At the end of February Claudio Cordone, interim Secretary General of Amnesty International, wrote to three South Asian women's rights activists - Amrita Chhachhi, Sara Hossain and Sunila Abeysekera - in response to the petition they'd got up on the issues raised by Gita Sahgal concerning Amnesty's collaboration with Moazzam Begg and Cageprisoners. Cordone's reply to them contains the following:
Moazzam Begg and others in his group Cageprisoners also hold other views which they have clearly stated, for example on whether one should talk to the Taleban or on the role of jihad in self-defence. Are such views antithetical to human rights? Our answer is no, even if we may disagree with them...
Since in the same letter Cordone says that 'we would never share a platform with someone... who openly espouses an ideology predicated on hatred and the killing of civilians', one must assume that he entertains a concept of 'jihad in self-defence' that does not accommodate the killing of civilians or other practices 'antithetical to human rights'. All the same, for the Secretary General of Amnesty International, no less, to give a clean, unqualified bill of health to self-defensive jihad is breathtaking. Can Cordone be unaware that there are other interpretations of defensive jihad that are rather more 'lenient' towards activities breaching human rights than is the benign notion of it with which he is evidently operating? This Chhachhi, Hossain and Abeysekera have now pointed out to him. (See also here under 1) The concept of 'defensive jihad'.) That one of Amnesty's leading officials can either display or affect ignorance of facts which half the world knows and the organization itself has a duty to know is a measure of how far off course Amnesty has strayed in this matter.