NYT and Amnesty International Collude in Gender Propaganda Piece

In a brazen attempt to skew public opinion and exploit the fears of women, the New York Times recently ran an article on intimate partner violence. Cleverly titled “Sweden Boldly Exposes a Secret Side of Women's Lives,” the essay suggests patriarchal beatings have become as commonplace in Sweden as driving a Volvo station wagon.

Of course, research paints a completely different picture -- that women around the world are equally likely as men to engage in partner aggression [http://pubpages.unh.edu/~mas2/ID16.pdf], and that men represent 38% of all persons who suffer an injury as a result of the incident. [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=10989615&dopt=Abstract]

But that didn’t stop NYT reporter Lizette Alvarez from quoting Swedish politician Gudrun Schyman’s description of domestic abusers: “It’s every man and in every class of society.”

Forgive the comparison, but the insight of that remark rivals the paranoid rants of persons who used to claim, “Jewish bankers control the German economy” and “The Trilateral Commission is conspiring to take over the world.”

In order to understand how responsible journalism at the Times morphed into this egregious example of gender-bashing, we need to go back to 2001.

That’s the year Irene Khan took over at the helm at Amnesty International. In addition to being a lawyer and former UN career bureaucrat, Ms. Khan is an ultra-feminist.

Four years later, Khan has now proven how easily a respected human rights organization can be turned into a breeding ground for the radical feminist cancer.

Pay a visit to the AI web page at www.amnesty.org, and you will learn about the “greatest human rights scandal of our times.” No, Amnesty is not referring to the forced displacement of hundreds of thousands of persons in the Darfur. And it’s not the trampling of civil liberties in Communist countries.

The greatest human rights scandal is -- get ready for this, “violence against women.”

That claim is sheer nonsense. The fact is, men are far more likely to be harmed by violence. The World Health Organization reports that twice as many men die from violence-related causes as women. [www5.who.int/violence_injury_prevention/main.cfm?p=0000000592]

Part of Amnesty’s fem-socialist strategy is to promote women’s activism at the local level. And that includes advocacy research. Which brings us to Ms. Alvarez’ recent contribution to impartial and balanced journalism.

The centerpiece of the NYT article is a “stinging Amnesty International report” on domestic violence that “set off a national reckoning” in Sweden. But it turns out the article, filled with suggestive innuendo and alarmist claims, has more holes than a hooker’s fishnet stockings.

The article claims that the number of police reports for assaults on women increased by 40% in the 1990s. But police files are a notoriously unreliable source of information about partner assault because of the problem of under-reporting – especially by male victims.

A bigger hole is that Alvarez never gets around to telling us the actual name of this report. After extensive searching, it turns out the document is not even posted on Amnesty International’s website. The paper, “Men’s Violence Against Women in Intimate Relationships,” can be found only on the website of Amnesty’s affiliate in Sweden. [www2.amnesty.se/svaw.nsf/mvaw/$File/mvaw.pdf]

Strange that a New York Times reporter would write a column about a ground-breaking report, but never reveal its title or tell us where to find it. It’s almost as if Alvarez didn’t want us to read it.

Maybe that’s because a perusal of the document reveals it is larded with neo-Marxist slogans about the “gender power structure” of society.

Or perhaps because the report never defines the word “violence,” a word that is subject to the broadest of interpretations in the hands of feminist advocacy researchers. Indeed, we don’t learn until page 25 that their all-inclusive concept of “violence” includes men’s “controlling behavior” -- whatever that means.

Based on that hyper-inflated notion of violence, the AI account notes that in 85% of incidents the woman didn’t even bother to file a police report. Why? Because in most cases, the event was “too insignificant” to the woman who had been “abused.”

But the truth finally slips out on page 33. That’s where we learn that at the Swedish Federation for Gay and Lesbian Rights, half of the hotline calls concern violence in intimate relationships.

Lesbians being beaten up by their partners, their lavender lady-friends? You mean to say, women are also capable of instigating domestic violence?

All the News That’s Fit to Distort -- get it now at the New York Times.

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