Otherwise, stop criticising people from the safety of Singapore

Are you suggesting that mildly criticisng Sid is gonna be dangerous to me if I were in the UK?

(do you write much about the lack of democracy there?),

I do , on singapore blogs, actually. Not that I have to justify anything to precious little puppets like you.

May I suggest that you are creating more embarassment for Sid/Faisal than I ?

It is just that he was quick – like so many british asians on pickled politics – to denounce an argument based on the (south asian) identity of the person making the argument. I found being accused of being a ‘communalist’ or islamophobe when recounting issues in say Malaysia, five years ago, rather offputting

‘mirax’

Put a photograph and your name to all you write. Otherwise, stop criticising people from the safety of Singapore (do you write much about the lack of democracy there?), especially when they make principled stands against extremist elements from the community that they live in and originate from. It is a weasel thing to do.

There is no truth except what these victims of language say, Liberation from oppression is to let them speak back and out against those who hated them through the language they used.

Their idea of a road show is a parody of a Hegelian dialectic of the Master and the Slave you set the ’slave free’ by hearing their voice condemn the master.

Amnesty International’s new third world quasi religious metaphysics imagines that power is confronted and contested and subverted by allowing the voices unheard to speak, ‘to give voice to the return of the repressed’ the words of the oppressed magically as it were re order power relationships.

This is why I call it virtual because Amnesty Internationals human rights advocacy has become a metaphysical reordering of words. If Moazzem Begg was silenced by the power of words in rendering him ‘other’ then Amnesty must support at the deepest level by sponsoring him so strikingly directly they express a kinship, a commonality (though it is a knowledge and ethics free zone),.

The hubris of this is the fact that their patronage of him as much as it bigs him up as a victim and hero for a recently mobilised and radicalised subculture, they assume he has been converted to their anti-colonial missionary church, because to actually listen to his words and his expressed values beliefs and intentions in support of a radically perceived Khalifah would be rather beneath them.

They remind me of the first missionaries to the Maori who brought some prominent chiefs to England and paraded them through progressive salons showing how advanced they were and how outrageous the stigmatised language of barbarism was.

The missionaries believed the chiefs had accompanied them out of a sense of a new found piety and wished to collaborate on a Maori – English dictionary at Oxford.

Nobody’s fool Hongi Hika went along with this as he hoped to get hold of thousands of muskets so that he could annihilate his enemy tribes.

He was granted audience with King George who provided him gifts for his role in converting the Maori to Christianity.

Returning to Sydney Hongi Hika exchanded them for thousands of muskets.

While he was disappointed that the missionaries would not trade directly with muskets he encouraged their settlement knowing that other Europeans would trade in the grog shops he set up where there was a lucrative trade in tattooed Maori heads for Muskets.

In fact inflationary demands meant that the old heads, those of an honoured enemy taken by their vanquisher cleaned and given to their surviving family had gone so new heads had to be gained and the new long range warfare of annihilation made possible by the Muskets meant more heads could be chopped for barter.

In addition the trade further expanded to market demands so slaves faces were prettily tattooed and then removed (their bodies were eaten) which given the number of slaves taken in the new long range warfare was easy.

The missionary supporters were staunch in their defence of Hongi Hika and other chiefs and thought them good , progressive men eager to learn of the decent labouring of modern farming methods that could so increase available nutrition.

Indeed the sweet potato was small and had a low yield but it was noble and could only be farmed by noblemen (who preferred warfare).

The newly introduced humble potato was given humble even slave status so that it could be farmed by huge groups of slaves captured from the new musket wars.

The new massive slave force created huge demographic changes reducing the population by as much as half. The new armies of slaves could grow the potato and subsist on them.

They also were the walking larder for food lines of supply allowing long range annihilatory warfare on a scale hitherto unknown. They provided the diet for the soldiers their potatoes for necessary carbohydrates and their bodies kept so fresh by being kept alive until their protein was needed and their heads could be given a quick tatoo job before being removed and salted, so that even in death these slaves could loyally support the royal and noble war effort.

The missionaries remained staunch protectors and defenders of their modern and progressive chiefs. Their task was largely to counter any stereotypical view of the Maori among colonial masters in Australia and England, this ironically led to English settlement and the annexing of New Zealand for the crown.

The missionaries stayed on without fail censuring the settlers for arrogance and discrimination and a lack of cultural understanding of the Maori especially as the inevitable effect of colonialism was conflict.

The missionaries detested the settlers to a large degree even though their business model benefited enormously. It was always clear to these first missionaries were absolutely to blame even when they ended up in a chief’s larder inquiries were held and the settlers condemned and the Maori exonerated.

Once they had found their new post enlightenment ‘Jerusalem’ they were prepared to see or hear no evil about their Noble Savages, never for once considering that it was they who really considered their ‘roadshow wards’ to be stupid savages as they could never countenance the fact, obvious to most any other observer, that they had been well and truly fucked over by obviously intelligent indigenous men whose own agenda though founded in their cultural milieu was radical and revolutionary in scope.

Everything to do with undermining the defence of democracy.

Using democracy to destroy democracy.

So many of the screechers defending ‘freedom fighters’ and their ‘God given right’ to kill civilians ‘cos they don’t have hi tech arms to kill soldiers.

One of the sicknesses infecting a certain mind set who grew up having freedoms that they didn’t actually fight for.

He is a fucking moron.

I cannot believe this is actually written by Widney Brown, Senior Director for International Law and Policy, Amnesty International – International Secretariat;

When the US government defended its detention of people it suspected as terrorists [sic] in Guantánamo Bay, then President Bush [sic] famously described the detainees as the “worst of the worst.” Translation – these men got what they deserved.

Well sorry to say ‘Translation: oh no it doesn’t’. Translation does not mean making up meanings for a lucidly clear phrase to fit your own ideological position.

Of course the term ‘Translation’ here is simply used metaphorically rather than literally as a short hand for ‘here we will substitute our view that because’;

They got years of detention, torture and ill-treatment, solitary confinement, complete isolation from the world and of course, no means to defend themselves against the charge of being the “worst of the worst”.

In fact because of this every single person detained in Guantanamo is not only obviously innocent of any bad thing, such as support for violent jihad or being cruel to kittens, or spitting in public, but in fact they are also incredibly sweet lovely people that are living exemplars of what the struggle for human rights entails.

In fact everyone of them and Moazzem Begg in particular are Human Rights made flesh.

In other words it is not possible to have totally opposed the creation of Guantanamo in principle and in practice it is necessary, like a first year undergraduate student activist to suspend the capacity for even the most elementary logic, such as in the following propositions;

1. People wrongly arrested, detained or renditioned, wrong or loathsome as these rights violations may, be are not necessarily innocent.

2. Just because nasty Mr Bush said they were all the ‘worst of the worst’, they do not as the simplest use of logic would show, actually really, I mean actually, in the real, actual, world become good, sweet, interesting, informative, exemplary and the ‘best of the best’.

Any campaigning human rights organisation, once knew that not only was it important to defend the most marginal and oppressed people vigorously, it is crucially politically important to choose their friends and ‘adopted advocates of conscience’ very carefully.

Of course people who are Human Rights activists in the real world know that oppressed or maltreated and legally wronged people can be bad, even really, really bad, as bad or worse as the bad that was done to them, sometimes even they can be the baddest of the bad.

Of course in the days of the ‘actual’ Human rights worker, before Human Rights became ‘de rigeur’ for the cocktail party gliteratti the self appointed stakeholders and opinion formers, before fashionable but meaningless post-modernist argot, aesthetics and mannerisms came to stand in place of the actual world, it was actually rather simple to make a few basic inquiries to check the background and ideological motivations of those who sought out the imprimatur of an organisation that could never afford to be seen to be crudely partisan and politically biased.

But as a cliched human rights narrative has replaced action, hard work and a dispassionate rigour based in the actual world, so a mawkish and cloying sentimentalism together with a pop culture of celebrities and speaking tours and road shows has taken over together with a wilful blindness towards whom one hugs tight.

This explains a phrase such as;

Interestingly, the US and other governments that have violated human rights standards in the name of countering terrorism justify those violations by saying that our security can only be protected by violating the rights of others. Mr Begg is one of the people that the US government defined as “other.”

But there is no place for the “other” in human rights because to argue that some people are more ‘deserving’ than others of having their rights protected is to argue that some beings are less than human.

Properly speaking this is gibberish. This needs a translation as to the average person who might be inclined to support Amnesty International because they think that Human rights are a good thing and it is a bad thing to violate them, could reasonably be expected to make little sense of this.

Other?, other? other than what? Other than whom?

Of course Widney Brown’s rhetorical use of the ‘other’ as a noun has little connection to ordinary speech.

It is a Lacanian concept warped for political ends by Althusser, while the ‘other’ as formative of identity in Gender studies is part of the post modern pick and mix meaning of the term, really there is a very clear origin for ‘The Other’ and it is Edward Said.

In fact Amensty International’s adoption of Moazzem Begg and their obsession with Islamists as victims and the US and Zionists as their oppressors has everything to do with Said.

Widney Brown’s use of the term ‘the other’ is absolutely not an inclusive ‘any other’ as in each and every human being is equal and equally deserving of the same standards, as any other, in respect of human rights.

No Amnesty has as its central motive a very particular ‘other’ the Saidian Middle Easterner, the Muslim, the Arab, the exemplary victim of colonialism and imperialism old and new.

Of course as an objectve matter this is nonsense as the issue of human rights in the world; its violations, its violaters and their victims are measurable as a matter of fact.

A genuine inclusive international human rights advocacy must take the observable, the empirical, as its foundation. It must have a strong sense of weight and proportionality.

If closed and dictatorial societies, movements and ideologies are less easily observable than in open societies it remains a straightforward but by no means easy matter to provide an unbiased fair and honest accounting of the proportionate measure of human rights violations globally.

Human rights advocacy based on the empirical and demonstrable may be hard work but it has an unimpeachable foundation.

Since Amnesty International, among other ‘human rights’ organisations has dispensed with the actual, in favour of a post colonial discourse of ‘narratives’, of ‘the Other’ however victims now are always representations of the colonials imagination necessary for their national identity.

The oppressed in this infinite regress of linguistic labelling are really but conjured creatures of the ‘colonialists’ ‘othering’.

Prosaically;

Translation- the US is the only colonialist, imperialist nation in the world and what they think and say and write about ‘the other’ i.e Muslims and Arabs is always a fevered fiction and it is oppressive.

So George Bush makes up shit about Muslims as the worst of the worst and he makes this shit seem real but these ‘others’ cannot possibly be bad because they are spoken and written about as ‘other’.

Until Amnesty International climbs down from this ridiculous ivory tower of post modernist nonsense, where human rights activism is about opposing George Bush’s words with the words of his victim a hero of resistance because the ‘innocent victim’ now gets the chance to speak (all over Europe thanks to AI) it will slip increasingly into irrelevancy.

As it does this it will become the enemy of a grounded human rights based in the actual and the observable world and it will be dragged further down by each and every Islamist ideologue that it lionises while everyone outside of the tiny self referential world these ‘Human Rights Opinion formers’ can plainly see a person with some bad views opposing democracy and some even badder views about equality and human rights.

In the real world the oppressed are disproportionately oppressed by the actions of oppressive states and violent ideological extremists.

They are not disproportionately oppressed by open democratic states, nor are they really oppressed by narratives and stereotypes held of the other, but by the actions (not necessarily discursive) of those who despise democracy and the concept of equal human worth, who have no compunction in using violence and torture even genocide to achieve those aims.

Amnesty International’s executives and policy workers need to get of their human rights high horse and get down from the travelling road show of rhetorical anti American theatricality to the level of the real world, to see that their knew found ‘friends’ are not victims but active agents of a violently undemocratic theo-politics who actually believe that short of their evident instrumentality secular human rights activists belong in the gutter with their discredited ‘otherising’ theories of droopy discarded French philosophers and occidentalising tenured charlatan academics.

Amnesty International’s return to the central and unimpeachable position as human rights defenders par excellance must start with the reinstatment of Gita Sahgal.

If their disconnected hubris gets the better of them and they show know understanding and humility, they will diminish and demean the very concept of human rights for which they could never be forgiven.

“At least a cursory reading of that “discover the network” AI page shows that they have almost nothing on AI. It doesn’t list a bunch of Islamist employees or managers or anything like that. I seem to remember they do have that sort of thing for some other groups..

All they have is disagreements over positions and policy.”

The McCarthyism charge has been very effective in silencing criticism of the Left. When you start poking around Leftwingers associations with Communist Front groups and the like, you better be real sure of your job security, because the guns will come out very quickly….and its more likely that yourself will be on the receiving end of negative consequences than the Communist sympathizer, or stealth Red.

In a War against Terrorism you have Terrorist Prisoners of War. Or ‘unlawful combatants’ as the US have defined them. If you apply criminal law instead of military law to fight a war, you lose. Simple as that. AQ know it and their anti-West allies like AI know it. Nothing to do with defending human rights. Everything to do with undermining the defence of democracy.

“Here’s more critical insight into the politics of Ms. Irene Khan”

I really wouldn’t call that rant an “insight”, Jack R.

I was once chatting at a meal out with a lady of Bagladeshi ancestry who was drinking spirits. Her name was Shirley. A name that’s about as muslim as Irene.

The case of the Ahmadiyyah is important. A theological argument about whether or not they should be included as muslims is one thing. Persecution, which happens in many Muslim-majority countries, is another.

Meanwhile, I think I would be an idea to demand the re-instatement of Gita Sahgal on the Amnesty staff and a distinction between Begg’s experiences in Guantanamo and his advocacy for Cage Prisoners.