Amnesty International And Its 'Cage Prisoners' Poster Boy Get What They Wanted.

It would appear that the Al Qaida operative and British asylum seeker Mahmoud Abu Rideh is free at last, having been killed by an airstrike in Afghanistan following Amnesty International's hard-fought campaign to have him released from his UK control orders.

In July, 2009, AIUK reported their success this way: "Today the Home Office has agreed to issue Mohmoud Abu Rideh with the travel document he needs to leave the UK. Thank you to everyone who has joined our campaign, your voice has made a difference." Thank you for "making a difference" indeed.

Rideh was a poster boy for jihadist Moazzam Begg's Cage Prisoners outfit, which has enjoyed the support, the services and the platforms of Amnesty International, to the great dismay of AI supporters and some AI staff, most notably AI whistleblower Gita Saghal, who was turfed from her job as head of AI's Gender Unit for her trouble.

AI's bullying of Saghal, its suppression of internal dissent and its sordid associations with Islamist reactionaries are the subject of this fine essay by Marieme Helie Lucas, the founder and former international coordinator of the international solidarity network Women Living Under Muslim Laws. Note especially that "AI induced a hierarchy among victims, in which fundamentalists were privileged as victims of the state while women, the vast majority of whom were victims of the fundamentalists, disappeared from the scene. . . AI also induced a hierarchy of rights, in which minority rights, cultural rights, religious rights (and fundamentalist interpretations of these rights were accepted) came first and women’s rights came last."

I caught quite some heck of trouble last year for noticing these things and writing this op-ed on the very subject: Amnesty International Doubles Down On Appeasement. For background on what Mahmoud Abu Rideh has been up to and the implications for AI and Cage Prisoners, do read this: Al Qaeda Militant Killed In Afghanistan Was Amnesty, Cage Prisoners, Guardian, Indie Pin-Up.