Looking for a Christmas present for the militant activist in your life?
Then let Amnesty International Australia make a suggestion.
Its website’s shopping page offers several books, including ones on Nelson Mandela, Aung San Suu Kyi and the Dalai Lama, and, just in, a biography by a fourth human rights hero, David Hicks.
Yes, as in the Hicks who trained four times with al-Qaida, including after September 11, 2001.
As in the Hicks who boasted in letters he “got to fire hundreds of bullets” at targets in Kashmir as a fighter for the terrorist group, Lashkar e-Toiba.
As in the Hicks who told his parents he was"very well trained for jihad in weapons”, and prepared to fight the “Jews (who) have complete financial and media control”.
So why would Amnesty International sell the book of such a man?
Because the Americans held him without charge for six years at cruel Guantanamo Bay, AIA’s fundraising director, Peter Thomas, replies, and “many of our supporters would be interested . . . to gain another perspective on his personal story and his case”.
Besides, “this is only one of many books we have sold on Guantanamo Bay”, by which Thomas means to imply that other books sold by AIA give a very different side of the Hicks case, explaining just why it was right to detain a foot soldier of a terrorist group caught fleeing the battlefield.
In fact, I suspect the real reason is that Amnesty has been captured by ideologues more interested in American and Israeli “crimes” than in the mortal threat posed by Muslim terrorists to their citizens’ most fundamental right -- the right to live.
You see, Hicks’ book does not give “another perspective” to the crimes to which he ultimately confessed, because less than one of the 456 pages tells of his training with al-Qaida, and most of that little pretends he didn’t really.
Second, this is not “another” perspective, but the only one Amnesty recommends. Hicks’ is the only book about his case - or even the war on terrorism - sold on this AIA website, and I’m yet to find a single one Amnesty has ever sold that gives a counter version.
Which leaves Amnesty promoting just one perspective - a whitewash by a former jihadist who trained with killers, and is now honoured with a place next to Mandela.