There is an excellent interview of Andrew McCarthy by Jamie Glazov at Frontpage magazine this morning. McCarthy seeks to answer that throny question about how the Far Left has gotten in bed with Jihadists (who don’t respect women’s rights, gay rights, or a woman’s right to choose regarding abortion) and addresses the controversy at Amnesty International (AI) we first told you about here in February.
Here is a portion of what McCarthy says about AI:
People need to understand what Amnesty International is: a hard-left political organization. It is one of the bastions of what John Fonte calls transnational progressivism, and it’s agenda is a post-sovereign world theoretically governed by an abstraction AI calls “international humanitarian law” but, as a practical matter, ruled by the leftists who make up what this purported corpus of “law” means as they go along (just as they make up what “social justice” and other such abstractions mean to suit the exigencies of the moment).
This is not to say that AI is without authentic human rights activists. There are many people who are dawn to AI because of its admirable historic mission to pressure authoritarian governments that are serial human-rights violators. But as an institution, AI is a just another leftist hack, and the country it most chooses to pressure is the United States, for the American people’s great crimes of being free and self-determining and being uninterested in a post-sovereign order, and for pursuing our interests in the world, including our national security.
Moazzam Begg is a Taliban jihadist and former Gitmo detainee. The invaluable Tom Joscelyn (of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies) has done a great deal of work exposing him — such as in this Weekly Standard essay, which collects other Begg links. Much like CAIR, Begg has discovered that if you swaddle your Islamist activism in the rhetoric of human rights, and be sure to target the United States and Israel as the cause of the world’s problem, the hack leftist organizations will flock to you regardless of the atrocities you’re willing to commit or defend. Thus has AI made common cause with Begg and his British organization, “Cageprisoners.” That this should happen is not at all surprising to anyone who does a comparative study of leftist ideology and Islamist ideology — which is the subject of a book I’ve just finished, The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America, to be released by Encounter Books in late May.
Of course, the tie between AI and Begg is upsetting to individual, authentic human rights activists, both because it associates their cause with an ideology that rejects basic human freedoms (conscience, equality of the sexes, equality of Muslims and non-Muslims, sexual orientation, the ability to legislate irrespective of sharia dictates, etc.), and because it holds up the mirror to what AI really is (as opposed to the utopian vision of AI that caused them to gravitate to it in the first place).
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Simply stated, I think it demonstrates that AI and its wider movement are fraudulent. Maybe it was once about human rights. But now it is just about the international left’s campaign against human freedom.
Read the whole interview.
The Far Left and Islamic supremacists have one thing in common—they both seek totalitarian control and the big question is, if they succeed in bringing down capitalism and western culture rooted in a Judeo-Christian ethic, then what? My prediction on these pages in the past is that the Islamists will devour the Leftists.
Be sure to read Judy’s good post on the unholy alliance here in January.
I plan to get McCarthy’s book and am hoping he has a chapter on immigration which is one of several areas the Left is using to bring about their own (and our!) demise.