I have decided to run for a seat on the Board of Amnesty International UK. But I need at least 10 paid-up members of Amnesty to support my nomination in order to get on the ballot. And I need those signatures by Thursday evening this week. If you are an Amnesty member, or you know one, I need you send me by post the following:

I nominate ERIC LEE of 4 Alexandra Park Road, London N10 2AA. as a candidate for a seat on the Board.

You must fill in the following fields:

Name of Proposer (your name)
Address of Proposer
Signature of Proposer
Date of Proposal

As it needs your original signature, please send it by post to my address (see above).

Thanks very much!

In recent weeks I've had the opportunity to listen to leaders of trade unions and the Jewish community in Britain discuss developments that concern them.

The first has been reaction to the decision taken by the Trades Union Congress (TUC) to call for a partial boycott of Israel and its more recent decision to praise the government's decision to label West Bank products. The second is the spectacular rise of the far-right British National Party (BNP).

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The possibility of using Twitter as a campaigning tool was recently tested by LabourStart.

We were inspired by the example of American Rights at Work (ARAW), a union-supported campaigning organisation, that has recently taken on the American Chamber of Commerce (the equivalent of the CBI here in Britain) using Twitter.

ARAW took advantage of a new web service called Act.ly (http://act.ly) that allows the instant creation of Twitter campaigns. (Their slogan is "Tweet change.") They succeeded very quickly in mounting one of the largest campaigns ever using the microblogging service, with over 1,200 messages sent.

We decided to try the same thing in support of our more traditional global web and email campaign in support of striking Canadian workers at Vale Inco, a mining giant.

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This article appears today on the Jewish Chronicle website and will appear in tomorrow's print edition. It is also being reprinted on the website of Pluto Press.

In recent months, Amnesty International in the UK has taken a sharp anti-Israel turn. This will be obvious to anyone who receives the organisation’s bi-monthly magazine, which now features articles bashing Israel in every single issue.

For example, last summer the magazine carried a long report on a visit by an Amnesty delegation to Israel and Palestine. It was an utterly one-sided account, reporting the suffering of Palestinians without even hinting at the possibility that Israelis too might be victims of the conflict.

Amnesty condemns the building of the separation barrier without mentioning why it exists or the lives it has saved. Its report focuses on petty matters like the cleanliness of toilets at Israeli checkpoints, without a mention of why those checkpoints are there (to counter terrorism).

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In late October, LabourStart conducted the first-ever global study of the use of Twitter by trade unionists.

Nearly 1,600 trade unionists participated, with the largest single group (360) coming from the U.K.

While all those responding were online (the survey was conducted through a website and publicized by email), less than a third used Twitter. Less than 10% of those surveyed said they frequently sent out "tweets" (short messages sent through Twitter).

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I just spotted this and cannot believe that journalists cannot write even a couple of paragraphs about Trotsky within making at least one error -- significant political errors -- in each sentence.

Here are two important ones:

"Trotsky was the founder of the Red Army, and along with Vladimir Lenin, one of the prime movers in the Bolshevik revolt that overthrew Tsar Nicholas II."

Wrong. Neither Trotsky nor Lenin was even in Russia when Tsar Nicholas II was overthrown. The Bolsheviks overthrew the Provisional Revolutionary Government, which at the time was headed by Kerensky.

"Today Leon Trotsky is almost forgotten, even though he was a real Russian Che Guevara -- a revolutionary who dreamed of global revolution," Alexander Smirnov, organiser of the exhibition at the Museum of Political History, told AFP.

Wrong. Che Guevara was a totalitarian Stalinist who would have been happy to plunge the world into nuclear war, had no problem with the persecution of dissidents (including homosexuals) and so on. His own party ruthlessly crushed Trotsky's own followers in Cuba. Trotsky is known today -- and respected -- precisely because he became an outspoken opponent of the totalitarian shift in Soviet Russia.

A generation ago, we had to contend with Stalinist media that lied about Trotsky. Today our enemy is ignorance.

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This article first appeared in Labour Research magazine.

In the course of the last decade, two colleagues of mine -- both senior trade unionists -- have suffered catastrophic losses of data. One lost his address book and calendar when his hand-held device died. The other lost all his handheld's calendar entries when he synced the device to his desktop PC, which had contracted a virus, thereby wiping out what was on the handheld.

There are two important lessons I draw from these experiences.

First of all, backups are essential -- but not in the way we used to do them.

And second, use of open source operating systems is no longer a luxury for the geeks.

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This article appears in the current issue of Labour Research.

To emphasize the importance of email, I used to tell unions that given the choice between a great website and a list of all members' email addresses, choose the latter. I still believe that email is the most powerful tool we have and now, thanks to a new service called Posterous, email lists can be the starting point of a multi-platform net-based campaign.

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Amnesty International in the UK is calling on people to write to the Foreign Minister urging Britain to support efforts to isolate and condemn Israel. They write:

The UN-mandated International Independent Fact Finding Mission, headed by Justice Richard Goldstone, has published its findings on the 22-day conflict in Gaza and southern Israel in December 2008-January 2009. The carefully argued report, which is consistent with the findings of Amnesty International, concludes that both the Israeli forces and Palestinian armed groups committed grave violations of international law including war crimes and, possibly, crimes against humanity.

The Amnesty website encourages us all to send messages calling "on the UK government to spare no efforts to ensure war criminals do not get away with murder". In an email to members, they express concern that the UK government may do no such thing.

But Amnesty's website allows people to individualise their messages -- to write their own thoughts, which they cheerfully pass on to the Foreign Minister. So I'd like to thank Amnesty for giving me a chance to write this instead of their text:

I am a member of Amnesty International but I do not agree with their call on the public to encouage Britain to support the Goldstone report.

Amnesty is wrong to call on us to ask you to help bash Israel -- clearly what is needed is a re-launch of the peace process, based on the Road Map, and not something that will only benefit Hamas.