Andy Worthington comes to the defence Moazzam Begg and Cageprisoners. Like all the “defences” of the CP/Amnesty nexus so far, it maintains a studious silence when asked to address Gita Sahgal’s fundamental issue:
“As a former Guantanamo detainee it was legitimate to hear his experiences, but as a supporter of the Taliban it was absolutely wrong to legitimise him as a partner.”
Nothing on there to addresses the material charges that Gita made of Amnesty but lots of diversionary smokescreen and yet another defense by fuzzy personal account. The transparently biased, anecdotal, “I know and work with Moazzam Begg and I think he is a really lovely bloke. Who’s Anwar al-Awlaki?” sort.
Worthington’s piece is an especially poor defence of Amnesty built around two weak talking points:
1) Any organisation is obliged to suspend any employee who criticises its core policies on the pages of the Sunday Times. And Amnesty is just another organisation.
2) The kind of people who are defending Sahgal are the usual assortment of right wing or “decent” left groups, blogs and journalists, whom he names individually, and finds issue with. For him, the defenders of Sahgal, such as Nick Cohen and Martin Bright are little more than “decents” and “Islamophobes”.
Firstly, Gita Sahgal might have been a senior employee of Amnesty but she went to the press because, after agonising over this for years, she wanted to publicise a fundamental flaw of an organisation that derives a lot of funding for its human rights programs from public largesse. So it’s not just any organisation. Secondly, if you want to talk internecine left-wing bollocks on the British landscape, one of the most depressing aspects of this story has been seeing members of the hard-left jump to Amnesty’s defence so that they can take on the appearance of being consistent champions of the human-rights of Muslims, when nothing could be further from the truth. You only have to read this disingenuous hard-left twaddle to see what I mean.
After a protracted exchange of comments in the discussion thread between him and myself, Worthington ends with:
I haven’t “chosen, like Amnesty to view women’s rights to be of a lower qualitative value than human rights of the tortured,”and I haven’t “wilfully chosen not to look into the view of Anwar al-Awlaki.” I’ve explained myself above, but the problem with this essentially adversarial type of argument is that you think you’re right, and attempt to justify your views, and I think I’m right, and attempt to justify mine. Who’s the arbiter? Well, your friends agree with you, and mine agree with me.
I didn’t realise this entire issue was all about getting validation from our individual peer groups but there you are. Damn inalienable universal human rights then. Andy Worthington: top bloke.
22 Comments
Had Gita Saghal gone directly to the media rather than try twice by internal means to get Amnesty to drop Begg as its prize show pig, Amnesty might have been within its rights to take action as her employer. But that was not the case. By sacking her for blowing the whistle, Amnesty is shows it has only concerns that its ability to raise money has been harmed just as HRW’s has been harmed by using bigots to produce evidence of wrong against a government that generally operates quite transparently.
It is very extreme political partisanship and that is all that counts for these muppets. Numerous defenders of Begg on the CIF blog on this subject went thus: Sahgal is wrong first of all for giving succour to the neocon-zionist cabal as exemplified by the Sunday Times. All muslims are victimised by said cabal, not least darling Begg. So Sahgal is wrong again. Begg not outright raving loon crying “Death to women’s rights!” and unconvicted, and thus noble defender of human rights. Evil neocons are smearing by association and we british lefty loons refuse to differentiate between lslamists and muslims ( they all look the the same to us anyway!).
It is an entrenched position. Newman of SU actually saying that faithheads cannot be judged by supremacist western, atheistic standards was revealing of the idiocy of ‘thought’ on the british left. Quoted some archbishop and all, didnt he?
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/weekend/2009/1121/1224259218727.html
Simplisticity is all these people can handle. Read the above article about someone else who falls for the malaysian bullshit about peace. He says of begg’s experience in Guantanamo :
“I could not have survived what they had to live through,” Halliday tells The Irish Times. “In the case of all the Guantanamo detainees, it was their faith which kept them going, when they had nothing else.”
Saying this with a straight face while being feted together with Galloway, Cynthis Mckinney and company in 5 star hotels in KL, with hundreds of similar prisoners incarcerated not two hours away in Kamunting. Precious or what? You dont want to know about the thousands of young men who have died in police custody the last few years, torture was the least of their problems.
Or this other muppet at the conference to criminalise war (but not jihad), member of Brussels Tribunal Dirk Adriaensens:
http://www.perdana.org.my/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=278:nst-dr-mahathir-lauded-for-peace-efforts&catid=57:plfinthenews&Itemid=151
It gives you some insight as to why the UN Human Rights commission is a joke and why HRW and AI are in danger of losing their moral authority.
The earwigca person – presumably female- was so angry about other women speaking up for Sahgal that she modified her profile on her bog to write this :
Very confused ideas on ‘liberation’ being such a strong supporter of Begg. Unesco has just released a report on how schools and educators are being targetted throughout the world, the particular focus being on disrupting girls’ education. The worst offenders : Afghanistan, Pakistan, Thailand
(south, muslim jihadis) and India (marxists). Good thing the poseurs are being separated from the real activist feminists. We have a proper fight on our hands.
http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=33729&Cr=UNESCO&Cr1=
Oh, btw, I think I am being censored at PP. I posted in response to ariff on the sahgal thread my post being no 31 at 3.55am and my post disappeared after half an hour.I reposted at the same at 5.32 am and got that post deleted as well. Now there’s only ariff’s reply, standing at post no #31. It could be a glitch. But for this to happen to me but not ariff is strange.
I am miffed as I broke my own rule and actually posted at that blasted site after 4 years!
31.
mirax — on 12th February, 2010 at 5:32 AM
Wait, are you censoring my posts? One appeared at 355am and stayed up for 30 mins and then disappeared. Glitch or something more sinister?
32.
mirax — on 12th February, 2010 at 5:41 AM
Here’s the original #31
mirax — on 12th February, 2010 at 3:55 AM
What matters is consistent support for human rights.
So by that standard, Begg the slimy toad fails entirely. Malaysia has jailed dozens of islamists (who probaly are odious twats but still)without trial under its ISA (internal security act) for as many years as the Evil Empire and yet Begg is so comfortable in Malaysia, associating numerous times with troofers and rabid antisemitics like Mahathir. Nary a word of criticism. On hearing that Obama had won the Nobel Peace Prize, he asserted that it was Mahathir, who deserved it. Answer that if you will!
Ps I feel somewhat dirty to be posting at this website and am sorry to have broken my 4-year resolution not to do so. But I finally have an answer to a question that I asked Sunny many times in the past: What does it mean to be a ‘progressive asian” blog?
Mirax
Why should anyone here be remotely interested in your disputes with Pickled Politics?
Mirax is an old friend and sparring partner on Pickled Politics. We both have similar views on why that particular site is an inconsistent champion of liberal values, to say the least. So yeah, I for one am interested in her comments on PP.
*shrugs and wanders off*
Sorry, I dont really expect anything of you or anyone else and was just somewhat shocked that my posts had disappeared – that is not something I expect of Sunny, to be honest.
I’d like to point out that the chief witch-hunter in the attack on Amnesty International is Nick Cohen who hates AI because he supports rendition and torture.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2006/nov/05/comment.terrorism
We have to deport terrorist suspects – whatever their fate
Nick Cohen The Observer, Sunday 5 November 2006
What a scumbag, just the sort of pondlife you should be associated with.
Resistor
It was Gita Sahgal, an employee of AI, who started this particular ball rolling. Unless you are suggesting that Gita is Nick Cohen in drag.
You really are coming across as utterly deranged.
“Nick Cohen in drag”, what an image!
With all this moralising over the Gita/Begg lovematch, I haven’t yet heard an intervention from you champions of liberal values pass judgement on the Binyamin Mohamed case.
Sunny at PP is right: “My main concern here is that people who have already had a vendetta against Amnesty are being supported by feminists who would otherwise not agree with them on a range of issues.”
http://www.pickledpolitics.com/archives/7492
Rambo:
If you search for ‘Binyam Mohammed’ on Pickled Politics, you will find that the only blog article published on PP on that case was written by myself. Not Sunny Hundal.
http://www.pickledpolitics.com/archives/2993
Nick Cohen started up the Facebook which is the centre of the campaign in support of Git Sahgal.
Cohen is on record supporting rendition and torture.
Sahgal has not disassociated herself from Cohen and other pro-war, pro-rendition and pro-war scumbags in the campaign.
If Saghal prefers to stand with the supporters of torture rather than the victims then she has no place i Amnesty International.
Or perhaps, we might re-word Resistor’s last diatribe:
“Resistor has not disassociated himself from Begg and other Jihadi, Islamist and clerical fascists scumbags in the campaign.
If Resistor prefers to stand with the supporters of fascism rather than the victims then he has no place lecturing anybody about Amnesty International.”
“Resistor has not disassociated himself from Begg and other Jihadi, Islamist and clerical fascists scumbags in the campaign.
If Resistor prefers to stand with the supporters of fascism rather than the victims then he has no place lecturing anybody about Amnesty International.”
Says Abu “Front Page magazine” Faris.
How are things in the Sudan, Abu Faris?
Ah, it’s Abdullah returned under another nickname.
More fun from an MPACuk forum regular.
And the author of this article is an arch-hypocrite. He goes on and on about the genocide of Bengali Muslims 40 years ago but ignores more recent genocides of Muslims in Bosnia, Gujurat, Palestine, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Burma etc
This is because:
1) He is a Bengali racial supremacist
2) The other atrocities were done by non-Muslims so dont fit into his Muslim bashing ideaology- and of course when it comes to Bangladesh he hypocritically, in keeping with his ideology, ignores the main perpetrators of the genocide the secular Pakistan army who actually commited the genocide and blames the Bengali Jammat -e-Islami who played a minor role – only because he supports secularism and opposes political Islam !
Moral relavitism indeed !
Ahh its Abu “living in an Islamic state” Faris aka khartoumi from MPAC
This comment by Worthington shows him either to be ignorant of the facts, the definition of “salafi”. Otherwise, he is simply lying:
“but ignores more recent genocides of Muslims in Bosnia, Gujurat, Palestine, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Burma etc”
ehhh…what about the non-Muslims bearing the brunt of jihad in India, the Caucasus, Southern Thailand, the Philippines, Darfur, Nigeria, Kenya, Israel, Madrid, London, Mumbai, New York.
Talk about self-pity and having a chip on your shoulder!