The Sunday Herald of Scotland has an article that gives Richard Dawkins far too much credit for a program run by CFI that helps rescue freethinkers facing persecution and murder around the world. The article is entitled “How Richard Dawkins became the Scarlet Pimpernel for atheists fleeing religious persecution.”





Secular Rescue is an organisation established by the Washington-based Center for Inquiry (CFI), which seeks to bring about a secular society based on reason, science and freedom of inquiry. So far, it has helped more than 30 people in Bangladesh and elsewhere who have been at risk from militant religious extremists. Secular Rescue was launched as a response to the murders in Bangladesh of secular writers and activists, starting in 2015 with Dr Roy, a naturalized US citizen born in Bangladesh. He had worked closely with CFI and many at CFI saw him as a friend. When the murders kept happening, the Center launched the initiative to start helping rescue secularists. At the start of last year CFI merged with the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason & Science to form the largest secularist organization in the US, the Dawkins Foundation becoming a division of CFI. Professor Dawkins, of course, is the renowned evolutionary biologist and atheist, author of such bestselling books as The God Delusion, The Selfish Gene and The Blind Watchmaker. Speaking of the work carried out by Secular Rescue, Dawkins said: “The Center for Inquiry…does an enormous amount where it can. For example, we have a program called Secular Rescue, where we go in there and, literally, rescue people in danger of their lives because they are threatened because they’re apostates or blasphemous and are threatened”.

Now please don’t misunderstand me here. I am very happy that this program is getting attention and that Dawkins is using his fame and his platform to promote it. I think that’s great. This program is very important to me and to many others and any help that Dawkins can give in terms of promotion and fundraising is very much welcome. But I also thought it might be worth telling the story of how Secular Rescue came about, which the article gets wrong as well. Because I was there at the very start.

The whole thing started on the night before I was running a lobby day for CFI – Michigan, where I am the chair of the advocacy committee for the board of advisors, in 2015. It was our first time doing a lobby day and I had spent weeks and weeks setting up meetings with legislators, planning training sessions, putting together policy statements, researching proposed bills, and much more. Michael De Dora, who was then the head of CFI’s Office of Public Policy, was kind enough to join us for that event.

The night before, he and I and the CFI – Michigan leaders were sitting around the pool at the hotel working out some last minute details when I got an email from Taslima Nasrin. She was in a panic because the same group that had murdered atheist advocates in Bangladesh were now publicly threatening to kill her as well. She needed to get out of India and go somewhere safe. I showed that email to Michael and we immediately started talking about the options.

The next day, in between meetings with legislators, he and I were both on the phone with several people making arrangements to get her out of harm’s way. It was a crazy, frantic day as we were all worried about her safety and knew the danger was very real and very immediate. That day and in subsequent conversations, I told Michael that I had long thought we needed an organization to handle situations like that. Taslima was only one of a huge number of freethinkers around the world, mostly in Muslim-dominated countries, who were at constant risk of arrest (leading to prison or execution, depending on the country) and of being hunted and killed by individuals or mobs.

I even suggested that a whole new organization be created, one that raises funds to transport and settle those at risk in countries where they would be safe to speak their minds, and also with experts in immigration, refugee and asylum laws in the United States and Europe. But Michael had already started the ball rolling at CFI to establish what was then called the Freethought Emergency Fund (I’m pretty sure that was the term), later renamed Secular Rescue. The real credit goes to Michael, Ron Lindsay, Debbie Goddard and others at the CFI Transnational headquarters, who saw the need and stepped up to the plate.

As the Sunday Herald article notes, Secular Rescue has helped people get out of countries like Bangladesh, where Muslim extremists are always trying to kill them, and get them to the United States, Canada, Germany and other countries where they are safe. I’m proud of the small role I played in making that happen, but even more gratified by the work that Michael (who is sadly no longer with CFI), Deb and the rest of the CFI staff did in moving quickly to establish the program and make it a life-changing reality.

And I’m glad that Richard Dawkins is helping promote it. That can only help with fundraising (which is important because it’s expensive to not only buy plane tickets but support these dissidents financially for a period of time until they can become established in their new countries) and visibility. But let’s give the credit for putting that project together to the people who really did the work.