Amnesty International this week issued its 2001 state-of-the-world report. After a year that saw the slaughter of thousands of innocents in the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and escalation of the Palestinian Arab terrorism campaign against Israel, the human rights group has released a report that spends an incomprehensible amount of time hyperventilating over the fact that America still has a death penalty, however sparsely used, and that Western nations have taken steps to make it easier to arrest and hold potential terrorists.

Readers know they are in for a bumpy ride starting with the introduction. “[Amnesty International] called on governments to bring to justice those responsible for the 11 September attacks and to ensure that they were tried in accordance with international human rights standards and were not at risk of being sentenced to death,” the report proudly recounts. Things get worse. This is how Amnesty sees the Allied campaign in Afghanistan: “On 7 October the USA…began a sustained bombing campaign in Afghanistan…By the end of the year, an as yet unknown number of Afghan civilians had been killed or injured or had their homes or property destroyed.” No word on how the remaining Afghans are enjoying free speech and the absence of soccer-stadium executions. The report also claims, “The 11 September attacks were followed by intense backlash against Muslims and people of Middle Eastern descent in the USA.” In fact, while there were isolated excesses, the American people, from President Bush on down, showed themselves to be remarkably tolerant.

The discussion of Israel and the Palestinian Arab controlled territories in the report is predictably one-sided. Much time is spent describing Israeli offensives, taking special care to recount that the Israel Defense Force used “mortars, grenade launchers and artillery shells.” The report also gives vivid if slanted accounts of innocent Palestinians killed accidentally by the IDF. At the same time, there is a dearth of technical detail as to how Palestinian terrorists carried out the mass murder of innocent Israeli civilians at pizza parlors and discos. Curfews apparently rate more ink from Amnesty than a campaign of terror.

We’re familiar with the argument made by the human rights groups that criticizing America gives them more credibility with foreign governments. And there are no doubt countries, like Iran and China, where Amnesty and the other human rights groups do good work. But there’s a certain point at which the human rights reporting becomes so detached from reality that it starts to undermine its own credibility.