People Hated Liam Neeson’s Pro-Abortion Ad So Much Amnesty International Hid the Ratings

International   |   Steven Ertelt   |   Nov 27, 2015   |   11:02AM   |   Dublin, Ireland

Actor Liam Neeson, known for his roles in popular action flicks, recorded a new ad for Amnesty International in October which calls on Ireland to legalize abortion. The European nation is staunchly pro-life and prohibits killing babies in abortions in virtually every circumstance.

Amnesty International is helping lead a pro-abortion push to repeal the 8th Amendment in Ireland, which has provided legal protection for unborn babies for years. Amnesty International Ireland recruited Neeson, an Irish actor, to do a voice-over for its commercial, which appears below.

In the ad, Neeson essentially says laws protecting babies from abortions are antiquated and should be repealed because human rights for unborn children is apparently an outdated notion. Neeson doesn’t appear in the ad, but his unmistakable voice is clearly heard as the narrator of it.

Neeson says: “A ghost haunts Ireland. A cruel ghost of the last century… It blindly brings suffering, even death, to the women whose lives it touches. Feared by politicians, this is a ghost of paper and ink… A constitution written for a different time. It is the shadow of the country we’d left behind… Ireland doesn’t have to be chained to its past. It’s time to lay this ghost of rest.”

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But an Irish pro-life group says pro-lifers hated the Neeson ad so much that it flopped and Amnesty International was forced to hide the ratings on YouTube because four times as many viewers clicked to thumbs down the ad as to five it a thumbs up. As Life Institute tells LifeNews:

With more than 4 times as many people disliking the video than liking it, Amnesty have now hidden the public ratings on the campaigning message. For obvious reasons, Amnesty stopped allowing comments on the video – titled Chains – almost immediately after its launch. (see screen shot attached of the video on You Tube prior to the ratings being concealed).

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Niamh Uí Bhriain of the Life Institute said that the response to the video revealed that Amnesty’s “crude propaganda piece” was actively disliked because it was such an “obvious and overblown” attempt to misrepresent Ireland and the 8th Amendment.”

Amnesty must have thought they were onto a sure-fire winner, with Liam Neeson narrating the piece, and widespread coverage and support in the media. But they clearly misjudged the Irish public, who gave the video a massive thumbs down, with a whopping 825 dislikes to just 177 likes, despite Amnesty’s global membership and considerable investment in the campaign ” she said.

“That’s a massive thumbs down from the very demographic Amnesty claim to represent: younger, internet-savvy, human rights advocates who they obviously felt would love this celebrity-endorsed propaganda piece, and go on to share the heck out of it.

Instead the response to the video has revealed that Amnesty’s abortion push is actively disliked on a level has now become public knowledge,” she saidMs Uí Bhriain said the video was a “clumsy piece of pro-abortion propaganda”, and that “obviously inaccurate and overblown claims had clearly led to a massively negative public reaction”.

“The ridiculously creepy music, the camera panning the broken-down graveyard, the farcical script, the preposterous attempt to make modern Ireland seem like a living nightmare: a country in the grip of a Gothic horror as a ‘ghost’ brings suffering, even death, to women.  What complete rubbish. Everyone knows this is not true. The video didn’t resonate with people because they didn’t recognise Ireland in this over-blown distortion of the truth. It also smacked of crude propaganda – and of the kind of vicious stereotyping of Irish culture and values which many people find jarring and unacceptable,” she said.

“A new poll by Millward Brown for the Sunday Independent showed slippage in support for abortion and that less than a third of people supported abortion on demand,” she said. “Amnesty and other campaigners are clearly out of step with the public on how this complex issue should be debated,” she said.

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