Salman Rushdie has done something good — and I don’t mean a new novel. He has spoken up for Gita Sahgal and against Amnesty International. Who is Sahgal? She is an official of Amnesty International who has now been suspended. She had opposed, publicly, an alliance between Amnesty and a man named Moazzam Begg. He is a former Guantanamo detainee who has a group called Cageprisoners. He is a major supporter of the Taliban — in fact, an Islamist. His shtick, apparently, is that terror detainees and their ilk are human-rights victims. Sahgal finds it all obscene, and so do others.

One of them is Rushdie. He said in a statement, “Amnesty International has done its reputation incalculable damage by allying itself with Moazzam Begg and his group Cageprisoners, and holding them up as human rights advocates. It looks very much as if Amnesty’s leadership is suffering from a kind of moral bankruptcy, and has lost the ability to distinguish right from wrong. It has greatly compounded its error by suspending the redoubtable Gita Sahgal for the crime of going public with her concerns.” For the complete statement, go here. And for a news article on the matter, go here. Rushdie knows a thing or two about Islamists: about the threats they pose, about their exploitation of free societies. There is much more to say about the Amnesty/Begg/Cageprisoners case, but let me confine myself to this: Amnesty is a frustrating organization. Don’t you think? It is like Human Rights Watch in the respect I mean. Sometimes, these groups are sterling and invaluable. Sometimes, they turn the concept of human rights on its head. Amnesty won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1977. (Groups and institutions can win it, as well as individuals. Remember that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change won it in 2007, along with Al Gore. That was a wise one, wasn’t it?) An alliance with Islamists is a serious taint on Amnesty’s record. But before I skip on to the next item, let me say something positive about the organization. After the Cuban prisoner of conscience Orlando Zapata Tamayo died following a hunger strike — this was on February 23 — Amnesty official Gerardo Ducos said, “Faced with a prolonged prison sentence, the fact that [Zapata] felt he had no other avenue available to him but to starve himself in protest is a terrible indictment of the continuing repression of political dissidents in Cuba.” Very, very well put.

‐I was interested in this headline from yesterday: “Al-Qaida growing in strength and numbers in Africa.” And the first sentence of the report read, “Al-Qaida’s terror network in North Africa is growing more active and attracting new recruits, threatening to further destabilize the continent’s already vulnerable Sahara region, according to U.S. defense and counterterrorism officials.”

A very quick point: Since 2003, I have heard, constantly, “We Americans created al-Qaeda in Iraq. There was no al-Qaeda until we got there. It is all our fault.” Okay. But what about North Africa? We haven’t invaded and occupied that region, have we? We are not trying to foster democracy — or at least non-tyranny — there, are we?

‐You may have read about the new U.S. embassy in London — go here, for example. The new embassy is controversial, not least for its cost, which is something like a billion. And people are arguing about the design, of course — there will be a moat! I’m not sure what I think about the design. But I know I think this: The United States should have a grand, no-expense-spared embassy in London — something befitting a superpower, and befitting the Anglo-American relationship, which is key. Our government spends on all sorts of things, and some of those things are questionable. A London embassy is truly, inarguably something the government should spend on — and let us spend big.

‐The article I have linked to, above, about the embassy, reminded me that there is to be a statue of Reagan — a statue in Grosvenor Square, near the present embassy (soon to be the old embassy). Reagan will not be moving to the new site. But that aside, I am sort of agog at the idea of a statue of Reagan in London. He was so vilified and denigrated. And now, a statue! Marvelous.

‐Still on the subject of Britain: David Cameron, the Conservative leader, is sinking in the polls, whereas Prime Minister Brown, the Labourite, is rising. I think of the old Goldwater slogan: “A choice, not an echo.” The Goldwater campaign went badly (in that it lost hugely to LBJ). But, for Cameron, echoing seems not to be working too well either.

‐My National Review colleague Nathan Goulding sent me a note. He said,

Thought you’d find this interesting. There’s a game for the iPhone called “Titanic Rescue” where you try to catch as many people jumping out of the burning Titanic as you can. If you don’t catch them, they splash into the water and die. If you catch them, you get points. Harmless, I suppose. But it made me wonder: In a hundred-ish years, will there be a game called “9/11 Rescue” where the point is to catch people jumping out of the Twin Towers?

I have not seen the Titanic game, but it sounds a little macabre at best and disgusting at worst. We are talking about a real event and real people.

By the way, some of us think of my colleague as “Nathan the Wise” — the designation coming from an old German play (Nathan der Weise!).

‐For some time now — years — I have been banging on about the ’08 Beijing Olympics and the deleterious effect of those Games on human rights. Of course, the Games were sold to us as a way to enhance human rights for the Chinese. Great, great.

If you can stand it, have one more report about the death of one more Falun Gong person — this one a woman named Gao Qiying.

Gao . . . had been abducted in 2008 before the arrival of the Olympic torch in her town. She died in custody on February 12, 2010 . . . within weeks of complaining to her family that prison authorities had injected her with an unknown drug. Gao is the 10th Falun Gong practitioner whose death from abuse the Falun Dafa Information Center has confirmed in 2010, though the actual toll is almost certainly higher.
“Sadly, Ms. Gao’s case contains two aspects that are all too common among the cases of Falun Gong practitioners in China,” says Falun Dafa Information spokesperson Erping Zhang. “One is the use of unknown drugs to mentally and/or physically incapacitate practitioners in an effort to force them to renounce their beliefs, and the second is the use of ‘Olympic security’ as an excuse to abduct Falun Gong practitioners.” . . .
Ms. Gao was a resident of Zunyi in Guizhou, where she worked photographing tourists in order to provide for her two sons and their education. She had been born with a physical disability to her back and chest, which caused her difficulty walking and breathing.

As I keep saying, the Western enthusiasts for the Beijing Olympics have a lot to answer for — I mean, those enthusiasts who insisted, as insist they did (I chronicled this exhaustively), that the Games would be good for human rights. But they are never called on to answer, are they?

I will bang on some other time . . .

‐Speaking of banging on: In the last several columns, I have talked about Internet freedom, expanding on a piece I had in a recent NR. I have touched on China, the Arab lands, Iran, and Cuba. Today, in conclusion, some general remarks? Okay.

A few weeks ago, I talked with my friend Ignat Solzhenitsyn, middle son of the writer. (Ignat is a pianist and conductor.) He said he just happened to be re-reading 1984 — where the government has complete control of the technology.

That put me in mind of Communist Romania. Do you remember? Ceausescu and his lovely, philanthropic wife Elena had the entire country wired. Citizens were spied on, day and night. And they were defenseless. Privacy was virtually nonexistent. Every single telephone came equipped with a microphone — not merely to record phone conversations, but everything that went on in the room. This system was brutally effective. Communist Romania was an almost perfect Orwellian state.

Thinking of his parents and their friends, Ignat marvels at what dissidents can do today. They don’t make dictatorships like they used to! (Except in a few places: Cuba, North Korea, Burma . . .) China allows a great deal of Internet access, rotten and cruel as that state is. Would the Soviet Union have allowed any access? The Soviets banned even copying machines, to say nothing of fax machines later. For that matter, Albania banned the ownership of cars.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s books got around because they were typed, one copy at a time. The writer’s friends and allies would do this, painstakingly. Imagine how difficult or tedious it is to type even a few pages of a book, Ignat said to me. Now imagine typing the whole book — and doing it in secrecy, at risk of capture, imprisonment, and death.

How much faster would the Soviet empire have collapsed with today’s technology — e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, and all that? How much could the Soviets have succeeded in controlling?

‐Our defense secretary, Robert Gates, made some interesting comments last summer. This was when the democratic protests in Iran were big. And remember he is, or was, what we used to call a “Sovietologist.” He said that the new media — Facebook, etc. — represented “a huge win for freedom around the world.” No longer was a “monopoly of information” in the “hands of the government.” A dictatorship, Gates said, “just can’t draw the net tight enough to stop everything. If you can’t text, then you Twitter.”

Maybe. But tyrannical governments have proven ingenious at thwarting and stifling their citizens. Citizens think of ways to break out; governments think of ways to clamp down. And so it goes.

‐In Cuba, there is a man — an independent journalist named Guillermo Fariñas — who so prizes Internet freedom, he once went on a long hunger strike for it. Reporters Without Borders gave him its cyber-freedom award for 2006. To read about him, and this award, go here.

Incidentally, Fariñas is black — an “Afro-Cuban” — like so many others in the forefront of Cuba’s democratic movement. Think of Biscet, Antúnez, the late Zapata. I was always told, by liberal apologists for the Cuban dictatorship, that the revolution was particularly good for blacks. Weren’t you told the same thing?

‐I think I’ll close these jottings on Internet freedom with something I have included in Impromptus before — I hope you won’t mind the repetition. When Google announced it would no longer censor its search engine in China, a touching thing happened: Day after day, ordinary Chinese trooped to the company’s Beijing offices to leave notes and flowers — in appreciation for Google’s pro-freedom stand. There are worse reasons to present notes and flowers, right?

‐Okay, a few items to finish out. I don’t think I’ve said anything about Al Haig since his passing — I’d like to now. I got a kick out of him, and I’ll tell you one of my favorite stories. He was famous for his dense, tangled language, you may recall. Sometimes, people could not understand him. One day, word leaked that he had called his British counterpart — Lord Carrington, I believe — a “duplicitous bastard.” This was during the Falklands War. Confronted with the allegation, he said, “It couldn’t have been me — it’s far too clear.”

Also, he ran for president (briefly), and I remember seeing a clip of him out in a field, talking with an Iowa farmer. He said, “Remember the name — Haig, as in the scotch whisky.”

‐Have a look at this by Tish Durkin. It is a charming, tart column on the offenses committed by airlines against their passengers. As I mentioned to her, Bill Buckley used to write these columns regularly. He flew more than just about anyone else — and he was flying in the days when relatively few people did so. When he was inconvenienced or shafted by an airline, he would dash off a column, while he was hot. He would sometimes do this in the airport he was stuck in. I remember, particularly, a column called “Beware Varig” — Varig being the Brazilian airline.

‐I grinned at this letter, and maybe even some liberals will, too?

Mr. Nordlinger,
A friend and I have been discussing “collectives” — collective nouns — such as a “murder of crows,” a “pod of whales,” and a “bevy of swans.” We have been trying to come up with a collective for liberals. We considered a “cacophony of liberals,” an “arrogance of liberals,” and a “piety of liberals.” Then we thought to keep things simple: What about a “collective of liberals”? What do you think?

I like it, much! By the way, here are a few of my favorite collective nouns: a “passel of hogs”; a “mob of kangaroos”; an “exaltation of larks” (many people’s favorite); a “parliament of owls”; a “conspiracy of ravens”; and a “party of jays.”

‐In a column last week, I mentioned an encounter with a Moroccan on a Manhattan street. This prompted the below note:

Hi Jay,
One night, I hailed a cab and got to talking with the driver. He asked me to guess where he was from. Based on the accent, I said Egypt, and he said, “Close — Morocco.” It was then that I noticed that his license had the name “Michael Eastwood” on it. The picture, though, was definitely of him. I asked about the name — and he explained that he had wanted the most American name he could think of, when he became a citizen. “Eastwood,” as in Clint, of course, said “America” to him.
Thought you might enjoy this!

Absolutely.

‐Here in Impromptus and on the Corner, I have been publishing stories about panhandlers — panhandlers and their techniques. This one is pretty much irresistible:

True story — mid-’70s, Times Square. Tom Poston and Jerry Orbach are walking along with a reporter. A disheveled fellow approaches them and says, “I’m not going to lie to you, I need a drink.” Poston reaches into his pocket, pulls out a buck, extends it, then withdraws it briefly, saying, “How do I know you’re not going to spend this on food?”

‐Thanks for joining me, friends, for this long, rambly Impromptus. (As distinguished from what other editions, huh?) The column will go on a bit of a hiatus, I think, because I’ll be gadding about (as WFB might say). (Once, proposing a trip, he said to me, “Do you ever gad about in a car?”) See you before the Ides of March, I feel sure!

#JAYBOOK#