What's good about Amnesty International..
Drew W., who participates in Amnesty International's Freedom Letters Campaign, had this response to this analysis of AI's attitudes towards human rights, "both or neither"..
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Let me put myself in the uncomfortable position of defending Amnesty International. First of all, this is not to in any way defend or excuse the asinine comments of AI International's secretary general Irene Khan. (Nor would I do the same for the feeble, backtracking attempt at damage-control by AI USA’s executive director William Schultz — that is to say, when he isn't reverting to form and reflexively backing Khan's assertions. Let's save him for another time.)
Irene Khan is obviously an imbecile --another smug, sanctimonious Europacifist, of the sort who are in abundance in Britain and especially on the Continent: from George Galloway (who seems like he walked off a movie screen that was showing the first Ealing comedy directed by Michael Moore), to Lars Von Trier (who complained of America’s global cultural dominance with the curious confession that "America fills about 60% of my brain" — a figure that, in and of itself, provides no helpful insight as to the size of Von Trier’s brain compared to that of the average Dane).
When Khan used the word "gulag," she gave in to an anti-Americanism that's truly gone off the rails, and also to an under-emphasis of the horrors of Stalin's police state that's endemic to those lefties still nursing a sentimental soft spot for the old Soviet Union. The left's offensive and exploitative use of genocide as a metaphor seems quite the thing these days, what with Rep. Charles Rangel's recent declaration of parallels between the Holocaust and the war in Iraq. (And that same impulse has just been played out on a comically absurd level as — cue the slide-whistle and bulb-horn sound effects — freelance Michael Jackson spokesman Jesse Jackson has likened the 2003 police search of the Neverland Ranch as a "Waco-style occupation.")
Aside from my interminable digressions, have I done a good job of defending AI so far? Never mind, here’s what's good about AI:
Like many people reading this, I first got wind of Amnesty International in the '70s, and was attracted to their evenhanded approach to human rights. (And this was when I was a good collegiate lefty who actually understood that life was lousy in Communist countries — even though saying as much out loud would have invited a severe-dressing-down from my friends, and at the very least would have been considered, shall we say, a trifle gauche.) At any rate, around the time I turned 30, I figured that I'd better start spending at least a little bit of time doing something community-minded. Since I consider human rights to be pretty much the world's paramount issue, I started to poke around to see what I could do for Amnesty. I signed on to their Freedom Writers program. (A hokey and self-inflating name, perhaps, but that’s a minor point.)
Every month, AI sends Freedom Writer participants three letters describing the cases of a person or people who were arrested, tortured, harassed, "disappeared" or killed doing things that we take for granted in Western democracies. Participants copy these letters under their own letterhead and send them out to the relevant heads of state, ministers of security or whatever The letter is also cc'ed to each country’s ambassadors in Washington, assuming they have them.
The idea is not really to change the minds of the autocrats in power, but rather to exhaust them with a stream of letters from the outside world. Obviously, the letters all come from the same source, but so what? As has been proven time and time again, the sheer volume of correspondence tends to wear down vicious governments where humanitarian appeals might go unheard. Human rights ideology is besides the point. Most of these governmental thugs don't really believe in anything beyond the preservation of their own power, so they gladly forget whatever reason they had for designating some individual an enemy of the state — so long as it means these thousands of people sent by AI will stop drawing attention to their doings. For those who feel the issue should be changing the attitudes of these anti-democratic states, I'd suggest that they might not feel the same way of they put themselves in the place of a political prisoner who' been deprived a charge, a lawyer, medical attention or any reason to believe that someone in the outside world is trying to get them out. (Good paleolefties: please insert obligatory Gitmo-makes-us-just-the-same-as-them trope here. Way ahead of ya, gang!)
Reading the hundreds of letters that I've gotten from AI to pass on to governments all over the world — letters that tell the stories of people threatened in their homes, injured by thugs or simply snatched off the street — has made me even more fervent in my belief that monsters like Saddam Hussein must be brought down.
Yes, being brought face-to-face, so to speak, with the victims of human rights abuse has made me passionate about — weirdly enough — human rights. It made me angry at the despots who kill, imprison and generally spread fear amongst their people, and it made me want simply to overthrow the bastards. (The package of Freedom Writer letters I received last month inquired about the arrest of NGO backer and women's rights advocate Mahboubeh Abbasgholizadeh of Iran; the murder of teenaged Bobby Alia of the Philippines, whose death quite probably came at the hands of government-authorized vigilantes; and the illegal detention of Sudanese community leader Ma'mun Issa Gader, from the Darfur region.) Indeed, I've been called on to send letters to the governments of Israel, Britain and the U.S., as I have, but I've sent many more to China, Egypt, Uzbekistan, Syria and a host of actual dictatorships. I realize that the ratio of letters should probably be closer to one to the U.S. for every 10,000 sent to Myanmar, but I don't pick and choose which governments get the Amnesty letters. I signed on to write their letters, which I will do until such time that I give up on AI entirely. And I haven't yet.
It's been said that the current foolishness of Amnesty's leadership came about because they've insisted in sticking their activist fingers into a few too many pies — poverty programs, AIDS awareness, whatever. The original mission of Amnesty International, when it was founded in the '60s, was precisely what the Freedom Writers program is about: the improbable, although surprisingly effective, use of letters as a means of freeing political prisoners. (I was unaware of that bit of AI history until this spring, when I read the obituary of its founder Peter Benenson in The Economist.)
So who gives a crap if some Euro-lefties and their bedazzled American admirers react to AI's spotlighting of governmental abuse by a) wringing their hands at the injustice in the world, then b) sitting on them, because to take action might leaves one open to charges of insensitivity. Who gives a crap about Irene Khan and her dumb rhetoric? (Let Anne Applebaum rip her to shreds, as she just did a second time.) Khan and her ilk represent a left that's living on borrowed time, set in a Europe that's rotting from within. They can paper over their problems with anti-American sloganeering, but that's a desperation move that offers them diminishing returns as this century progresses.
So despite the fact that I've apparently drawn the lessons from AI's advocacy of which they might not approve, I will keep writing letters for them, on behalf of political prisoners. When I think of Khan's brainlessness, I'd love to tell Amnesty International to go get bent. But when I think of Mahboubeh Abbasgholizadeh, Bobby Alia and Ma'mun Issa Gader, I keep writing the letters.
Dean Esmay has asked: "Does anyone know of a better human rights organization to support?" One suggestion was the American Anti-Slavery Group — about whom I've heard nothing but good things — but people imprisoned or harassed by dictatorial governments seem to be outside their mission. If anybody can give him a good answer, I'd sure like to hear it as well.
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