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And if human rights has become a growth industry, Amnesty International, the 1977 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, is unquestionably the market leader. The 28-year-old London- based organization, which monitors human rights abuses and offers a fragile shield to prisoners of cons- cience, is undoubtedly per- forming a necessary task in a hard, brutish world. For some, Amnesty is the only hope. At its headquarters in London, Amnesty's files of letters bear testimony to the effectiveness of the organization's work — whether through publicizing a prisoner's plight in the media, appealing to offending governments or mobilizing its army of sup- porters around the world to write letters of support and solidarity. "When the first 200 letters came, the guards gave me back my clothes," wrote one former prisoner in the Dominican Republic. "Then the next 200 letters came and the prison director came to see me." Membership in Amnesty worldwide doubled from 250,000 in 1981 to 500,000 in 1986, and today it numbers some 700,000, organized in . -...mosisqpresepowarosientear., 3,985 groups (almost equal to the 4,640 political prisoners which Amnesty has "adopted"). The impact on the United States in particular, accor- ding to Amnesty officials, has been so impressive that the flood of new, young recruits posed a formidable organizational challenge. So what's the catch? How can one possibly fault an organization that is so ob- viously on the side of the angels? One catch, quite simply, is that all too often the focus of Amnesty's attention becomes hopelessly skewed. Liberal democracies, which allow a free, in- quisitive, critical press and permit relatively easy access to their societies, also pro- vide the softest targets for Amnesty — and a wealth of material to swell its reports. In the Middle East, Israel's highly publicized battle to contain rioting Palestinians has no doubt led to trangres- sions of Israel's high human rights standards. Nothing that Israel has done, however, could begin to match the atrocities com- mitted by its neighbors. In Iran, over 1,200 polit- ical prisoners were executed last year and torture was commonplace. In Iraq, the regime ordered ballistic mis- siles, tipped with chemical warheads, to be fired into villages inhabited by its own Kurdish minority. Some 5,000 men, women and children were killed on a single day and hundreds of thousands more fled into ex- ile. Yet, in Amnesty's latest annual report, Israel, Iran and Iraq are accorded equal space. Moreover, in the year under review, Amnesty in- vestigators visited Israel on no less than three occasions — more than any other Mid- dle East country — while they made not even one visit to Iran or Iraq. Sensitive, perhaps, to this inherent inequity, the organization implicitly ac- knowledged the imbalance by hedging its report with a carefully worded disclaimer: "Amnesty International stresses that the length of a country's entry in its report depends on the information available and does not pro- vide any basis for comparing the extent and depth of the organization's concern in that country..." While Amnesty's reports, particularly its sections. on Israel, receive wide media attention, there is not a sin- gle reported case of this small-print being noted by editors, for many of whom Israel is the flavor of the month. There is yet another, more insidious, catch to those Amnesty reports: "Amnesty represents a pro-Arab view," says Juliet Keen, a long- time Amnesty member in Britain who has vigorously criticized Amnesty's one- sided approach to the Middle East. "But that's not sur- prising because the view in Britain is generally pro- Arab." Jane Moonman, head of the British Israel Public Af- fairs Committee (BIPAC) is more specific. She believes that Amnesty's bias, while unintentional, is cemented into the very fabric of the organization. Amnesty International, she points out, was founded 'lett