by Eric Dondero

Throughout the Cold War, 1970s, '80s, the Right accused Amnesty International of being little more than a front group for leftwing causes. Their reluctance to criticize human rights abuses by Communist regimes, from Angola to Nicaraugua to Cambodia to the former Soviet Union, was legendary.

Now it appears AI has taken on a new ally on the Left - Islamo-Fascism.

News now breaking from across the Atlantic that worldwide human rights activist Gita Sahgal has been "suspended" from the Amnesty International governing board. Her crime? Criticizing AI's alliance with Islamic Terrorist sypmathizer and Taliban defender Moazzam Begg.

The Times On-line reported:

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.

DNAIndia columnist Antara Dev Sin adds further details:

Sahgal has been protesting within the organisation for some time, in vain. Things may have come to a head last month, when Begg was part of Amnesty’s delegation that met British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, demanding that Guantanamo be shut down.

A week later she went public in an interview with the London Times.

From the UK Guardian Feb. 9:

Within hours of the article appearing she was suspended from her job by Amnesty as Gita says in her statement, "trying to do my job and staying faithful to Amnesty's mission to protect and defend human rights universally and impartially".

Michael Weiss in the Wall Street Journal adds this maddening detail to the story, Feb. 26:

Especially galling for Ms. Sahgal is the fact that she only accepted her job after insisting to Widney Brown, senior director of International Law and Policy at Amnesty, that she be allowed to address the Begg alliance.

"I told her, 'If you don't give me the power to clean up this Begg situation, I won't take on the gender affairs assignment. Widney encouraged me to write a memo on it and even came past my office late one night while I was writing to discuss it. There was no internal resistance against this. So I was promoted with full support. Then, when the Sunday Times story broke, everything I uncovered was deemed 'innuendo.'"

Now, Amnesty International has been caught engaged in an efffort of scrubbing their website of comments in support of Sahgal. Back to the UK Guardian:

for some hours yesterday, negative posts on Amnesty's website were being filtered out.

Few Liberals willing to defend Sahgal

What's been the reaction so far, from the liberal human rights community? Almost universal silence.

Noted author and free speech advocate Salman Rushdie has been virtualy the only exception. He has since come to her defense issuing this statement:

"Amnesty International has done its reputation incalculable damage by allying itself with Moazzam Begg and his group Cageprisoners, and holding them up as human rights advocates. It looks very much as if Amnesty's leadership is suffering from a kind of moral bankruptcy, and has lost the ability to distinguish right from wrong. It has greatly compounded its error by suspending the redoubtable Gita Sahgal for the crime of going public with her concerns. Gita Sahgal is a woman of immense integrity and distinction and I am personally grateful to her for the courageous stands she made at the time of the Khomeini fatwa against The Satanic Verses, as a leading member of the groups Southall Black Sisters and Women Against Fundamentalism. It is people like Gita Sahgal who are the true voices of the human rights movement; Amnesty and Begg have revealed, by their statements and actions, that they deserve our contempt."

Christopher Hitchens has strongly denounced Amnesty:

It’s now incumbent on any member who takes the original charter seriously to withdraw funding until Begg is cut loose to run his own beautiful organization and until Sahgal has been reinstated.

But besides Hitchens and Rushdie there has been little if any comment by the big players on the International Left, and nothing but deafening silence by American Liberals.

Besides the two quixotic writers, the only ones so far coming to Sahgal's defense are Human Rights advocates on the Right.

The Right consistently Pro-Human Rights

South London blogger Bob Brockley, who regularly rants against Jew-haters and Stalinists in the UK wrote:

Defend Gita Sahgal!

A courageous feminist sacked for blowing the whistle on Amnesty's relationship with the Moazzam Begg's Islamist front...

In the US, conservative columnist Mona Charen has written in World, "Rights group left its own out in cold":

Amnesty International has been a handmaiden of the left for as long as I can remember. Founded in 1961 to support prisoners of conscience, it has managed since then to ignore the most brutal regimes and to aim its fire at the West and particularly at the United States. This week, Amnesty has come in for some (much overdue) criticism — but not nearly so much as it deserves.

Amnesty has a great many celebrity supporters, particularly in Hollywood, and in the music industry. They include the likes of Bono, Sinead O'Connor, Al Pacino, Bruce Springsteen, Chevy Chase, Jennifer Lopez, Christina Aguillera, Joaquin Phoenix, Kate Bush, Michael Stipe, Nicolas Cage, John Cleese, Sting, and Yoko Ono.

To date, not a single one of them has issued any statements in support of Gita Sahgal.

Like another Euro-liberal turned libertarian human rights advocate Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Sahgal may soon find that her real friends and allies both in the UK and USA, are on the libertarian and conservative Right.