Remember this? From five years ago? Gita Sahgal told the Sunday Times about her disagreement with Amnesty International over their support for CAGE? And they fired her as a result?
A SENIOR official at Amnesty International has accused the charity of putting the human rights of Al-Qaeda terror suspects above those of their victims.
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 Taliban”. 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.
The rest is pay-walled, but you get the idea.
Maajid Nawaz wrote a pointed little Facebook post linking to that article yesterday:
I take this moment to salute human rights campaigner Gita Sahgal. Five years ago to the month she was sacked by Amnesty International for exposing their links to Islamist group CAGE (Jihadi John’s friends) in The Sunday Times to Richard Kerbaj http://t.co/kUtp4CktnA
Will you apologise Amnesty? Sincerely, your former Prisoner of Conscience.
Seriously. They should have listened to Gita instead of firing her. Islamists are not allies of human rights organizations. Islamists have human rights, and AI gets to campaign to protect those human rights, but that’s not the same thing as being allies.
Amnesty UK have been on Twitter saying they only had CAGE as a joint signatory to 9 letters. The latest one was on the UK government’s complicity in torture. Given that CAGE themselves have been “complicit” in torture via their support of Jihadi John, that is sheer chutzpah. I wonder if they will come out with a press release tomorrow.
One of Gita’s points was that oppression doesn’t just come from governments. Amnesty were totally blind. They would never have partnered with a Fascist group whose members were incarcerated without due process.
CAGE is financed by the Rowntree Trust, a Quaker organisation.
http://hurryupharry.org/2015/02/28/the-joseph-rowntree-charitable-trusts-statement-on-cage/
Until, and I don’t see this happening, we view the problem of those people who are simply(an overused term)uncivilized and that their uncivilized state is bolstered by their religion, people will treat the issue as a matter of sensitivity to religious preference rather than to merely(an underused term in this situation)a matter of lowbrow, effectively one dimensional brains that can only be stopped by killing them. These brains(people) need to be killed the way rabid animals need to be killed because they pose a threat and can not be negotiated with. There is no need to talk or address or consider. These are people who are effectively so dangerous that they have removed from discourse any possibility of rational or for that matter, irrational address to solve the problem. I do think there are those who have a stake in the continued existence of these killers and folks that all they are, killers, and those who simply(there’s that word again,) don’t care because the folks being killed or oppressed aren’t anyone (with the power to do anything about it) they care about and being uncivilized is a sliding scale sort of thing. The religion is only relevant in the way that fur, scales, footprints, skat and other identifying elements let us know who and where the predators are. Any other discussion means only naivete, foolishness or intentional obstruction and in each of those will only mean more deaths which will mean in the first and second conditions, perplexity, in the third, satisfaction.
zubanel #2:
Which people, exactly, are you dooming with this monstrous judgement? How do you propose to objectively distinguish those you characterise as “lowbrow, effectively one dimensional brains” such that your judgement can be enforced against them?
What I see in your words is a desire to treat a group of humans as monsters, and thereby ignore even the possibility of treating them as human.
There are hundreds of thousands of people who once held abhorrent religious beliefs and today have been convinced otherwise. Your hateful speech not only lacks all compassion or hope for change; it is also flatly false on the facts.
Please remove yourself from the ranks of reasonable people, until you too have shed your horrible views.
Then you’ve missed the point. I’m saying quite the opposite. I’m saying disregard the religious element as essential and focus on murderers. There is no need to invoke “monster” for these people because they are all too human. They are simply, incurably, one-dimensionally uncivilized. There are obviously plenty of civilized people who hold religious beliefs. Clearly I’m not talking about them. That does not render the religious proclamations of murderers useless in ferretting them out. Obviously that will not be the only useful tool or those who are not murderers will be caught in the net. I don’t personally care what someone believes however abhorrent to me as long as it doesn’t get expressed in the oppression or death of another. My point is, that it is not the religion that is to blame. It is the undeveloped, uncivilized mind that is the problem. But when the shooting begins, talk should be over.
zubanel, #4:
So, we focus on those who have already killed? We are to direct our attention away from the ideas that strongly compel them to premeditated murder of strangers?
That doesn’t do it for me. I want to detect potential murderers before they do murder, and obligate them to not murder.
For that, we need to focus on the ideas which compel some people to murder — and that inevitably requires that we spend a lot of attention on combating Islam, which is a set of ideas that explicitly and actively compels people to do murder.
Again, I can only point out to you that there are many people – the person named in this piece being a prime example – who were devoted to religious ideas compelling premeditated murder of strangers, and yet they were cured and civilised to the point of not holding those ideas any more.
To write off such people as “simply, incurably, one-dimensionally uncivilized” and to advocate killing them, is to kill people like Maajid Nawaz before they have a chance to change.
That would be an unacceptable loss. Killing is only going to lead to more motivation for killing. Whereas counter-jihadi propaganda from organisations like Quilliam – which can only exist because we don’t apply your hopeless ideas – will prevent killing. I know which I would prefer.
Your idea is imploding in on itself. It isn’t the religious ideas that are making them kill. if that were the case, no one who held those religious views would or could be capable of not killing. The religion is just the expression, or the excuse that folks predisposed to the unmediated and unexamined emotions, whose theory of mind goes no further than a world view that doesn’t comport with theirs is a threat. This is a basic human condition that, under civilized conditions, a child, who starts off that way, grows out of it.
You want to stop people from killing before they do? I’m for that. Good luck. all I’m saying is that that will not be effectively accomplished by addressing their religious beliefs.
in the mean time, there are enough people doing actual killing to warrant the lion’s share of attention before we worry altogether about keeping folks from starting killing. If we don’t, there won’t be anyone left to start killing. then they’ll kill each other. Oh wait. They’re already doing that.
Still if it ever comes up that you’re faced with a gun, and I hope it never does, if you want to strike up a conversation about religion, go ahead.
I’m not sure who it is you think I’m writing off. The only folks I have an issue with are the ones who are killing or damaging people without cause. Why you have a problem with that I don’t know but that’s your thing.