Wanted: Plenty of Bactine For Amnesty International Staffer

First of all, if you send an email out to a group, for pity’s sake use the BCC field so that everyone doesn’t see everyone else’s email address. It’s just common decency not to expose your family and friends to spam via an oft-forwarded email. Second of all, if you do get one of those emails, be sure you hit Reply, not Reply to All if you don’t want to embarrass yourself. Kathy Shaidle recently schooled a clueless (willfully so?) Amnesty International staffer who thought he’d have a go at Geert Wilders. He’s going to need a lot of Bactine after her blistering replies.

The short version is a mutual acquaintance of Kathy’s and the Amnesty staffer sent out a mass email with a link to a Wilders video on Youtube.  The Amnesty staffer replied to all suggesting that since he’d never seen any problems with radical Islam in an Amnesty International human rights report, Wilders must be a loon who can safely be disregarded.  Kathy replied that “obviously all the threats to Wilders’ life, and the murder of Theo Van Gogh, and what they’ve done to Hirsi Ali, the Danish cartoonists, etc etc somehow didn’t make it into your AI ‘human rights reports.’” I do hope she replied to all when she wrote that; click through for the whole exchange, it’s very amusing.

I am not an enthusiastic Geert Wilders fan but at the same time, all that “nuance” that liberals claim to love so much never seems to be applied to defenders of western freedoms, does it?  Geert Wilders, Pat Condell, Hirsi Ali, Christopher Hitchens and a host of others disagree with me heartily over my faith but defend the values of the west that permit me to practice my faith freely.  They speak for the oppressed in Islamic countries that Amnesty International roundly ignores.  The top three stories at Amnesty International right now are:

1. Migrant workers in South Korea vulnerable to abuse and exploitation
2. Paraquayan bill rejection leaves 90 indigenous families living by the highway
3. Poverty is the world’s worst human rights crisis, says Amnesty International’s Irene Kahn

That is simply insane.  They take the time to criticize South Korea when North Korea is essentially a slave state?  They’re worried about Paraquay’s homeless when the Venezuelan government steals farms from their owners?  (And that worked out so wonderfully for Zimbabwe, formerly Africa’s breadbasket and a net exporter of food.)  Poverty is the worst human rights crisis, when Iranian protesters are murdered in the street?  That’s not to mention the abuse of women; honor killings, beatings for showing a hint of ankle, throwing acid in girls’ faces for the offense of attending school, being burned alive for the offense of trying to escape a burning school without being veiled, and child marriages, all of which have occurred, continue to occur in Islamic countries.  None of those countries are condemned on Amnesty’s Stop Violence Against Women Campaign page, which does take the time to criticize Peru for its abortion policy.

Anyone who does not recognize that radical Islam is a threat to the west is either not being truthful or not paying attention.   I guess I can give Amnesty International props for one thing in spite of their apparent uselessness.  Unlike the United Nations, their staffers are at least not known to rape the people they’re supposed to defend.