Amnesty International is a hard Left-wing ideologically run speudo human rights organization, that while having some real human rights activists who are sincere in the goal of safeguarding human rights, the organization as a whole however, represents something else altogether. Safeguarding jihadis’ “rights”, to the point of allowing them to return to the battlefield to wage yet more jihad, will be the legacy of this group, and of other groups like it. KGS
Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and a columnist for National Review. His book Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad (Encounter Books, 2008), has just been released in paperback with a new preface. Check out a description from Encounter Books. His new book, The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America, is to be released by Encounter Books in late May.
FP: Andy McCarthy, welcome to Frontpage Interview.
Amnesty International supports individuals such as Former Gitmo detainee Moazzam Begg. Tell us what exactly is going on here.
McCarthy: Jamie, it’s great to be here, as always.
People need to understand what Amnesty International is: a hard-left political organization. It is one of the bastions of what John Fonte calls transnational progressivism, and it’s agenda is a post-sovereign world theoretically governed by an abstraction AI calls “international humanitarian law” but, as a practical matter, ruled by the leftists who make up what this purported corpus of “law” means as they go along (just as they make up what “social justice” and other such abstractions mean to suit the exigencies of the moment).
This is not to say that AI is without authentic human rights activists. There are many people who are dawn to AI because of its admirable historic mission to pressure authoritarian governments that are serial human-rights violators. But as an institution, AI is a just another leftist hack, and the country it most chooses to pressure is the United States, for the American people’s great crimes of being free and self-determining and being uninterested in a post-sovereign order, and for pursuing our interests in the world, including our national security.
Moazzam Begg is a Taliban jihadist and former Gitmo detainee. The invaluable Tom Joscelyn (of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies) has done a great deal of work exposing him — such as in this Weekly Standard essay, which collects other Begg links. Much like CAIR, Begg has discovered that if you swaddle your Islamist activism in the rhetoric of human rights, and be sure to target the United States and Israel as the cause of the world’s problem, the hack leftist organizations will flock to you regardless of the atrocities you’re willing to commit or defend. Thus has AI made common cause with Begg and his British organization, “Cageprisoners.” That this should happen is not at all surprising to anyone who does a comparative study of leftist ideology and Islamist ideology — which is the subject of a book I’ve just finished, The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America, to be released by Encounter Books in late May.
Of course, the tie between AI and Begg is upsetting to individual, authentic human rights activists, both because it associates their cause with an ideology that rejects basic human freedoms (conscience, equality of the sexes, equality of Muslims and non-Muslims, sexual orientation, the ability to legislate irrespective of sharia dictates, etc.), and because it holds up the mirror to what AI really is (as opposed to the utopian vision of AI that caused them to gravitate to it in the first place).
FP: What happened to Gita Sahgal, head of AI’s “gender unit,” recently and what is the significance?
"…if you swaddle your Islamist activism in the rhetoric of human rights, and be sure to target the United States and Israel as the cause of the world’s problem, the hack leftist organizations will flock to you regardless of the atrocities you’re willing to commit or defend."
I've got to remember that line for future reference. It's a keeper!