WAF STATEMENTS
Gita Sahgal and Amnesty International
(published February 2010)
On February 7, 2010, Gita Sahgal was suspended from her post at Amnesty International. If you would like more information, please go to the website Human Rights For All.
WAF is publishing this statement in support of Gita. We are concerned at the way in which Amnesty International has sought to address Gita Sahgal’s criticism of its involvement with Moazzam Begg. Surely Amnesty International should be able to tolerate questioning from one of its senior officials about its associations? Amnesty International’s equation of Gita Sahgal’s legitimate concerns with the demonisation of Guantanamo inmates as the ‘other’ by the neoconservatives and their allies in the West, in our view, amounts to a denial of internal and external accountability. What we need is a proper debate, not a closing down of debate of these important issues.
We admire and respect the work of Amnesty International to place women’s human rights on the agenda, and more generally we support Amnesty International’s campaign to highlight the plight of those who have been tortured, detained without trial and denied due process. However, we believe that it is right that Amnesty International’s stance is questioned in order to ensure that the debate on the War on Terror and religious fundamentalism is not reduced to the logic of ‘either you are with us or you are against us’. Woman Against Fundamentalism & Southall Black Sisters have sought to avoid such dead ends which fail to illuminate how and why human rights violations are perpetrated either by states or by religious fundamentalist movements.
We have fought against considerable odds to ensure that women’s human rights and those of other marginalised groups and minorities are universally accepted and addressed, especially in the face of violence and persecution by non-state actors, including all religious right wing forces who masquerade as anti-imperialist, development, human rights and anti-racist movements. Failure to acknowledge concerns that Gita Sahgal and others have raised about those who sympathise with, or have connections with, anti-democratic religious right forces in all religions, raises a concern that Amnesty International is not sufficiently committed to the rights of women and sexual minorities or freedom of expression.
When governments and individuals advocate ‘engagement’ with the Taliban – perhaps necessary to achieve peace – why are they not challenged on the authoritarian social and political agenda of the Taliban? We know from experience around the world, including post war Iraq, that women’s rights are the first to be traded in these political settlements.
If human rights are universal and indivisible – a view which we believe we share with Amnesty International – then it becomes all the more incumbent upon us all to double check who we take on as our partners. If, like us, Amnesty International accepts that the question should not be about whether some are more deserving of human rights than others, then it should urgently review its collaboration with those who sympathise with religious fundamentalist forces however difficult this may be. The time has come for all liberals working within the human rights arena to engage their critical faculties, not suspend or leave them behind for fear of being labelled Islamaphobic, anti-Semitic or racist. There is another way of looking at human rights – one which does not trade women’s rights or those of other vulnerable minorities - for either the right to security or for the right to manifest religious identity.
Peter Tatchell and Islamophobia
(published February 2010)
WAF recalls its commitment to the abolition of the blasphemy law and its defence of free speech. WAF believes that the threat of the far right is one of the key concerns today, and that the far right is establishing itself as both racial and religious movements across all religions, a fight against the reconstitution of the far right should recognise it clearly in all its forms.
WAF believes that terms such as anti-semite and Islamophobe are used as a disabling tactic against people who criticise religion and fundamentalists. This tactic is used to trash reputations, to silence critique and to stop political activism. In particular, in the current context where religious identities and faith-based organising is being privileged and where ‘anti-imperialist’ activism has become about defending any and all ethnic minority religious voices, no matter how right wing and at great cost to equality campaigns, those advocating secular solutions and secular spaces are being accused of racism and Islamophobia.
In that light, WAF supports the right of Peter Tatchell and numerous other gay activists to oppose the legitimisation of fundamentalists and other right wing forces on university campuses, by the Left and by the government in its Preventing Violent Extremism strategy and numerous other programmes and platforms. The fight against fundamentalism and other forces of the far right, cannot be limited to a single strategy, nor is it an intra-religious struggle. It is a struggle for universal values including the struggle for sexual autonomy and human rights for all.
WAF recalls the slogan ‘Fear is their weapon, courage is ours’ and invites everyone to renew its commitment to struggle against fundamentalism in all religions.
Women Against Fundamentalism
This statement has been issued in the light of attacks on Peter Tatchell in the book Out Of Place, whose publishers have since issued an apology to Peter on their website
PROTEST THE POPE!
(published February 2010)
Women Against Fundamentalism wholeheartedly opposes Gordon Brown's invitation to Pope Benedict XVI for a state visit to the UK in September 2010. This man should not be afforded state legitimacy, let alone state funding, for this particularly narrow missionary venture. WAF says: The Pope is not welcome here and especially not on our taxes or with the state's official support! We subscribe to the 'Protest the Pope Coalition' call for all progressive forces in the UK to unite and campaign against this visit.
WAF opposes the Pope's state visit and particularly the use of state funding to facilitate the visit of any such right wing religious leader. The estimated cost to the state will be something in the region of £20 million. This expense is scandalous, more so in an age of recession, and within a political context where essential public services – an ailing National Health Service, a rescinding public housing sector, an education system fending off billions of pounds worth of cuts – are severely compromised. This invitation is yet another example of a government-led faith agenda using up public resources in order to appease and legitimise right wing religious lobbies that are actively mobilising to compromise equalities and undermine hard fought for rights.
Pope Benedict holds some pretty ridiculous, nay abhorrent, views. He is renowned for claiming that the appropriate remedy for HIV/AIDS is chastity, not condoms, and he has already been associated with a stream of homophobic comments claiming that homosexuality is an ‘objective disorder’ and that gay marriage represents an ‘attack’ on the natural differences between men and women. Indeed, this is a Pope who has been actively creating a more conservative front in Catholicism, evidenced by his recent de-excommunication and rehabilitation of Bishop Williamson, a notorious Holocaust denier and one of five bishops in the ultra-right Society of Pius X (linked with Le Pen in France).
In the last few days alone, the Pope's challenge to the Equality Bill is a highly intolerant claim for the ‘freedom of religious conviction’, an overt call to quell dissent within the Catholic Church and revert to a very restricted interpretation of the Gospel. This narrow interpretation is widely contested by other sections within his own church, such as LGBT Christians, who are being denied full participation and their right to express freedom of religious conviction altogether, thanks to his interventions.
Moreover, on this question of being accountable to all his congregation, the Pope's recent expressions of shock in response to the findings of the Murphy Report into child sexual abuse within the Irish Catholic Church cannot camouflage the overall way that he has handled this issue – he refused to allow the Vatican to be involved in the inquiry and his subsequent statements have not called for action against the offenders or sought to apologise for the Church hierarchy's collusion in the perpetuation of abuse. Most recently he has outraged survivors groups by refusing the resignation of two bishops named in the report.
WAF is a member of the Protest the Pope Coalition. Clara Connolly of WAF and Pragna Patel of Southall Black Sisters will be speaking at the rally on September 18.