannon on Unsplash

As the granddaughter of Amnesty co-founder and International Chairman Sean MacBride, the human rights charity is in Iseult White’s blood. The pre-Christmas period at home was always spent writing to various prisoners of conscience around the world, and supporters of Amnesty’s work were always in and out of her grandparents’ house.

An Irish Republican, MacBride had spent time in prison, as had his firebrand mother, Maud Gonne, who had set up the Women’s Prisoner Defence League. This is a very personal story.

So when, in 2020, Iseult saw that Amnesty Ireland had signed a letter from the Transgender Network Ireland calling on the media and politicians to ‘no longer provide legitimate representation’ for those they believed held ‘bigoted beliefs’, she saw red.

‘The whole letter was batsh*t crazy and I couldn’t believe that Amnesty had signed,’ said Iseult, a psychotherapist. ‘And then I saw the CEO of Amnesty on Twitter claiming it was only British feminists who had any sort of issue around self-ID.’

This was mid-way through what had become known as the gender wars, with feminists and gay men coming out against the idea that anyone who identifies as the other sex should immediately be accepted as what they claim to be.

‘It seemed to me that this was authoritarian behaviour,’ adds Iseult. ‘I was shocked. I felt hurt. So I put myself out there, I wrote a letter saying that by signing such a document, Amnesty was seeking to deny legitimate representation to people of conscience. It became a huge thing.’ Indeed, it did.

Iseult, who describes herself as same sex attracted, soon discovered what happens if you speak out against the trans lobby and their organisational backers such as Amnesty. She got death threats and was warned by her bosses to stay off social media. It became such a storm that she felt she had to take some time off work.

But at the same time, she started to look at Amnesty with clearer eyes and some of the projects they were involved in – from working with pimps to legalise prostitution to cosying up to Islamists - shocked her, all the more because their reputation relies on the good work done by her grandfather and others.

‘Amnesty dines out on its reputation. Newspapers parrot their findings. People assume what they say is correct. I did. It was only through this experience that my understanding of the world was totally changed. Watching the relationship between governments and NGOs [Non-Governmental Organisations] like Amnesty and Stonewall, and how they have worked to silence ordinary people from speaking up about things that impacted them: I didn’t realise this could happen. The idea that people could be silenced and muzzled and in fear of their livelihoods and that Amnesty was making this possible was profoundly shocking.’

It takes a brave person to fight against that. Iseult was one of the earlier ones. But this month, the UK branch of Amnesty International finally went a step too far by crossing groups that are already battle-hardened and primed and ready to fight, and which have the backing of one of Britain’s richest women, author JK Rowling.

In a report called A Growing Threat: The Anti-Rights Movement in the UK, written by Chiara Capraro, the Gender Justice Programme Director at Amnesty International UK, it warned that an ‘anti-rights ecosystem’ was threatening ‘the safety of women and LGBT+ people in the UK’. It identified 117 of these dangerous organisations which ranged from British feminist and lesbian and gay organisations to the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales, to American Christian groups.

Perhaps most shockingly – and certainly most stupidly – it listed Beira’s Place among these ‘extremist’ organisations. This is an Edinburgh charity funded by Harry Potter writer Rowling for female rape survivors after the Scottish government funded rape crisis network refused to keep these spaces single sex.

The report may have quickly disappeared – with an Amnesty spokesperson saying it was undergoing an ‘internal review’ – but Rowling has offered to underwrite the costs of any feminist or LGB group named which wants to sue the charity.

Meanwhile, comedy legend John Cleese, who helped organise and perform fundraisers for the charity in the 1970s, wrote on X: ‘I was once a major fund-raiser for Amnesty. But in those days, it was about preventing torture. Not about sexual identity. I disown them.’

How did Amnesty end up this way? And what does its fall tell us about the extremist wokeism that has enveloped so many organisations in the NGO sector, which share its omnicause obsessions of being pro trans, pro prostitution, pro Islamism and anti Israel?

The organisation was founded by British Jewish-born Catholic convert Peter Benenson, a barrister, after he read about two Portuguese students imprisoned for toasting to freedom under the far-right Salazar regime. He issued a newspaper ‘Appeal for Amnesty 1961’ to draw attention to people imprisoned for their beliefs, opinions and religion. He called them ‘prisoners of conscience’.

Working with fellow lawyer, MacBride, and Quaker activist Eric Baker, who had founded the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, he set up Amnesty International, which drew attention to peaceful prisoners of conscience, partly by getting the public to join in with huge letter-writing campaigns to show that the wider world was watching out for them. In 1977 Amnesty International won the Nobel Peace Prize.

For some, the first sign of rot came in 2010 when Amnesty collaborated with Islamist organisation CAGE to campaign against Guantanamo Bay detentions and torture. Gita Saghal, the head of Amnesty’s gender unit, was suspended after an internal email she had written berating the organisation for working with a former Guantanamo Bay detainee, who she labelled ‘Britain’s most famous supporter of the Taliban’, was leaked.

She later described an ‘atmosphere of terror’ and ‘deep misogyny’ at the organisation where, she said, staff were cowed into accepting the prevailing line.

In 2015, there was more anger from feminists as Amnesty put out a report as part of a push to get countries to decriminalise the sex trade. One key group quoted in the report was the Global Network of Sex Work Projects (NSWP), even though its vice president, Alejandra Gil, had been jailed for 15 years for sex trafficking.

Things were becoming increasingly fraught within the organisation. As support dwindled, the stress ramped up and there were more and more redundancies. In 2018, after the suicide of two staff members, the independent KonTerra Report into Amnesty staff well-being found a ‘toxic’ working culture at the organisation, including widespread bullying, public humiliation, sexism, racism and abuse of power by management.

A controversial 2022 report into Ukraine after the Russian invasion – which accused the country of illegally endangering civilians by placing armed forces in civilian areas - only made things worse and the organisation was forced into a rare apology.

So it was perhaps a good time to become laser-focused on the evil of Israel.

Founder Berenson was a Zionist and Amnesty’s Israel office is one of its oldest international outposts. Molly Maleker was a veteran human rights and anti-occupation activist who had frequently demonstrated against her own government when she joined the organisation in 2015, eventually becoming the CEO of Amnesty International, Israel.

She remembers how soon after she started, Amnesty changed its policy of allowing countries to do reports on their own regions. ‘They said they wanted to safeguard their staff and keep neutrality but we and other sections would joke that it was part of the London headquarters making sure they were in control. It was part of their colonial legacy,’ she says.

There was a lot of internal discussion about how to not only stop donors from leaving but also attract new ones. ‘I clearly recall that sections in Western Europe and the USA saying we were losing ground and membership because we were behind others in progressive circles who were criticising Israel.

‘Until then, Amnesty had held to its core values of judging things on international and humanitarian laws but slowly I saw how the line was being blurred as the work became more politicised and standards went down.

‘The organisation became more and more led by political ideologies such as theories around colonialism and seeing everything through the lens of the victim vs the oppressor. Younger people were joining from universities who were imbued with these political theories in which Israel is only ever viewed as an oppressor.’

In 2022, Amnesty decided to redefine the word apartheid so that it could apply it to Israel alongside Human Rights Watch – the two echoing each other’s narratives. The Israel branch, which included several Israeli Arabs, was not happy as the report said the entirety of Israel was an apartheid state.

‘Even if you agree the occupied territories are using a form of apartheid, none of us would accept that it is the same in the state of Israel,’ says Molly. ‘And we tried to argue that in making these two territories one land, they were actually joining hands with the most right-wing Israeli politicians who want to annex that land.’

But it was hard for their complaints to be heard: ‘Asking questions is very, very dangerous. These are people who are very committed and it surprises them if someone would dare to question them.’

And what happens when the perceived oppressor becomes the victim, as they did on October 7?

Molly recalls how the exchange of emails was going on as she hid in bomb shelters not knowing how bad the war was going to get. ‘One of the things I remember from that horrible night was communicating with London as they considered how to phrase their condemnation. They could never just say, ‘this is wrong’. Not even for one minute.’

Instead, the Amnesty message, even on October 7 2023, was titled ‘Civilians on both sides paying the price of unprecedented escalation in hostilities between Israel and Gaza as death toll mounts,’ and blamed Israel’s behaviour for the cause of the attack.

Less than 20 days later, Amnesty was officially calling for a ceasefire. ‘In the lead to their statement up there had been these urgent emails, especially from the Europeans and Americans, pushing for a ceasefire. But Amnesty had never done this before. This was not part of their mandate.’

While Molly’s department pushed hard for Amnesty to at least speak up about the hostages, the head office refused.

Instead, Molly started seeing internal discussion about ‘the genocide report’: the conclusion had been determined before the investigation. The report came out in December 2024, a few weeks later, once again in tandem, HRW came out with a report with the same conclusion.

‘Just as with the apartheid report, we pushed back and said this is a cherry-picking strategy. You have built a narrative and are finding facts to fill in,’ says Molly. The day the report came out, Molly’s office put out a statement denouncing it.

A few weeks later, while at a conference, Molly’s phone blew up with messages: Amnesty had announced it was suspending the Israel office for being ‘anti-Palestinian ’.

It is unlikely that the office will be reopened in this era.

For Molly, it is personal upset, but she sees this as a problem which is much bigger than one office.

‘As a long-time activist, it was very sad for me personally to be a witness to this tragic collapse of the norms and values that Amnesty should be holding, the leadership it should be taking. Because we do all need human rights protection but we can no longer trust those like Amnesty who should be safeguarding them.’

The Israel hysteria, the trans obsession - together known as the omnicause - have shown up something rotten in our human rights organisations.

Danielle Haas, a former senior editor at Human Rights Watch, has set up an organisation called EiGHT for disillusioned human rights workers which recently put out a report about antisemitism within NGOs. She says it is time that they are properly investigated.

‘This sector has immense unchecked power,’ she says. ‘They influence how our children are educated, how the court system works, and how our policymakers think. Not examining them more closely is one of the greatest oversights of our time.

‘We tend to trust these immense institutions that claim moral authority. There is a declining trust in in other sorts of institutions, in government, in business, and yet there is a prevailing sort of trust in NGOs. We want to believe they are good actors, but sadly we have failed to see them realistically. We have forgotten that these organisations are an industry.

‘They are not moral simply because their missions are moral. Industries are influenced by all sorts of factors: ideological, financial, operational, and we need to have better oversight and regulation over those.

‘This is not an attack on human rights organisations but to defend them. These organisations are uniquely susceptible to corruption because they are unregulated and ideological. Activists have simply been able to climb in through the back door of these organisations and take them over from within, and we are living out the consequences today.’

· An Amnesty spokesman wrote in response to my queries outlined here: “We regret that this briefing was uploaded to our website without going through the established internal review processes that are in place to ensure consistency, accuracy and alignment with Amnesty International UK’s positions. Its use of language does not reflect the position of Amnesty International UK which is why it was promptly removed. We remain committed to defending human rights, including both the rights of women and the rights of trans people. Human rights protections are strongest when they apply equally to everyone, and no community should be singled out for unfair treatment or denied their dignity and rights.”