Amnesty Prefers Jihadists to Feminists

It’s official. Amnesty International’s policy on human rights advocacy in Afghanistan or Pakistan encompasses your average jihadist’s right to wage “asymetrical resistance”. This means is that Amnesty has now decided that indiscriminate attacks by jihadists on their “enemies” which often includes the loss of life of innocent civilians is not antithetical to human rights. For Amnesty, the rights of women and heterodox muslims, and other ‘collateral damage’ of “jihad”, are secondary to the human rights of “jihad in self-defence”.

Nick says:

Well, given the contortions in modern liberalism, Amnesty’s abandonment of universal human rights was always likely. In the 2000s I wrote that Amnesty was becoming equivocal about political violence, torture, racism and the hatred of women and gays if abuse could not be blamed on the West. (Here scroll down.) Still, its final collapse remains a melancholy spectacle and a shocking one.

Gita Sahgal, its women’s officer, has finally decided to resign. In her resignation statement she says that Amnesty remains unconcerned that its poster boy Moazzam Begg, a former Guantanamo detainee, is now involved with an organisation called Cageprisoners which has championed the views of jihadists. “They have stated that the idea of jihad in self defence is not antithetical to human rights; and have explained that they meant only the specific form of violent jihad that Moazzam Begg and others in Cageprisoners assert is the individual obligation of every Muslim.” This is the sly liberal’s get-out-of-jail card: a one-sided cultural determinism. Jihadism is a part of “Muslim” culture, says Amnesty, so we cannot criticise it, indeed we must promote it. Yet if the head of a pro western intelligence agency were to say that colonialism was part of his cultural inheritance, Amnesty would condemn him as a racist.

Support for religious reaction and support for the rights of women are, of course, incompatible. Amnesty has made its choice, and as Gita announces, its Stop Violence Against Women campaign is over.