Sahgal objected to Amnesty's relationship with Moazzam Begg. She did not complain that Amnesty demanded due process for an Islamist interned in Guantánamo but that it treated him as a respectable partner. And not just Amnesty. A roll call of supposedly liberal organisations followed suit. Freedom from Torture, Human Rights Watch, Justice, Liberty, Redress, Reprieve, and the US Center for Constitutional Rights all promoted Begg. The Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trustan organisation set up by pacifist Quakers — and the Roddick Foundation — which was set up by a feminist — funded him. I speak from experience when I say that not only the managers of human rights charities but their supporters could not get enough of him. To the left-wing middle class of the last decade, Begg was a star: the ideal victim.

He was also an Islamist fighter in Bosnia, and the manager of a bookshop in Birmingham that was a magnet for cranks and extremists. He moved his family to Afghanistan because he admired Taliban rule so much he wanted to live under it. While there, he helped at a school for the children of al-Qaeda fighters, and one can guess that "empowering" girls through education was not the first aim of its curriculum. Nato forces captured him, and after the Americans released him from Guantánamo, he set up Cageprisoners. It claimed to be a human rights organisation of the sort that liberal ladies and gentlemen should endorse. Sahgal examined its websites and literature and found that the only prisoners it was interested in were jihadis — not much support for universal human rights there — and that Cageprisoners endorsed the oxymoronic concept of "defensive jihad", which in the case of Afghanistan involved para-militaries murdering civilians and executing teachers for allowing girls to learn to read and write.

Sahgal raised her concerns with her superiors at Amnesty. Their response said it all. Faced with a conflict between feminism and Islamism, Amnesty chose Islamism and in 2010 forced Sahgal out. (She later won compensation under laws that protect whistleblowers.) The "liberal" human rights group then announced that in its considered opinion defensive jihad was not "antithetical" to human rights.

The Sahgal affair was the biggest scandal the human rights movement has seen in years. In her attempt to explain why so many liberals and leftists have gone along with ideologists who want to kill liberals and leftists, Meredith Tax shows a novelist's insight into the psychology of delusion and betrayal.

When confronted with the horrors of the wars of Bush and Blair, many saw groups that can be fairly described as clerical fascists, as "anti-imperialist". As Vijay Prashad of Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, explained in an interview with Asian online journal, Political Notes, last year, while leftists opposed evangelical Christians in the US, and Hindu and Jewish nationalists, when it came to Hamas, the Taliban, Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood, "we are divided from them but not against them". They are against "imperialism" and therefore cannot be our enemies.