Aaronovitch Watch draws my attention to the latest Decent crusade against Amnesty International for having the audacity to actually, you know, work with an ex-Guantanamo Bay prisoner in getting this prison and torture site closed as well as persuading European countries to take in ex-prisoners. According to The Times AI is “damaged” by their partnership with Moazzam Begg, providing as evidence the innuendo and assertions of “A SENIOR official at Amnesty International”, one Gita Sahgal:
Gita Sahgal, head of the gender unit at Amnesty’s international secretariat, believes that collaborating with Moazzam Begg, a former British inmate at Guantanamo Bay, “fundamentally damages†the organisation’s reputation.
In an email sent to Amnesty’s top bosses, she suggests the charity has mistakenly allied itself with Begg and his “jihadi†group, Cageprisoners, out of fear of being branded racist and Islamophobic.
Sahgal describes Begg as “Britain’s most famous supporter of the Talibanâ€. He has championed the rights of jailed Al-Qaeda members and hate preachers, including Anwar al-Awlaki, the alleged spiritual mentor of the Christmas Day Detroit plane bomber.
It’s all the usual guilt by association and scary buzzword — Taliban, Al-Qaeda, jihadi, served up in that undercooled semi-objective writing style the Times is so good at; all done nicely and proper with both sides of the story presented, but you still know what to think just from the headline. That said, it’s still a lot more sane than Martin Bright’s rant about it, as noted on Aaronovitch Watch:
Bright’s prose is somewhat over-caffeinated: “… blowing the lid… rightly sick of the lazy alliance… blown the whistle [hmm, lots of ‘blowing’ going on here – Ed] … Begg is now an integral part … she has been deeply frustrated by the way the British liberal intelligentsia gives house-room to right-wing Islamists … Jamaat-i-Islami, the south Asian blood-brothers of the Muslim Brotherhood… It is Gita Sahgal who should be the darling of the human rights establishment, not Moazzam Begg.” What, I wonder, is giving “house-room”? Until today, when, according to Bright, Ms Sahgal was suspended she was a ‘senior official at Amnesty’ (Sunday Times). So which of them, if either, was a ‘darling’ of the “liberal intelligensia”?
All the usual stuff from those who want Amnesty International to be the cheerleader for US-led human rights imperialism, who want AI to denounce the enemy-du-jour and then shut up, who want AI to mention Iranian torture, not Israeli torture. It infuriates somebody like Martin “not too” Bright, that AI does not distinguish between torture done in the name of Allah or torture done in the name of anti-terrorism. With his Us vs Them mentality, his worldview of a civilised west in conflict with barbaric Islam he’s the spiritual descendant of the Cold Warriors who in the seventies and eighties accused AI of being communist dupes, as he now accuses them of being jihadist dupes. What has changes is the reification of human rights — back then Cold Warriors could still argue that the fight against communism justified the occasional human rights violation, even if they tried to bagatalise them, but today Bright and others like him have to pretend they are the real human rights defenders.
Accusations like these are nothing new therefore. hey tend to pop up whenever AI or HRW or any other human rights organisation focuses attention on the wrong sort of human rights violations, those perpetrated by the US or its allies (especially Israel). First these crimes are denied, then once that becomes impossible they’re minimalised, then AI is accused of paying undue attention to them and not enough to other crimes (usually said by people too stupid to even scan their website which always proves the opposite) and finally it is accused of being a (willing/unwilling) tool of the enemy. Lather, rinse, repeat; concern trolling on an international scale. It’s a transparent ploy that has never worked in the past, but as long as you sling enough shit something will stick in the end. And that’s the real crime, if fake scandals like this persuade people not to support AI anymore.