Funny story: Mike Buchanan of the Justice for Men and Boys party — you remember, the tiny British partylet that managed to win literally 0.0007% of the vote in the last UK elections — is trying to organize a men’s rights conference in London.
He recently approached Amnesty International to see if he could rent one of the rooms in their London headquarters for his little shindig. They said no, because AI is a feminist organization, and Buchanan’s little party has more or less declared war on feminism.
Paul Elam — America’s most embarrassing Men’s Rights Activist — apparently thinks that Amnesty’s “no” to Buchanan is a greater violation of human rights than police torture, political imprisonment, and all the other human rights abuses the organization has fought for decades to eliminate.
In a YouTube video, Elam — a transcontinental pal of Buchanan — has accused Amnesty International of a “pretty brazen display of bigotry.” declaring that the venerable human rights organization only cares about human rights “if you have a vagina and align yourself to the correct political ideology.”
The perpetually angry Elam informs us that
this is the moment in time when Amnesty International has gone on the record subscribing to the narrative that men are not human beings and therefore not recognized as having human rights issues.
He urges people not to support “a human rights advocacy group that fails to recognize the humanity of half the population.”
By that he means Amnesty International, not his own hateful gang.
AI’s alleged failure “to recognize the humanity of half the population” might come as something of a surprise to these guys:
VICTORY! #ReggieClemons conviction overturned & death sentence thrown out by #Missouri Supreme Court. #DeathPenalty pic.twitter.com/uodUmO7sJ0
— Amnesty International USA (@amnestyusa) November 24, 2015
THANK YOU to all who demanded justice & helped secure Filep Karma's long-overdue release! https://t.co/Mfled087Ia pic.twitter.com/F5YhUnMGMO
— Amnesty International USA (@amnestyusa) November 20, 2015
#AlbertWoodfox remains trapped in 40+ yrs of solitary confinement & a flawed legal process. https://t.co/KIDfgrA4yW pic.twitter.com/AsOulBLXs9
— Amnesty International USA (@amnestyusa) November 10, 2015
#Malaysia MUST drop absurd charges against cartoonist facing decades in jail for tweets https://t.co/sDRQe4J92S #W4R pic.twitter.com/5yfjrhsSGY
— Amnesty International USA (@amnestyusa) November 5, 2015
BREAKING: #ShakerAamer released from #Guantanamo after being held for over 13 years. https://t.co/i9SqKASw3y pic.twitter.com/80fLq63BzW
— Amnesty International USA (@amnestyusa) October 30, 2015
Journalism is NOT a crime. #Myanmar must release 5 journalists jailed for doing their job. https://t.co/ESGS22P4jG pic.twitter.com/7um8rtThcl
— Amnesty International USA (@amnestyusa) October 29, 2015
And these are just a few of the thousands of men the organization has campaigned for over the course of many decades of dedicated and diligent work. Amnesty International literally saves men’s lives.
The group also campaigns on behalf of 13-year-old girls forced to marry 70-year-old men, rape survivors forced to marry their rapists, and women sexually tortured by police officers. Because AI recognizes that, you know, women have human rights too.
Amnesty International stands up for oppressed people, regardless of gender, often at great risk.
Mike Buchanan, by contrast, used his platform as a political candidate in the last elections to inform potential voters that marriage is “slavery for men,” that feminists are “hatchet-faced miserable women” and that men groping women’s bottoms without their permission is no big deal, if you think about it. His stance on these and other crucial men’s human rights issues won him 153 votes. Not 153,000. 153.
As for Elam’s A Voice for Men gang, well, aside from calling women “bitches” and worse, slandering people on Twitter, and running a website that loses traffic and influence by the day, AVFM’s only real-world accomplishment in the last year or so has been holding a small retreat for its male “actvists” in which said activists got drunk and made a video in which they made assorted crude sexual remarks about several feminist writers.
Elam was apparently so proud of his drunken performance in this video that he posted it online. And here it is, because I never get tired of reposting this wondrous thing.
That’s the weirdest bit of “human rights activism” I’ve ever seen.
Paul Elam, Amnesty International has been working tirelessly on behalf of humanity for 55 years.
You’ve been running your hate group for men for a few years now and lining your pockets with the money that miserable guys send you.
I don’t think the world will be impressed with your argument.
But by all means, keep spewing the hatred.
Bonne chance!
We should be so lucky.
But Dave, none of those men are white, so they’re technically women. Obviously.
O/T but in Newz of Other Jerks:
http://enews.earthlink.net/article/top?guid=20151205/2e1aa8c5-07d3-4a2d-a6b5-d0448e99e1e7
“Liberty President Calls for an Armed Christian Campus”
Definitely following in the footsteps of Christ.
Definitely in this world but not of it.
Of course they don’t care. They just want feminists to do it. Otherwise, we don’t care about men, and that’s just evil.
Then they actively engage in homophobia and think gay men are somehow not men either, because eeew, who wants to fuck a dude?! Or, even worse, let a dude fuck you?! No REAL MAYUN would ever have a PENIS inserted inside him! That’s emasculating!
But they sure as fuck perpetuate it by insisting that men be REAL MEN by being violent, unable to control themselves sexually, and just straight up animals.
Why actually do anything when you can just silence your opponents by inciting your hate mobs?
PI
Not only most of them are white straight cis middle class abled men and boys who are afraid of losing their power but some (women and minorities) have joined in on the scams as well to get easy money and are scared as well to lose their power so they silence others as much as possible.
Whohoo! Navigating the site on my phone doesn’t make my phone give up on every link! Yes!
Also, every time I think AVFM’s hit rock bottom, they find a way to keep digging. I’d be impressed, but I’m really not…
Falwell has started carrying a .25 in his hip pocket? Hope he sits down someday and shoots himself in the assets.
Elam has the look of a man who’s spent his entire life marinating in his own hatred and bile to the point of critical mass. With luck, the detonation will be inward and not, as I fear, outward onto innocents.
The hairs on my neck stand up whenever I look at him, because he’s broadcasting “stay the fuck AWAY from this person” at megawatt levels. Gah.
At least this photo of Elam is a change from his avatar, the one that’s a photo of him glaring at us over his bifocals.
I always want to punch that avatar.
No, I am not the teenager who took your car without your permission, got drunk, and wrecked the car. Again.
So you can just stop looking at me that way.
Yeah, funny, they were behind me with advice, signs, educational material, and publicity when I organized a rally for Saudi prisoner Raif Badawi, a man, in front of the Saudi consulate in Los Angeles last June.
Of course that doesn’t count. Not only is Raif not white, I’m a woman. And a feminist. I could never have done such a thing. It’s unpossible.
Worse even than that even, Raif’s actual wife, also a feminist woman, has been campaigning tirelessly for his release from the beginning. HIS WIFE.
Of course I’m sure she just wants him back so she can spermjack him while he pays to keep her in bon bons and scented candles.
Fruitloopsie — true to form, you raise good points!
Amnesty told Mike Buchan to get lost? They really do piss off all the right people, don’t they? I think I need to get around to setting up a direct debit to give them money.
I have been an activist member of AI for more than twenty years. Ironically, far from failing to protect the rights of men and boys, for many years Amnesty did just about only that. Human rights abuses used against women in particular (eg rape in war, forced sterilizations/abortions) did not fall neatly into the way that AI was set up in terms of mandate (eg targeting governments and not armed opposition groups, focusing on individuals such as Prisoners of Conscience etc). It is only in the last 10-15 years, with changes in the scope of its work, that women’s human rights were campaigned for- while the older areas of focus have continued on, as can be seen in David’s post. In fact just yesterday I sent cards of support to some of those pictured… It is Write for Rights season, and you can write too. Here is some info on 12 (of which 7 are men as it happens).
Don’t you get it? It’s HuMAN Rights, not HuWOMAN Rights!
OT, and sorry if this has already been addressed and I missed it, but are the sidebar links coming back? In particular, I always liked how there were survivor resource links for men.
(It also occurred to me that maybe they *are* on the site, and my blockers are interfering, but I have WHTM whitelisted, so I would hope that isn’t the case.)
Does anyone else suspect that Mike Buchanan asked AI for a room because he knew they would say no? I suspect this was a cheap way to feed the hate machine and drum up some publicity.
Also, are all the men who work for AI otherkin?
Does AVFM have any links like that? I never been there for obvious reasons.
Amnesty has gotten more and more explicitly feminist over the years. At one point, for intance, AI was officially had no position on abortion (though that was likely to get donations from Catholics and members of moderate non-fundamentalist Protestant churches). They eventually switched to a full defense of abortion and reproductive rights.
I think AI tends to be fairly consistent about protecting different groups of people, recognizing that human rights can be violated by people and groups other than the government, etc.
@Fabe
Nope. Nothing like that, other than Paulie’s money making scam “An Ear For Men”.
Mels, yeah, the blogroll is coming back, and so are the other links, though I haven’t decided where to put them.
@dhag85
wow,he can’t even manage to do that much to actually help men? let me guess that only out side links that are there are to other mra hate sites right?
@Fabe
Barely even that! Most of the links are to other AVFM related things, like their own books and side projects. There’s a short blog roll at the bottom of the page linking to other woman hating blogs. No actual resources.
lol so a web site thats suppose to be for man hating femnazis has more resources for helping men then actual sites that say they are for helping men. That’s irony right?
@Fabe
I just think it’s baffling that Paulie can’t be bothered to at least pretend as if he’s interested in actual men’s issues.