• Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
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      20 hours ago

      You don’t have to trust me, you can check the sources I linked, which includes the UN report itself. The overwhelming majority of “independent agencies” talking about genocide in Xinjiang are glorified western think-tanks, linking back in some way to Adrian Zenz. Amnesty in particular was incredibly useful for the George W. Bush when they were one of the biggest reporters on the Nayirah Testemony and released a report about Iraqi soldiers taking babies out of incubators. This is one of the most well-known atrocity propaganda incidents in history, and was crucial for gathering consent to kill 1 million Iraqis:

      In January 1992, it was revealed that Nayirah had never been a nurse and that she was the daughter of Saud Nasser Al-Saud Al-Sabah, the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States at the time the testimony was made. She and her father were members of the House of Sabah, the ruling family of Kuwait. Furthermore, it was revealed that her testimony was organized as part of a wider public relations campaign conducted by the Kuwaiti government-in-exile’s Citizens for a Free Kuwait, which sought to encourage American military involvement against Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait through coordination with the American public relations firm Hill & Knowlton. In the aftermath of the Gulf War, the Nayirah testimony came to be regarded as a classic example of modern atrocity propaganda.[1][2]

      Nayirah’s story was initially corroborated by Amnesty International, which published a report about the supposed killings[3] and testimony from Kuwaiti evacuees. Following the liberation of Kuwait, international media crews were given access to the country. A report by ABC News found that “patients, including premature babies, did die, when many of Kuwait’s nurses and doctors … fled” but Iraqi troops “almost certainly had not stolen hospital incubators and left hundreds of Kuwaiti babies to die.”[4] Later, Amnesty International USA reacted by issuing a correction, with executive director John Healey subsequently accusing the George H. W. Bush administration of “opportunistic manipulation of the international human rights movement.”[5]

      Amnesty International is no stranger for taking flimsy evidence to support imperialist narratives.