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Huge victory for the stealth jihad: UN passes measure limiting free speech

Nov 25, 2008 9:40 am By Robert Spencer

This has been a long time coming. The UN anti-blasphemy measure, although non-binding at this point, is part of a larger and long-term effort to restrict speech that Islamic authorities dislike, including honest examination of the motives and goals of jihad terrorists. The only victors can be the jihadists themselves: Western authorities, already mired in politically correct myopia, will grow even more afraid to speak openly about what they’re trying to do and what we can do to stop it. The losers can only be those who value freedom of speech and understand why it is so important in a genuinely pluralistic society. The UN measure moves the West one step closer to submitting to the hegemony of Islamic norms.

“UN anti-blasphemy measures have sinister goals, observers say,” by Steven Edwards for Canwest News Service, November 24 (thanks to Kathy Shaidle):

UNITED NATIONS – Islamic countries Monday won United Nations backing for an anti-blasphemy measure Canada and other Western critics say risks being used to limit freedom of speech.

What? Canada still has free speech?

Combating Defamation of Religions passed 85-50 with 42 abstentions in a key UN General Assembly committee, and will enter into the international record after an expected rubber stamp by the plenary later in the year.

But while the draft’s sponsors say it and earlier similar measures are aimed at preventing violence against worshippers regardless of religion, religious tolerance advocates warn the resolutions are being accumulated for a more sinister goal.

“It provides international cover for domestic anti-blasphemy laws, and there are a number of people who are in prison today because they have been accused of committing blasphemy,” said Bennett Graham, international program director with the Becket Fund, a think tank aimed at promoting religious liberty.

“Those arrests are made legitimate by the UN body’s (effective) stamp of approval.”

Passage of the resolution is part of a 10-year action plan the 57-state Organization of Islamic Conference launched in 2005 to ensure “renaissance” of the “Muslim Ummah” or community.

While the current resolution is non-binding, Pakistan’s Ambassador Masood Khan reminded the UN’s Human Rights Council this year that the OIC ultimately seeks a “new instrument or convention” on the issue. Such a measure would impose its terms on signatory states.

“Each time the resolution comes up, we get a measure of where the world is on this issue, and we see that the campaign has been ramped up,” said Hillel Neuer, executive director of the Geneva-based monitoring group UN Watch.

While this year’s draft is less Islam-centric that resolutions of earlier years, analysts note it is more emphatic in linking religion defamation and incitement to violence.

That “risks limiting a broad range of peaceful speech and expression,” Neuer argues.

The 2008 draft “underscores the need to combat defamation of religions, and incitement to religious hatred in general, by strategizing and harmonizing actions at the local, national regional and international levels.”

It also laments “Islam is frequently and wrongly associated with human rights violations and terrorism.”

But of course they are referring to non-Muslims who report on how Muslims associate Islam with human rights violations and terrorism. They are not referring to the Muslims who actually make these associations.

But Western democracies argue that a religion can’t enjoy protection from criticism because that would require a judicial ruling that its teachings are the “truth.”

“Defamation carries a particular legal meaning and application in domestic systems that makes the term wholly unsuitable in the context of religions,” says the U.S. government in a response on the issue to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.

“A defamatory statement . . . is more than just an offensive one. It is also a statement that is false.”

And that’s just it. Here, here and here are three examples of Islamic groups regarding true statements about Islam as defamatory. And that reveals the real agenda of anti-blasphemy measures.

The paper also points out the legal difficulty of even defining the term “defamation” since “one individual’s sincere belief that his or her creed alone is the truth conflicts with another’s sincerely held view of the truth.”

Precisely.

Yemen, on behalf of OIC, successfully introduced the measure to the UN General Assembly for the first time in 2005 after Pakistan first tabled it 1999 for annual consideration in the Human Rights Commission – the Council’s forerunner. […]

Muslim countries say they are only trying to cut down of what they see as extensive bias against Islam in the West. In the lead-up to Monday’s vote, many referred, for example, to the 2005 publication of Danish cartoons that satirized Muhammad, and which touched off riots through the Muslim world….

Cut down on Islamic terrorism, and you will see an end to this alleged “extensive bias against Islam in the West.”

Read it all.

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