Remember this? From five years ago? Gita Sahgal told the Sunday Times about her disagreement with Amnesty International over their support for CAGE? And they fired her as a result?
A SENIOR official at Amnesty International has accused the charity of putting the human rights of Al-Qaeda terror suspects above those of their victims.
Gita Sahgal, head of the gender unit at Amnesty’s international secretariat, believes that collaborating with Moazzam Begg, a former British inmate at Guantanamo Bay, “fundamentally damages” the organisation’s reputation.
In an email sent to Amnesty’s top bosses, she suggests the charity has mistakenly allied itself with Begg and his “jihadi” group, Cageprisoners, out of fear of being branded racist and Islamophobic.
Sahgal describes Begg as “Britain’s most famous supporter of the Taliban”. He has championed the rights of jailed Al-Qaeda members and hate preachers, including Anwar al-Awlaki, the alleged spiritual mentor of the Christmas Day Detroit plane bomber.
The rest is pay-walled, but you get the idea.
Maajid Nawaz wrote a pointed little Facebook post linking to that article yesterday:
I take this moment to salute human rights campaigner Gita Sahgal. Five years ago to the month she was sacked by Amnesty International for exposing their links to Islamist group CAGE (Jihadi John’s friends) in The Sunday Times to Richard Kerbaj http://t.co/kUtp4CktnA
Will you apologise Amnesty? Sincerely, your former Prisoner of Conscience.
Seriously. They should have listened to Gita instead of firing her. Islamists are not allies of human rights organizations. Islamists have human rights, and AI gets to campaign to protect those human rights, but that’s not the same thing as being allies.