[Opinion] Just Like Its Namesake, Amnesty's CSI: Gaza is About Psuedo-Forensics

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Amnesty International’s political campaign against Israel has a new dimension: pseudo-forensics. Amnesty officials were recently in Israel to market the Gaza Platform, an “online tool” launched earlier this month that purports to “map Israeli attacks in Gaza” during the 2014 Gaza conflict.

Amnesty is marketing its project with a promotional video titled “CSI: Gaza.” The video intersperses highly emotive images of dead children with shots of staffers purporting to be remotely “investigating” the Gaza “crime scene”.

..the Gaza Platform provides no real evidence. The Platform relies solely on publications by Al Mezan and Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR), without independent verification and even when the accounts are wholly contradictory.

A further distortion in Amnesty’s Gaza Platform is that conclusions are solely based on the effects of particular strikes. Essential information – location of enemy forces and military targets, nature of combat, and intelligence available to commanders at the time of the fighting – is not incorporated into the analysis.

Without these details, the Platform’s “data” are fatally flawed.

… the erasure of context, such as the more than 4,000 rocket attacks on Israeli civilians, make this “tool” nothing more than propaganda.

We can only hope that the intended audiences – diplomats, government officials, journalists, prosecutors and judges, and the general public – see through Amnesty’s facade.