Muslim Hate of Free Speech
Freedom of Speech Is in the Eye of the Beholder
Friday , October 02, 2009
By Lauren Green
Fox News
The artist whose cartoon shook the world says his fight for freedom of speech is not about bashing religion, but about preventing violence and the criminalization of ideas.
“I have no problem with religion,” says Danish artist Kurt Westergaard, who was in the U.S. this week to inaugurate the first International Freedom of Speech Day, Sept. 30, which just happened to coincide with a more irreverent celebration called International Blasphemy Day.
Westergaard had very little to say about the latter event, which was marked by anti-religious antics and was sponsored by the Center for Inquiry and the Council for Secular Humanism.
“For me,” Westergaard says, “It’s not about blasphemy. It has to do with terrorism, threats, killings, other terrible things.”
The two events shared a common goal but differed widely in approaches. Both endorsed the right to express ideas without fear of criminalization. And both chose the anniversary of the deadly protests over Westergaard's cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad as the day to honor that fight.
The Center for Inquiry said its focus was “the right of individuals to express their viewpoints … about all subjects, including religion.” Events included a “Blasphemy challenge,” a contest in which participants were invited to submit videos containing phrases, poems or statements that would be considered blasphemous and were required to include the phrase "I deny the Holy Spirit."
The day featured De-Baptisms, where former believers denounced the Christian sacrament, and an artist’s exhibit with an irreverent depiction of the crucifixion of Christ, entititled, “Jesus gets his nails done.”
It was blasphemous, as intended.
“It strikes me as completely cracked,” said Diana West of the International Free Press Society, which sponsored Westergaard’s trip to the U.S. “The probable threat to freedom of expression is not coming out of Christianity.”
The Free Press Society, on the other hand, is squarely focused on Islam, which West says “is not a religion structured like Christianity or Judaism. It is not simply a divinity and faith. There’s no separation of Mosque and State.”
West says International Freedom of Speech Day offered an opportunity for “the media to do some soul-searching.” The concern, she said, is that journalists will tacitly abide by Shariah law under fear that their speech, illustrations or writings will bring death threats.
She said that was the impetus behind the Danish newspaper Jylland-Posten creating the forum for the series of "Muhammad" cartoons it published in 2005. A publisher of a children’s book could find no artist to depict the prophet Muhammad, because Islamic law forbids any visual representation of its Prophet, and the artists feared retribution.
Westergaard said all he did was depict “some people from the Muslim society who has [sic] a variant of Islam which inspires killing and terror.”
“Afterwards,” he said, “it turns out that I was right.”
Blasphemy Day organizers said they weren't out just to bash Christianity, as some critics claimed. Nathan Bupp, vice president of communications at CFI, pointed out that it was their magazine, “Free Inquiry,” which first published the Muhammad cartoons in the United States.
“I’m critical of all fanaticism and dogmatism,” Bupp said.
But Dr. John Rankin, president of the Theological Education Institute, says it’s simply easier to attack Christianity than Islam. He noted that apostasy laws (converting from Islam to another religion) carry a death sentence in some Muslim countries.
“You can’t be a former Muslim without persecution," he said. "But you can be a former Christian and safely bash Christianity.”
The cost of criticizing jihadists
UN resolution is part of Islamic muzzle
Nat Hentoff
Washington Times
Monday, February 9, 2009
Geert Wilders - a film producer and also a member of parliament in the Netherlands - is facing a prison term there for "insulting" Muslims. His short film "Fitna" in 2008 juxtaposed verses from the Koran with scenes of violence committed by jihadist terrorists. The Dutch appellate court refused a free-speech defense because the insults were so egregious.
If convicted, Wilders faces a maximum sentence of two years in prison. Said the defendant: "I lost my freedom already four and a half years ago in October 2004, when my 24-hour police protection started because of threats by Muslims in Holland and abroad to kill me."
I have heard from Muslims in this country that jihadists around the world have more than insulted traditional Muslim law by their fierce punishments of both non-Muslims and Muslims who have acted in speech or writing against jihadists' reinterpretations of the Quran. Some of these protesters, exercising freedom of conscience, have been killed for their "blasphemy."
What awaits Wilders in the Netherlands may be a harbinger of what will happen if a nonbinding Dec. 18 U.N. resolution, passed by a strong majority in the General Assembly, becomes international law. The resolution urges U.N. members to take state action against (punish) "defamation of religion" and "incitement to religious hatred" caused by defamation.
The main force behind this resolution, which was sponsored on its behalf, is the 57 members of the Organization of the Islamic Conference. Following the combustible cartoons of Prophet Muhammad that were published in Denmark in September 2005, this organization had a key role in expanding the violent protests against those cartoons in a number of countries.
On Feb. 9, 2006, I received a copy of a letter to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan from a longtime source of mine. He was acting against Sudan's National Islamic Front government killing, raping and enslaving of black Christians and animists in southern Sudan. He was John Eibner, director of Christian Solidarity International, which was instrumental in rescuing many of those captives from slavery in the north of Sudan.
Eibner told Annan (as I reported at the time in the Feb. 14, 2006, Village Voice): "The role of the Saudi-based Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC), representing 57 Muslim states, in creating a climate for violent confrontation over the cartoons [was shown when] the OIC set the stage for anti-free speech demonstrations at its extraordinary summit in Mecca in December 2005.
"The Muslim states," Eibner continued, "resolved - through many demonstrations - to pressure, through a program of joint Islamic action, international institutions, including the U.N., to criminalize insults of Islam and its prophet. ... On the 4th of February - the day the mob violence commenced - the Organization of Islamic Conference described publication of the caricatures as acts of 'blasphemy.' Blasphemy is punishable by death, according to Sharia law."
Revealingly, although there was outrage when, on Oct. 17, 2005, the Egyptian newspaper Al Fagr published the cartoons on its front page, there was nothing like the furious demonstrations elsewhere until after the Organization of the Islamic Conference summit meeting in December 2005.
After the OIC's focus on the cartoons at the Mecca summit, Syria, Iran, Egypt, Lebanon and Qatar went on to carry the inflammatory message of blasphemy. And the OIC's grand plan to get international institutions to criminalize insults of Islam began to work. On Feb. 9, 2006, the European Union asked for a voluntary code of conduct to prevent offending Muslims. And on the same day, Annan concurred with an OIC proposal that the U.N. Human Rights Council "prevent instances of intolerance, discrimination, incitement of hatred and violence...against religions, prophets and beliefs."
Last Dec. 18, the OIC triumphed with the U.N. General Assembly's passing of the nonbinding but rousing "defamation of religion" resolution on behalf of the OIC, which emphasized only Muslims and Islam by name as the forbidden targets of such "defamation." Pressure may well continue to enshrine this resolution into international law.
The OIC had a New York Times ad on Inauguration Day, Jan. 20, "An Invitation to a New Partnership," addressed to President Obama. The organization wrote: "Throughout the globe, Muslims hunger for a new era of peace. We firmly believe that America, with your guidance, can help foster that peace, though real peace can only be shared - never imposed."
The OIC, however, was at the time fresh from its U.N. victory to actually impose silence on critics of Islamic jihadists, who have long been working to hijack the true Muslim religion. And why has the press, particularly the American press, continued to be so silent on this U.N. attack on individuals' right of conscience throughout the world to call jihadist terrorism what it is? You might want to ask your news sources why they have ignored this global gag rule on free expression.
Nat Hentoff's column for The Washington Times runs on Mondays.
United Nations Anti-Blasphemy Resolution Curtails Free Speech
Monday, October 06, 2008
By Jennifer Lawinski
FOX News
Religious groups and free-speech advocates are banding together to fight a United Nations resolution they say is being used to spread Sharia law to the Western world and to intimidate anyone who criticizes Islam.
The non-binding resolution on “Combating the Defamation of Religion” is intended to curtail speech that offends religion -- particularly Islam.
Pakistan and the Organization of the Islamic Conference introduced the measure to the U.N. Human Rights Council in 1999. It was amended to include religions other than Islam, and it has passed every year since.
In 2005, Yemen successfully brought a similar resolution before the General Assembly. Now the 192-nation Assembly is set to vote on it again.
The non-binding Resolution 62/145, which was adopted in 2007, says it “notes with deep concern the intensification of the campaign of defamation of religions and the ethnic and religious profiling of Muslim minorities in the aftermath of 11 September 2001.”
It “stresses the need to effectively combat defamation of all religions and incitement to religious hatred, against Islam and Muslims in particular.”
But some critics believe the resolution is a dangerous threat to freedom of speech everywhere.
The U.S. government mission in Geneva, in a statement, told the U.N. Human Rights Council in July that “defamation-related laws have been abused by governments and used to restrict human rights” around the world, and sometimes Westerners have been caught in the web.
Critics give some recent news events as examples of how the U.N. "blasphemy resolution" has emboldened Islamic authorities and threatened Westerners:
-- On Oct. 3 in Great Britain, three men were charged for plotting to kill the publisher of the novel "The Jewel of Medina," which gives a fictional account of the Prophet Muhammad and his child bride. FOXNews.com reported U.S. publisher Random House Inc., was going to release the book but stopped it from hitting shelves after it claimed that “credible and unrelated sources” said the book could incite violence by a “small, radical segment.”
-- An Afghan student is on death row for downloading an article about the role of women in Islam, FOXNews.com also reported.
-- In December 2007 “a court reportedly sentenced two foreigners to six months in prison for allegedly marketing a book deemed offensive to Aisha, one of the Prophet Muhammad's wives,” the U.S. government said.
-- A British teacher was sentenced to 15 days in jail in Sudan for offending Islam by allowing students to name the class teddy bear Muhammad in November 2007.
-- In February 2007 in Egypt an Internet blogger was sentenced to four years in prison for writing a post that critiqued Islam.
-- In 2004, Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh was murdered after the release of his documentary highlighting the abuse of Muslim women.
“It’s obviously intended to have an intimidating effect on people expressing criticism of radical Islam, and the idea that you can have a defamation of a religion like this, I think, is a concept fundamentally foreign to our system of free expression in the United States,” said former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton.
Passing the resolution year after year gives it clout, Bolton said. “In places where U.N. decisions are viewed as more consequential than they are in the U.S., they’re trying to build up brick-by-brick that disagreement with this resolution is unacceptable.”
Kevin “Seamus” Hasson, founder and president of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a public interest law firm in Washington that opposes the resolution, said it is a slap in the face of human rights law.
“The whole idea of the defamation of religion is a Trojan horse for something else," Hasson said. "When you talk about defamation, you talk about people being defamed and people being libeled, but ideas can’t be defamed. Ideas don’t have rights, people have rights.”
He said the resolution is a shield for Islamic fundamentalists who retaliate against perceived offenses and want to make Islamic Sharia law the law of the land. He said the resolution passes under the guise of protecting religion, but it actually endangers religious minorities in Islamic countries.
“Who could possibly be in favor of defamation?” Hasson said. “God may well punish blasphemy in the hereafter, but it’s not the government’s job to police in the here and now.”
Paula Schriefer, advocacy director for Freedom House, a member of the Coalition to Defend Free Speech, agrees.
“You have to remember that many of the governments that are pushing forward this idea are not democratic governments,” she said. “Citizens of Pakistan or Egypt, who have been two of the ringleaders of this movement, are frequently put in prison or arrested. Even if they’re not arrested, the fear of being arrested creates an environment of self-censorship.”
Floyd Abrams, Visiting Professor of First Amendment Law at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, said that while Americans are protected by the Constitution at home, the U.N. resolution could affect those who travel to countries with anti-free-speech laws and isolate Westerners who oppose restricting religious dialogue.
Neither the Pakistani, the Indonesian nor the Egyptian missions to the U.N. responded to requests for comment. All three are members of the Organization of the Islamic Conference.
Concerns rise in Europe that freedom of expression is being eroded
The Associated Press
November 8, 2006
ROME: A Mozart opera canceled in Germany, surrealist art removed from a London exhibition, villages in Spain changing centuries-old festivities.
In recent months, several artistic or cultural events have been scaled down or scrapped in Europe apparently to avoid offending Muslims, raising concerns about freedom of expression.
Many believe the violent reaction by Europe's Muslim minorities to perceived insults to their religion has created a climate of fear in which self-censorship is becoming more common. And concerns that passions might even spill into Islamic terrorism — rarely far from European minds — have contributed to the urgency.
Europe has long grappled with the question of whether Islam is compatible with the West's democratic values.
The 1989 fatwa issued against Salman Rushdie over his novel "The Satanic Verses" was one of the first signs of a fault line that turned deadly in 2004 with the slaying of filmmaker Theo Van Gogh by a Muslim fanatic who was angered by the documentarist's depiction of Islam.
Van Gogh's collaborator Ayaan Hirsi Ali was forced to go into hiding. About a year later, violent protests erupted over caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad published in Denmark. And in September, Muslims reacted with outrage over comments on Islam by Pope Benedict XVI.
It has all raised thorny questions for Europeans.
Is it worth risking lives over free speech? Should there be laws protecting religious sensibilities? Or, as the publishers of the Danish cartoons have argued, can provocation be an effective political tool, a way of asserting one's loyalty to free society?
Many observers say Europeans are becoming overly cautious about offending Muslims, a tendency they see as imperiling the foundations of their society.
"We pretend not to see that it's the principles of liberalism that we are trampling on," said Angelo Panebianco, a leading Italian political analyst.
The Whitechapel Art Gallery in London said this month that it was removing some photographs by Hans Bellmer from an exhibition to avoid upsetting Muslims in the neighborhood. Part of the surrealist artist's work featured dolls of naked female children.
In September, a Berlin opera house canceled a production of Mozart's "Idomeneo" that depicted the beheading of Muhammad, leading German Chancellor Angela Merkel to warn against "self-censorship out of fear." The company has since announced it will stage the opera in December.
This fall, traditional Spanish festivals commemorating the country's expulsion of the Moors have also been scaled down, including one which did away with the custom of blowing up the head of a Prophet Muhammad dummy with firecrackers.
Meanwhile, many governments are debating whether to limit Muslims' ability to express their religious affiliations as a means of encouraging them to integrate.
Former British foreign secretary Jack Straw created a stir recently by saying wants Muslim women to abandon the veil — a view supported by Prime Minister Tony Blair and much of the British public. It was a striking shift in a nation that takes pride in multiculturalism.
Questions of self-censorship on religious grounds are not limited to the debate over Islam.
Earlier this year, theaters in Britain dropped plans to produce "Jerry Springer — The Opera" after it was targeted by a small but vocal group Christian group that picketed the London theater staging the show featuring a diaper-wearing Jesus Christ who says he is a "bit gay."
A controversy over a play that offended Britain's Sikh community highlighted a religious-secular split in 2004. The play's author, a Sikh woman, went into hiding after receiving death threats.
And Christian groups in Europe reacted with outrage at Martin Scorsese's 1988 "Last Temptation of Christ," which depicted Jesus dreaming about marrying and having children. A Paris cinema showing the movie was firebombed.
However, Europe's debate on free speech has focused on Islam because of the frequency of confrontations, the way they often involved thousands of angry Muslims, and their level of violence.
One leading European thinker believes it is dangerous and disingenuous to underestimate the power words have to wound people at the very core of their being.
"Words are not innocent," French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy told the Corriere della Sera. "Language is not a neutral means ... it is charged with meaning, with violence."
Indian Muslim Extremists Attack Human Rights Activist Author At Book
Launch
August 9, 2007
Linda Young - AHN News Writer
Hyderabad, India (AHN) - Exiled Bangladesh feminist author Taslima Nasreen was attacked by Muslim extremists on Thursday in Hyderabad, India at a launch of a Teluga language version of one of her novels. Muslims have accused the humanist rights activist of ridiculing their faith and religion in general.
Nasreen, who was attacked by a group of lawmakers and members of a political party, retreated into a corner where supporters protected her. The group of 100 assailants had broken into a meeting where the author was presenting a translated version of one of her novels.
The attack on Nasreen was only the most recent incident against her. In March, an Indian Muslim group called for her execution and put a bounty on her head. Nasreen is a former Muslim who says she has become an atheist.
Nasreen is a physician, author, feminist human rights activist and secular humanist who won the 1994 Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought. Calls for her execution because of her writing caused her to flee Bangladesh for Sweden in 1994. She has lived in Calcutta for the past two years and has applied for citizenship.
Nasreen vowed not to be cowed by her persecutors.
BBC news quoted Ahmad Pasha Quadri, one of the lawmakers, as saying, "Our protest is against Taslima Nasreen because of her writings ridiculing Islam. We want the Indian government to send her back to Bangladesh."
Although Muslim extremists have accused her of ridiculing the Koran and calling for it to be changed, she has denied those charges.
On her website Nasreen wrote, "Nature says women are human beings, men have made religions to deny it. Nature says women are human beings, men cry out NO!"
She continues: "If any religion allows the persecution of the people of different faiths, if any religion keeps women in slavery, if any religion keeps people in ignorance, then I can't accept that religion."
But she doesn't categorize the attacks on her or the increasing conflicts that are contributing to conflict around the world as religious struggles.
On her website, she said she characterizes such conflicts as a "conflict between the future and the past, between innovation and tradition, between those who value freedom and those who do not."