Some further thoughts on Gita Saghal, and a bit of Aaro watching

Now Aaro's joined in, it seems that my last post really was on topic. My name's Dave Weeden, by the way: if you write a post about this post, and I pop up in your comments, don't be surprised.[1]

Brownie of Harry's Place said in the comments to my last post the following:

Yes I can. Here's what I expected at AW, for example:

"See what those wankers at HP are up to now? Shat the bed...royally buttfucked...right-wingnuts...etc., etc....."

Followed by:

"Mind you, what the fuck are AI playing at? Are they stupid?"

Rather, that's what I hoped for rather than expected. I actually expected exactly what you can read in this thread.

If we're going to play at fantasy history, this is how I would have preferred the situation to have developed.

Gita Saghal has a dispute with her superiors at Amnesty International because (to quote David Aaronovitch's succinct rendering of her opinion) she "objects to Begg, however, being used as a kind of poster boy for important Amnesty campaigns when, in her view, he is not a great stickler for the rights of others." (This part happened; unless you go with the theory that Ms Saghal's objection to Mr Begg lay not with his beliefs, but with his being a Taliban/jihadist front-man. Either way; Ms Saghal objected to Mr Begg 'sharing a platform' with Amnesty International. Let me be clear: I am not unequivocally saying that I believe she was wrong in her objection.) What she should have done, in my opinion, was, when the situation was clearly not going to be resolved to her satisfaction, was to threaten to resign - essentially, say "It's him or me." (Easy for me to say, greater love hath no man than to suggest a stranger give up her career for a cause which he is, at best, ambivalent about.) And, if the decision went to "him", walk out and tell the press. As Flying Rodent has pointed out in the last thread (and been quoted in horror over at Harry's Place), going to the press with private, internal emails really doesn't do one's career much good. You try it. Worse, this was done at the weekend, forcing someone at Amnesty to draft a quick press release. No wonder they suspended her. Now, I'm sure some readers will say but AI did this because they're institutionally fascist. But my explanation relies on Occam's Razor. I merely state that AI is an organisation and further than organisations would not take kindly to internal disputes being ventilated in the papers. The alternative thesis (which many bloggers take as a given) requires some proof than AI regularly quashes dissent. My argument here is simple; it's the one against AI which requires evidence.

Now, if Ms Saghal had resigned, and announced same to the Sunday Times, they might have felt obliged to actually contact Amnesty and request their side. So far, we've only had one side. Amnesty often represents rather unpleasant people. Some people detained as terrorists really are terrorists. They hate you and your way of life. I still think they deserve a fair trial, with good legal representation, and they shouldn't be tortured before or after being tried. "Amnesty in league with nasty/crazy bastards" is not news, people.

I have to say, I love that Aaro quote, about Begg "being used as a kind of poster boy for important Amnesty campaigns". Let's recall Martin Bright:

Congratulations to Richard Kerbaj for blowing the lid on Amnesty International's relationship with former Guantanamo detainee Moazzam Begg and his organisation Cage Prisoners, who act as apologists for Islamist totalitarianism.

So, Moazzem Begg was a "poster boy" for AI, but this relationship needed the lid blown. Moazzam Begg is on Wikipedia, which lists his alleged contacts with extremists. Aaro accuses them of, if I can put it like this, excessive openness. Bright of covering up unpleasant facts. Something doesn't add up.

I find Aaro's column a mixed bag. Partly I wish that he had debated Mr Begg as he says:

A couple of years ago I was invited to debate with Moazzam Begg, but in the event he pulled out. I wasn’t surprised. It was clear to me, and I had suggested it, that while there was no evidence that he was a al-Qaeda sympathiser, there certainly was plenty of reason to believe that he was a political extremist who supported jihadi movements abroad.

First, I'd like a little clarity regarding Mr Begg: either he's exposed (in which case AI may drop him) or he's exonerated (in which case all this nonsense stops). Second, I'd like to understand better the shades of difference between being "a[n] al-Qaeda sympathiser" and supporting jihad movements.

There comes a time in every Aaro Watch post I write where I simply get tired of my own voice, and that time has arrived, so I'll end with one final objection to Aaro's piece.

In the wake of the Sahgal statement, that strangely likeable but unreasonable Muslim convert, the former journalist Yvonne Ridley, complained that Begg was being “demonised” and asserted that he was “a great supporter of women and a promoter of their rights”.

Aaro goes on to quote Begg: "jihad is a drug I’m allowed to take and I always come back for more". Indeed, Begg does seem rather a bellicose fellow. However, just as between the idea and the reality between the motion and the act falls the shadow, so there is a certain distance between Yvonne Ridley's defence and our man's critique. Suppose, for instance, that one thought that women were actually oppressed in Europe. Suppose one thought that the contraceptive pill had put all the blame for pregnancy on women, and cleared men of same. Suppose one thought that naked women in the tabloids, and impossibly beautiful women everywhere in the media actually harmed women, made some of them anorexic, for instance.

He said: "She died at the age of 46, not of anything sudden; she was one of the most spectacular victims of the revolution.
"It would have needed the Taliban to protect her."

That is, of course, Martin Amis talking about his sister.

My view is this: it's possible to support women and be a total fuckwit, which is what I think Amis (and Begg if that is his logic) is/are. Begg could be sincere in his support of women. It's possible to be sincere and wrong at the same time.

[1] This is my little dig at Brownie of Harry's Place, who quoted my previous post in the comments here. I replied and got duly told off for not being Andrew Adams. To make things clear, I am not, and never have been Andrew Adams.

Update 21:55 There's always more. Here's Yvonne Ridley on Dr. Aafia Siddiqui. She and Martin Bright deserve each other. Harry's Place like YouTube videos (see this anonymous post). Well, so do I. I'm sure you can work out the relevance to both Ms Ridley's and Mr Bright's prose style.

Martin Bright vs Amnesty

I don't particularly want this blog to start watching Martin Bright, but where he goes, I think Nick Cohen (and Harry's Place) are likely to go too. I'll try to keep this brief.

This morning's Sunday Times ran Amnesty International is 'damaged' by Taliban link:

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.

(Unspeak alert: is 'collaborating' really the best word here? It seems to imply guilt on Amnesty's part. It also doesn't seem to be Ms Sahgal's word. I've quoted her below.)

This was taken up by Martin Bright in the Spectator: Amnesty International, Moazzam Begg and the Bravery of Gita Sahgal. Bright's prose is somewhat over-caffeinated: "... blowing the lid... rightly sick of the lazy alliance... blown the whistle [hmm, lots of 'blowing' going on here - Ed] ... Begg is now an integral part ... she has been deeply frustrated by the way the British liberal intelligentsia gives house-room to right-wing Islamists ... Jamaat-i-Islami, the south Asian blood-brothers of the Muslim Brotherhood... It is Gita Sahgal who should be the darling of the human rights establishment, not Moazzam Begg." What, I wonder, is giving "house-room"? Until today, when, according to Bright, Ms Sahgal was suspended she was a 'senior official at Amnesty' (Sunday Times). So which of them, if either, was a 'darling' of the "liberal intelligensia"?

“I believe the campaign fundamentally damages Amnesty International’s integrity and, more importantly, constitutes a threat to human rights,” Sahgal wrote in an email to the organisation’s leaders on January 30. “To be appearing on platforms with Britain’s most famous supporter of the Taliban, whom we treat as a human rights defender, is a gross error of judgment.”

I can understand Ms Sahgal's position, but I can also see why Amnesty suspended her for taking an internal disagreement to the press.

The Spittoon has picked up this story.

Amnesty has issued a statement.

I'm on Amnesty's side here. I can't help but see Bright's argument as being, "if I think you're guilty, who cares if you get a fair trial? and if you support terrorism AND you've been accused of terrorism and taken to Guantanamo Bay, who cares if legal niceties were observed or not? I, for one, don't want to know you."

I don't doubt that Bright is sincere in his feelings, but writing, as he did, in the grip of deep emotions alienates rather than persuades me. Put another way, Bright's post fails the Politics and the English Language smell test.

Update 19:30 Harry's Place got there last night. It includes this, which, if I could be bothered, I'd tie into Nick Cohen's libel piece today.

Here is a Guardian apology which makes the point that Martin and Gita cannot:

Chowdhury Mueen-Uddin: we apologise for publishing allegations that he was part of a group that abducted people in East Pakistan and was involved in the commission of genocide (Prosecute Bangladesh’s war criminals, 7 October, guardian.co.uk).

Chowdhury Mueen-Uddin has never been prosecuted, charged nor even arrested in connection with these events. Mr Mueen-Uddin has consistently denied the accusations made against him as utterly false.

We are sorry for the distress our article caused him.

Britain’s absurd libel laws are another part of the jigsaw that allows champions of human rights abuses and jihadism to pose as progressives and civil libertarians. Put simply, the more outrageous and extreme your behaviour, the easier it is to cry ‘defamation’ when your politics is pointed out.

IANAL (and David Toube, who may or many not be 'Lucy Lips' is), but alleging that someone committed genocide is different to pointing out their politics.

Update 2 21:30. I'm glad I posted this. Mail on Sunday pointed out the politics of a blogger. Justice Eady dismissed the libel case. Why? Because there was clear evidence that those were the blogger's views. There is no such evidence that Chowdhury Mueen-Uddin committed genocide. See also Nick on libel today, particularly this comment.

There is a case for some reform. But not the half-baked slanderer's charter drafted by PEN, which is a thinly disguised plea by the UK media to do what the hell it likes with no fear of comebacks. If enacted, it would have prevented say Kate and Gerry McCann from successfully suing the UK tabloids for alleging they had done away with their own daughter.

what, who, me?

The 2009 Community Security Trust Report is out and being covered in the Guardian, although naturally (at the time of AW going to press), Denis MacShane's joke of a Potemkin thinktank couldn't get their act together to do so much as a blog post about it. It blurbs:

Anti-Jewish hate crime in Britain is a growing problem that the liberal left must condemn as readily as any other form of racism

well, certainly, I definitely condemn, why would anyone have thought I did anything other than condemn, I wholeheartedly condemn ... hang on a minute, what the fuck has this got to do with me?

The actual CST report makes it crystal clear why 2009 was the worst year on record for anti-Semitic violence in the UK - the increase was a result of anti-Semitic attacks by Muslims during the period of Operation Cast Lead. Why is this the "liberal left"'s problem? What are we doing in that headline?

In so far as I understand it, Mark Gardner's point is that anti-racist organisations don't take anti-Semitic violence seriously enough (I think the underlying idea is that anti-racists don't take anti-Semitism seriously specifically because they think it's motivated by Israeli foreign policy, although he doesn't say this in so many words and I might be wrong) and that this neglect is tantamount to "institutional racism" under the definition of the Macpherson Report.

To which I respond a) that Gardner gets points from me for using the phrase "institutional racism" correctly, unlike ENGAGE et al, whose misuse of the term as a blanket synonym for "differential impact" was one of the points made in Martin Shaw's humiliation of David Hirsh in the famous Democratiya exchange[1]. But b) that is this actually true of most mainstream (as opposed to specifically Muslim) anti-racist organisations active in the UK, most of whom seem to take anti-Semitism plenty seriously IME? And c) how is it relevant to "the liberal left", which is not an organisation and therefore can't have any institutional features at all, let alone racism?

The idea that anti-Semitic violence would be less of a problem in the UK if only the 300,000-odd readers of the Guardian would condemn it a little more is a curious kind of vanity. It's also more than a little pernicious because it is more or less inevitable that the CST's report, when publicised in this language, is going to be taken up by the kind of yahoo who thinks that anyone who notes that a consequence of Israeli militarism is anti-Jewish sentiment outside Israel (which the CST report itself does, how could it otherwise) is thereby making excuses for anti-Semitic violence. Which I think we can all agree is not going to be remotely productive for any kind of public debate, particularly the one that the CST wants to start.

[1] If you understood that sentence without following the links I hereby award you the title of "Aaronovitch Watch Black Belt Spotter"

Bright Ideas

As regular commenter Organic Cheeseboard pointed out, Nick Cohen has said on his Standpoint blog (6th comment) that he "will vote Labour - but only because of Iraq". His friend, Martin Bright, will vote Labour too. (He's said so a few times on his Spectator blog.) Presumably, then, they want Labour to win the election. They should write 'DIVIDE AND CONQUER' in the largest font they have on a sheet of A4 and stick it on the walls facing their desks. Guys, this is not the way to win.

First Nick has a long post on Sunday Gordon Brown: the Fear and the Filth (same post as the one the comment above is on) which pretty much does what it says in the title, and yet again re-opens the wound of Martin Bright's exit from the New Statesman. NC quotes from Private Eye, naturally anonymous, but very likely by Nick himself. The only reason for believing it's not Nick is this: presumably Nick writes on a PC like everyone else, and he presumably keeps his work (for later reference, books, and so on), so all he'd need to do would be to copy and paste his original article. However, there appears to be a transcription error. The story in the Eye clearly lacks some detail.

Instead of congratulating her, Whelan's face darkened. Geoffrey Robinson, the wealthy Labour MP and one of Brown's oldest friends, bankrolls the Staggers. Next to its office, is the Robinson-funded Smith Institute, a think tank that so blatantly provided jobs and favours for Brown's allies, the Charity Commission investigated it.

Brown's aides expect Robinson and everyone he employs to follow the party line. They hate Bright because in a documentary for Channel 4, he investigated the corruption allegations against Ken Livingstone's cronies, the London Mayor's use of public money for political purposes and his alliances with ultra-reactionary Islamists. He then compounded the offence, by writing articles for the Statesman that were insufficiently adulatory about the Great Helmsman.

Immediately after the Livingstone documentary, Neal Lawson the Brownite lobbyist was telling anyone who would listen that Bright had to be punished.

Whelan followed up by giving Thorpe and listening hacks a rambling monologue in which he asked her to agree that her husband and father of her two children should be fired.

What did Whelan follow up? A sentence seems to be missing after 'darkened'. I can only assume that this is because Nick hates typing up someone else's prose as much as I do. I'm no fan of Charlie Whelan, whose only purpose in life, as far as I can tell, is to make Alastair Campbell look like a reasonable human being. But I do think Whelan had a point. The New Statesman is supposed to be a Labour magazine. It seems unusual for it to employ an editor who attacks Labour candidates and writes polemics against them. Bright puts his side very well in Gordon Brown, Charlie Whelan and Me in the Spectator. I accept that Geoffrey Robinson doesn't like Bright, but I still don't see any evidence that Gordon Brown was behind his firing. Editor deviates from owner's political line. Editor gets fired. Also, dogs bite people, the Pope is not a secular humanist, and bears defecate among trees.

Finally, Nick updated his blog with a quote from Harry's Place attacking the new editor of the Staggers, and one from Guido Fawkes, the "I'm a libertarian not a Tory" Tory.

...Gordon Brown is a malevolent, deeply damaged and unpleasant human being. ...

Does the Guinness Book of Records have an entry on suicide note length?

PS Nick also cites Andrew Rawnsley. I think there's a difference between NC and Rawnsley (but you may disagree, so I'll articulate my position as best I can). NC seems to me to be a partisan in the Blair-Brown struggle, and he's one-sidedly reporting dirt on Gordon Brown. Rawnsley, I think, is a journalist who found a good story, and is reporting it because he believes it to be true. Both show Brown in a bad light, but one is writing journalism, the other not.

A 'stunning performance'

I actually haven't managed to watch the whole thing, but Richard Madeley's defence of Tony Blair is a hoot.

Not curiously at all, Norman Geras has ignored it. Harry's Place, however, says, "All I can say is: cor blimey. That’s a stunning performance from a man who is basically a daytime chatshow host." Some of Madeley's high points: Churchill had to answer inquiries into his decisions during WWII (good for democracy!), but he was acquitted, ergo so should Blair be. (Getting information out of Nazi Germany in 1944 given a state of all out war was somewhat harder than gathering intelligence with UN weapons inspectors inside Iraq in 2003: the two really don't bear comparison.) Thatcher used spin to get us into war with Argentina. (She didn't: she did use spin during the war; however Argentina mounted amphibious landings of the Falkland Islands, which would be very hard to spin as anything other than an act of war.)

What was impressive was that Madeley can walk and talk at the same time. Has anyone ever seen him chew gum?

"It is 1940 and I am Churchill"

In more or less so many words!. Other "shocking little moments of whatever the opposite of an epiphany is" - Daniel Finkelstein notes that after his horrific cock-up in Iraq, nobody is particularly interested in what he's got to say about Iran, then proceeds to tell us what he thinks about nobody caring what he's got to say about Iran (I didn't read on).

Aaro ghosts for the "Guilty Pleasures" column of Metro

In which, Aaro does what the broadsheets are regularly mocked for, repeating all the salacious and entertaining redtop stories, under guise of condemning them for their triviality and prurience. The unworthy thought occurs that perhaps he is speaking in parables here, and really wants to talk to us about another leader of a troubled institution who the press are all clamouring to resign ... but that would be too easy.

I don't think this was a very well thought-out column or a particularly sensible argument - it's basically a twitch of the knee in the direction of Aaro's reflex response to any attempt by the media to criticise anyone in a position of leadership. I was wondering whether it was a sign of something or other that the captain of the national football team had now entered the charmed circle of those who Aaro regards as far above any criticism on any grounds at all, as opposed to those of us lower down the food chain, interference in whose personal lives is practically a duty of government. But no, I think he's just flexing the muscles and keeping his hand in for writing "bias against understanding" bollo.

He's also presenting a somewhat deracinated view of human life - apparently, if Danny Finkelstein slept with the wife of another Times leader-writer, Aaro would expect it to have next to no effect on the Comment team's morale and teamwork, as they all sagely worked together to inform us that more regulation was not the answer, and that China needs to take its place at the top table. Unrealistic, I think.

Non-prediction thread

From the non-barking dogs section. Nick Cohen, as regular readers know, is not a fan of Mr Justice Eady. (See his article from May last year on Simon Singh.) However, Justice Eady supported the Mail on Sunday against a libel action. 'Kill British' blog man fails in MoS libel bid.

Azad Ali tried to sue over articles which appeared in the two newspapers in January last year under the headlines "Muslim civil servant suspended over 'kill British' blog", and "Civil servant 'backed fanatic's call to kill our troops in Iraq'."

Justice Eady yesterday gave the newspapers' publisher, Associated Newspapers, his summary judgment in which he said Ali's case was bound to fail and had about it "an absence of reality".

Ali had claimed the articles meant that he was "a hardline Islamic extremist who supports the killing of British and American soldiers in Iraq by fellow Muslims as justified".

The stories said he had been suspended from his job after posting a number of remarks on his personal blog, published on the Between the Lines website, which is hosted by the Islamic Forum of Europe.

Can we expect another story on the limited mental faculties of David Eady, his bias against journalism, etc?