Amnesty International and Cageprisoners: Statement by Gita Sahgal
7 February 2010

This morning the Sunday Times published an article about Amnesty International’s association with groups that support the Taliban and promote Islamic Right ideas. In that article, I was quoted as raising concerns about Amnesty’s very high profile associations with Guantanamo-detainee Moazzam Begg. I felt that Amnesty International was risking its reputation by associating itself with Begg, who heads an organization, Cageprisoners, that actively promotes Islamic Right ideas and individuals.

Within a few hours of the article being published, Amnesty had suspended me from my job. Read More

Amnesty boss Gita Sahgal suspended over criticising the charity's involvement with ex-Guantanamo detainee Moazzam Begg

A remarkable turn of events in the world of humanitarian charity – and a lesson in how the Left works:

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. Read More

'Burn in Hell': Pakistani Muslim Lawyers not making death-threats and blocking the entrance to an Islamabad Courthouse against anyone foolish enough to prosecute fellow Muslim employer who can't have raped, tortured and killed a 12-year old Christian girl, because that could have never happened. Allah is oft forgiving, most merciful...

Hmm… we wonder why?

It seems the international mainstream media were clearly so shocked by the fact that Pakistani lawyers, adherents of the one religion on the planet that condones sex with underage children and the ill-treatment of members of other religions were forcibly preventing legal action that would challenge such behaviour to go ahead – that they didn’t bother to report on the story:

No lawyer comes forward to defend Shazia Bashir, the servant girl murdered by her employer. The powerful association of lawyers in Lahore, arrayed in defence of the murderer, launches death threats and prevents access to the Court. Christian Association condemns this new form of terrorism.

Because of the threats posed by the powerful Lahore Bar Association – an umbrella organisation of city lawyers – no Christian or Muslim lawyer is ready to take on the defence in the murder of 12 year-old Shazia Bashir, it was reported yesterday by The Pakistani Christian association that deals with legal assistance. Read More

The people the Obama administration would welcome talks with..

ISLAMABAD – Taliban militants flog two men and a teenage boy in a video that has emerged from Pakistan’s tribal belt along the Afghan border, showing the hold of insurgents in at least one area there despite army offensives and intensified U.S. missile strikes in the region.

The video was shot on a mobile phone on Feb. 3 and passed to a local journalist who occasionally provides video to Associated Press Television News. The man who provided the clip said it was taken in the Mamozai area of the Orakzai tribal region, though there was no way of verifying that because travel there is dangerous for outsiders. The tribal elder requested anonymity out of fear for his life. Read More

Once again, Pat Condell eloquently voices what everyone else is thinking. Or would be thinking, if this trial weren’t being ignored by much of the European mainstream media.

The shame of Islam: over 200 so-called 'honour killings are committed in EU-candidate Turkey every year

More human development excellence from Moderate, Secular Turkey™. We really don’t know why the EU just doesn’t drop all formalities and let them in immediately:

The father and grandfather of a 16-year-old Turkish girl will face trial for burying her alive because she had developed friendships with boys.

The body of Medine Memi was found in a sitting position with her hands tied in a 6ft hole dug underneath a chicken coop outside her family’s home in Kahta, south eastern Turkey, 40 days after she had been reported missing.

According to a post mortem examination, a large amount of soil in her lungs and stomach revealed that she had been buried while conscious and suffered a slow and agonising death. Read More

Freedom fighter: Wildeers in court yesterday, as show-trial judges barred 15 out of 18 requested witnesses and decreed that the witesses they did allow would be heard in secret

The killer of Theo van Gogh and 14 of the other witnesses anti-Islam MP Geert Wilders wanted to call in his defence against charges of discrimination and inciting hatred have been ruled inadmissible by Amsterdam district court.

But three Islam experts proposed by Wilders will be heard behind closed doors, the judges said on Wednesday afternoon. They include American Syrian psychiatrist Wafa Sultan who believes the world is witness to ‘a battle between modernity and barbarism which Islam will lose’.

The court also turned down Wilders’ request to hear five legal experts on the grounds that the MP will have ample opportunity to say whether or not he agrees with them during the trial. He had wanted to call 18 experts and Muslim radicals. Read More

Let’s hear it for France:

The French government has refused to grant citizenship to a foreign national on the grounds that he forced his wife to wear the full Islamic veil.

The man, whose current nationality was not given, needed citizenship to settle in the country with his French wife.

But Immigration Minister Eric Besson said this was being refused because he was depriving his wife of the liberty to come and go with her face uncovered. Read More

The phenomenon of bogus marriages between Pakistani men and non-Pakistani foreign females is well known in Britain. But now the Immigration Jihad has spread across the Irish Sea, too. A long investigative article from The Times – but well worth the read:

Shortly after Muhammad Shafi made an application to marry his teenage Latvian “girlfriend” in a civil wedding ceremony in Donegal, detectives at the Garda National and Immigration Bureau (GNIB) were discreetly notified of his intentions. The bureau was in the middle of an investigation into sham marriages between Pakistani immigrants and eastern European women.

Operation Charity, as it was codenamed, was launched last year after officials in the Irish Naturalisation and Immigration Service (INIS), a division of the Department of Justice, noticed an increase in applications for residency permits from Asian men on the grounds they had married eastern European women with EU citizenship, which entitled them to reside in Ireland. Read More

Islamist Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan delivers a rant to Israeli PM Shimon Peres at the World Economic Forum, Davos, last year

Shocked - Shocked! ‘Tell me it ain’t so’ Dept:

The European Court of Human Rights said it issued 2,395 rulings in 2009, an increase of 27 percent from the previous year, with Turkey and Russia as the biggest offenders, according to annual figures released Thursday.

Judges issued 341 rulings against Turkey, more than 200 of them concerning the workings of its national courts and 30 following complaints of inhuman or degrading treatment.

Russia remained in second place with 210 rights violations, including three for torture and 84 for inhuman treatment – mostly from war-torn Chechnya.

Russia is also by far the biggest source of complaints with 28 percent. The foreign ministry in Moscow says many these relate to conditions in jails and abuses committed by government forces in Chechnya.

The Russian parliament has just voted to ratify a key protocol that allows reforms streamlining the Strasbourg court to go ahead.

The protocol had been blocked by Moscow lawmakers in 2006 amid complaints that the court was anti-Russian.

Europe’s top rights court is battling to come to grips with an increasing workload that soared by nearly a quarter last year. The number of pending cases at the Strasbourg tribunal rose by 23 percent to 119,300, the court said in its annual report.

The European Court of Human Rights, which celebrated its 50th anniversary last year, can be appealed to by 818 million people in the 47-country Council of Europe if they feel their national courts have failed.

From the country whose Prime Minister is currently issuing almost hourly lectures to Israel (a free and democratic country whose large Muslim Arab population enjoys standards of governance and rights completely unheard of in any Islamic country); comes this salutory lesson embodied by the ancient, advisory proverb inolving people, glass houses and stone-throwing.

Taste the sweet irony, Tayyip Bey.

[Source: Hürriyet Daily News]