Looking into the Darkness

The mainstream media present us with a picture of a liberal democracy perhaps going too far in dealing with ‘terrorists’. And yet… A word that is increasingly being associated with Israel is ‘evil’. For example, the leading Israeli human-rights lawyer Michael Sfard has called its regime in the occupied West Bank ‘one solid mass of distilled evil’.

Is such language justified? How do we make sense of it? And how should we respond to it?

Moazzam Begg is a senior director of the prisoner rights organisation Cage International.

He was himself falsely imprisoned in Bagram and Guantánamo Bay for nearly three years after being abducted by the CIA in Pakistan in 2002. He later successfully sued the British government for complicity.

In 2006, readers of the New Statesman ranked him 21st in their top 50 ‘heroes of our time’. His memoir, co-written with Victoria Brittain and published that year, was ironically titled Enemy Combatant. Philippe Sands praised it for its ‘striking’ humour and warmth, and Yasmin Alibhai-Brown compared it to the ‘Holocaust testimonies’ of Primo Levi and Hugo Gryn, observing that Begg ‘writes with the same authenticity and conveys horror without hyperbole’.

You can read Huw Spanner’s interview of him for Sublime here.