Category Archives: Feature

“Jihad, whether of the defensive or offensive variety, constitutes a profound threat to all human rights. Amnesty International cannot afford to equate views that are underpinned by systematic discrimination towards women and minorities with those that respect all human rights. Senior human rights advocates and many people across Asia, Africa, and Latin America understand this — they have no choice but to deal with all threats to human rights simultaneously. Universality is no abstract principle for them but often a matter of survival.

It is time that Europeans and North Americans active in human rights movements understood this and told their leaders so.”

– Gita Sahgal

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.