Priorities. This is what you use the United Nations for: stopping a private entity in a distant country from republishing some drawings in a book. Under any other circumstances, the absurdity would be obvious and rightly laughed off, but, of course, double standards abound. “Tajikistan urges UN to try to stop republication of Muhammad cartoons,” from Interfax, May 6 (thanks to Weasel Zippers):
Dushanbe, May 5, Interfax – Tajikistan has urged the United Nations to take measures to stop a Norwegian firm from republishing a book containing cartoons satirizing the Muslim prophet Muhammad that set off global turmoil in 2005.
A letter to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon “expresses anxiety over the fact that the Norwegian printing press Cappelen Damm plans to republish the book Tyranny of Silence in May 2011,” the Tajik Foreign Ministry said in a statement. “This book contains cartoons that blaspheme the name of the Islamic prophet.”
Action must be taken. This urgently needs a response, from UNHCAAYPI, the United Nations High Commission on Asking “And Your Point Is?”
Tajikistan, which currently presides in the Organization of the Islamic Conference, had the text of the letter approved by all the other 56 member states of the OIC.
The 12 cartoons published in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten on September 30, 2005 first sparked protests in the Danish Muslim community, and were then condemned at an OIC summit in December 2005 and set off mass anti-Danish demonstrations in Muslim countries resulting in numerous fatalities.