Civil liberties

Bouncing off my own post yesterday, Alex proposes the Amnesty rule:

I don’t think I’ve ever seen this happen when B actually had a point – time after bleeding time, it followed this exact course. I therefore intended to declare this as a law, like Godwin’s Law. The Amnesty rule – anyone who asks “why doesn’t Amnesty speak out on X?” is lying.

This goes for Human Rights Watch as well. Though I couldn’t find it yesterday, I’m sure I’ve done posts before either here or at Prog Gold on this subject, showing some rightwinger bozo that no, AI doesn’t just criticise the US or Israel and yes, has actually spent more time campaigning on some cause or other he pulled out of his ass and never wrote about before or since…

It’s worse when this sort of thing comes from alleged lefties, masking as honest critics of Amnesty or whatever other human rights organisation which dared to criticise one of their hobby horses, when whatever miniscule amount of dirt that can be brought up is blown up out of all proportions but what AI actually does is completely ignored. Rightwing critics are bad enough, but relatively honest in their hatred of AI; the motivations of their supposedly leftwing “critics” is much more petty. Flying Rodent put it best, back when the whole sorry Gita Sahgal mess first came to light:

This excerpt represents the clearest statement of what I believe has motivated this whole sorry affair – a small group of like-minded journalists and bloggers determined to crush Amnesty, in the insane belief that a spontaneous uprising of somebody else will magic a deus ex machina human rights organisation into existence… that will say nasty things about Noam Chomsky.

You really don’t need to read further than the second paragraph in Gita Sahgal’s latest rant to understand she’s completely lost the plot:

This week, Amnesty International launches its Annual Report and starts year long preparations for a jamboree titled Amnesty@50. From a small group of activists it has grown into a gigantic, global organization. And in many ways, has come to resemble the forces that it has done so much to oppose. Its record of handling one of the greatest challenges to its reputation suggests that it is entirely unable to examine the story of itself or the story of its times. So difficult is it for Amnesty International to provide a coherent account of what has happened over the last few months, that it has chosen to provide no account at all.

Really? Amnesty International has started to disappear, torture and murder people? Why isn’t this frontpage news rather than a blogpost? Or is it’s just that AI choose not to pay much attentions to the over the top accusations of encouraging “Islamofascism” leveled against them by you, nobody else found them credible either but for a handful of nutters gunning for AI anyway because Amnesty has dared to criticise Israel and the The War Against Terror?

It gets better.

Their programmes of social control such as promotion of the hijab are supported quite uncritically. The actions of human rights advocates mirror those of governments from Chechnya to the UK. Recruit former insurgents or fundamentalists and subcontract them to provide surveillance and control over the mass of the population. Defeat one form of fundamentalism by supporting another.

How does this even make sense? How the hell is AI using “former insurgents or fundamentalists” to “provide surveillance and control over the mass of the population”? does she thinks AI is some sort of government or what?

Those are the two nuttiest propositions in the article; the rest is the usual wingnut boilerplate about how AI gives comfort to the enemy yadda yadda and how it always criticises “us” but not “them”. For instance:

Those who make this allegation are immediately accused of supporting torture or arbitrary detention. Shadi Sadr, the courageous Iranian lawyer who has been sentenced in absentia to lashings and imprisonment, has pointed out that while Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have rushed to condemn the niqab ban in Europe, not a word has been heard against increasing dress code restrictions imposed by the State in Iran and accompanied by draconian punishments.

Let’s see for ourselves, shall we? Here’s the latest A-Z county reports (PDF) from AI and what it says on Iran’s treatment of women:

Women continued to face severe discrimination under the law and in practice, and women’s rights campaigners were harassed, arrested and imprisoned.

[…]

Discrimination against women
Women continued to face discrimination in law, despite some minor improvements. Women’s rights campaigners, including those active in the “One Million Signatures” campaign to end legal discrimination, were harassed, detained, prosecuted and banned from travelling for collecting signatures in support of their petition.

On 1 February, Alieh Eghdam-Doust, a member of the Campaign for Equality, began a three-year prison sentence imposed for participating in a peaceful demonstration. She was among many women arrested during a protest in June 2006 against discriminatory laws, and the first to begin serving a prison sentence.

That’s just from this year’s annual report; much more can be found by simply googling “amnesty international” “dress code” iran. This is not hard or esoteric knowledge and I wish that people stop accusing organisations like AI or Human Rights Watch of not caring about subjects when even five seconds of research would show otherwise. But then Gita Sahgal isn’t that interested in honesty anyway, is she?