southchild

The reaction of Amnesty International over the treatment of terrorists at Guantanamo marks the tragic descent of a once respectable, International organization into the sewer of jihad-loving anti-Americanism. By comparing the treatment of Gitmo prisoners to those in Soviet Gulag’s, AI has trivialized it’s entire mission and discredited the whole organization. This is bad news for the real political prisoners wasting away (or being tortured away) in places like North Korea and China.

An excellent piece by Christopher Hitchens about the absurdity of Amnesty International appears in Slate magazine. He concludes the discussion with this observation:

And now look. I think it is fairly safe to say that not one detainee in Guantanamo is there because of an expression of opinion. (And those whose “opinion” is that all infidels must die are not exactly prisoners of conscience.) Morally neutral on this point, apparently, Amnesty nonetheless finds its voice by describing the prison itself as “the gulag of our times.” No need to waste words here: Not everyone in the gulag was a “prisoner of conscience,” either. But if an organization that ostensibly protects the rights of prisoners is unaware of the nature of a colossal system of forced labor and arbitrary detention—replete with physical torture, starvation, and brutal execution—then the moral compass has become disordered beyond repair. This is not even neutrality between the fireman and the fire. It surely expresses a covert sympathy with the aims and objectives of jihad and an overt, if witless and sinister, hatred of the United States. If only this were the only symptom of that tendency.

Highly recommended reading.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 15th, 2005 at 3:02 pm and is filed under General, politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.