The OIC argues that religion needs to be protected from “defamation” – acts such as the publication of newspaper cartoons satirizing Mohammed, or the suggestion that the Koran promotes violence against non-Muslims.

By Patrick Goodenough,/CNS News

Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu: whatever it takes to shut you up….

(CNSNews.com) – As support wanes for its campaign to secure controversial but non-binding “defamation of religion” resolutions at the United Nations, the Islamic bloc is pushing ahead with an alternative route – one that would carry the weight of international law.

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The OIC is now attempting to have a key U.N. panel amend an existing international treaty to encompass supposedly religiously defamatory speech.

Unlike the resolutions, changing the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD) to cover religion would be legally enforceable.

The Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) has for the past decade overseen the passage of non-binding resolutions at the U.N. General Assembly and human rights bodies.

Last week, the most recent effort passed in the General Assembly’s Third Committee, which deals with social, cultural, and humanitarian issues. It will go before the full General Assembly for a vote next month, but the committee vote indicates a continuing, measurable decline in support.

Eighty-one countries voted for the resolution, 55 opposed it and 43 abstained. The result showed less support for and more opposition against the resolution than for those introduced by the OIC over the last three years. (see graph)

As in past years, most support came from the 57-member OIC (although two members, Burkina Faso, and Cameroon, abstained) plus non-Muslim allies in the developing world, led by China, Russia, Cuba and Venezuela.

Comparisons of voting records from 2006 to date reveal a continuing erosion of support in Latin America. Chile, Mexico, Panama, Uruguay all voted against the OIC-led resolution this year, having abstained in 2008. Elsewhere, Lesotho and Sri Lanka were among those who moved from supporting the resolution in 2008, to abstaining this year.

The OIC argues that religion needs to be protected from “defamation” – acts such as the publication of newspaper cartoons satirizing Mohammed, or the suggestion that the Koran promotes violence against non-Muslims.

Although its resolutions purport to cover all religions, Islam is the only one cited by name. The text passed by the Third Committee voices concern that “Islam is frequently and wrongly associated with human rights violations and terrorism.”

The OIC campaign has been confronted by freedom of expression advocates who say the bloc is trying to shield Islam, its teachings, practices, institutions and leaders, from legitimate criticism or scrutiny.

Critics say defamation prohibitions should cover individuals, not religions. They charge that resolution proponents are trying to introduce in Western societies similar restrictions to those enforced in some Islamic countries, where converts from Islam or those with dissident views risk trial for apostasy or blasphemy.

‘Binding normative standards’

Unlike the nonbinding U.N. resolutions, the OIC’s alternative strategy proposes to develop “new binding normative standards relating to religious ideas, objects and positions,” including “legal prohibition of publication of materials that negatively stereotypes, insults or uses of offensive language on matters regarded by followers of any religion or belief as sacred.”

World’s chief foe of free speech wants to set up its own human rights body

• Professor Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu of Turkey has served as OIC secretary general since January 2005. 

Update:

Organization of the Islamic Conference to open office in Brussels to fight “Islamophobia” in Europe

Priorities: Gotta love ‘em. “OIC to open office in Brussels to fight Islamophobia,” by Servet Yanatma for Today’s Zaman, June 25:

The Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) will open a representative office and appoint an ambassador to Brussels to fight more effectively against Islamophobia in Europe.

They should try our handy five-step plan for dealing with the root causes of “Islamophobia.”  More>>

This is not a joke — although in a certain sense it is. “Islamic Bloc Wants to Set Up its Own Human Rights Body,” by Patrick Goodenough for CNS News, April 13 (thanks to JW):

(CNSNews.com) – A bloc of the world’s Islamic states, which has been accused of undermining human rights at the United Nations, is planning to establish its own “independent human rights commission.”

The Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), the 57-nation bloc of Muslim nations at the U.N., held a conference Sunday at its headquarters in Saudi Arabia to discuss the plan.

OIC Secretary-General Eklemeddin Ihsanoglu in a speech stressed that “human rights and man’s dignity are an integral part of Islam and core components of Islamic culture and heritage,” according to an OIC statement.

Just not the freedom of speech, apparently.

International interest in the issue of human rights had grown exponentially over the past two decades, said Ihsanoglu, a Turkish academic. The complexity of the issue called for the need to refine the Cairo Declaration on Human Rights, he added, “in keeping with the current global human rights discourse.”The 1990 declaration controversially states that all human rights and freedoms must be subject to Islamic law (shari’a), although senior Islamic leaders have over the years disputed the assertion that the Islamic document contradicts the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The OIC statement did not elaborate on how the bloc envisaged that the Cairo Declaration would be “refined.”

Among the OIC’s more active members are countries where shari’a is imposed to varying degrees. Critics say the tenets of Islamic law often result in discriminatory treatment of women, religious minorities, and converts from Islam to other faiths.

Arguing that Islam and Muslims are increasingly under attack, the OIC has over the past decade sponsored a string of controversial “defamation of religion” resolutions at the U.N. General Assembly and at the world body’s human rights agencies, the Commission on Human Rights and its successor Human Rights Council.

Opponents of the campaign say it amounts to an attempt to place Islam and some of the more controversial practices associated with it above criticism – to protect a religion, rather than its adherents, from “defamation.”…

* A little more on Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, the Turkish “historian of Islamic science” whose outward appearance is so deceptively modern and secular and sweet-reasonable, and then one realizes that that is merely camouflage and that his mental baggage, while not quite as primitive as that of the qaradawis and tantawis, is from the same product line manufactured by Islamic Tourister:

Against free speech, but for it

* Perhaps Ihsanoglu should ask the OIC to remove the 164 jihad verses from the Koran, for starters, things like “8:12 Strike terror in the hearts of the unbelievers”…

Of course, he is exercised about “attempts to equate Islam with terrorism” by non-Muslims, who make this equation simply by reporting accurately on the terrorists’ own stated justifications for their actions. He is not talking about the terrorists’ own “attempts to equate Islam with terrorism.” Those don’t bother him.

“Don’t link Islam to terror, Islamic chief urges,” by Robert Evans for Reuters, December 19 (thanks to JW):

GENEVA (Reuters) – The world’s top diplomat for Islam called on Friday for an end to what he termed efforts to equate the religion with terrorism and said the ‘demonization’ of Muslims around the world must be fought.

* Nothing Sada Cucumber can’t fix: US Envoy Vows to Boost
Ties with Islamic Countries

But speaking soon after the U.N. General Assembly passed an Islamic-sponsored resolution condemning “defamation of religion” for the fourth year in a row, Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu said his group was committed to respecting freedom of expression.

Ihsanoglu probably knows that he can’t have it both ways, but is hoping the West doesn’t figure that out in time to stop his anti-free speech initiatives.

There was a “rising tide of incitement to religious hatred and discrimination and intolerance targeting Muslims,” he told a meeting called by the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) at the United Nations in Geneva. The 57-nation OIC, based in Saudi Arabia, represents 1.5 billion Muslims.”Attempts to equate Islam with terrorism should be stopped. Stereotyping and demonization of Muslims should be combated,” said Ihsanoglu, a Turkish history professor who became OIC Secretary-General in 2005.

In a statement on Ihsanoglu’s remarks, Geneva spokesman for the International Humanist and Ethical Union Roy Brown argued that Islam was often linked to terror because perpetrators of many terrorist acts identify themselves as Muslims.

See a fuller statement from Roy Brown in this Jihad Watch exclusive.

The OIC calls on the media to suppress the truth

Roy W. Brown, former president of the International Humanist and Ethical Union, offers in this Jihad Watch exclusive an analysis of the Organization of the Islamic Conference’s attempts to destroy the freedom of speech:

On 2 December 2008, the General Secretariat of the OIC released a statement that is utterly breathtaking in its duplicity. I feel it must be refuted. The statement is entitled “Islam, the Religion of peace, tolerance and compassion”. It begins:“With the multiplicity of terrorist attacks perpetrated recently by deviant and fanatic individuals, the General Secretariat of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC) has noticed a tendency of a section of the media, to interpose the word “Islam” in reporting these incidences.”

“Noted a tendency”? Whyever could this possibly be? Could it perhaps be because the terrorists shout “Allahu Akbar!” when launching their attacks? Or leave video testimonies calling for all Muslims to join them in a Holy War against the infidel while calling for the establishment of a global caliphate? Might this perhaps have misled some commentators into believing that these “deviant and fanatic individuals” have something to do with Islam? Or, perhaps they have been misled by the slogan of the Muslim Brotherhood, “Death in the path of Allah is the greatest glory,” into thinking that Allah has something to do with Islam.

The OIC statement continues:

“Islam, the religion of peace, tolerance and compassion, that sanctifies the human soul, and whose universal message is one of mutual peaceful coexistence among all the peoples of the world, regardless of their ethnicities, race, religions, and which calls for kind reasoning and dialogue with all their fellow human beings, abhors and despises all such criminal acts and had enacted the utmost severe punishment for their perpetrators.”

But peaceful coexistence with non-Muslims only ever applies as long as they show their submission to Islam by paying the jizya, protection money, and accept their state of dhimmitude, and maybe not even then. Evidence the million Jews who have been forced from their homes in Arab lands and the 400,000 Christians who have been driven from Iraq by Islamists (who of course have nothing to do with Islam) since the American-led invasion.

Continue reading “The OIC calls on the media to suppress the truth”

* Check these links and see if any of them have anything to do with Islam:

*Florida: Iranian woman convicted of trying to get thousands of night-vision goggles for Iran’s military

* Moroccan jihadist gets 20 years for his involvement in killing 191 people in Madrid bombings

* Naive kid gets 15 years in Florida jihad terror case

* UK: Al-Qaeda terror director given life in prison

CAIR in Georgia  (Canada Free Press)
Why does CAIR feel that a Muslim woman has the right to curse out a non-Muslim judge in an American courtroom?

Covert war being waged against and within America and the West

Incident in Georgia: One Example of Islamist Agenda

Stealth Jihad Alert: Georgia judge jails Muslim woman for refusing to remove headscarf at security checkpoint

Stealth Jihad Update: is it a violation of a Muslim woman’s civil rights to have to remove her hijab at a security checkpoint? Or is it simply an unhappy consequence of the situation that her own coreligionists have forced upon us, and which she should be willing to put up with in the interests of protecting innocent civilians?

The real question is whether American law or Islamic law must give way when the two conflict. Underscoring that as the real issue here is the involvement of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation Hamas terror funding case, and a skillful practitioner of legal intimidation tactics.

“Ga. Judge Jails Muslim Woman Over Head Scarf,” from AP

 

“Where does it say in the Quran that you can’t do suicide bombs?”

He said it. If I had, it would have been “Islamophobic.” As it is, he could find justification for the practice, as some Muslims have, in the Qur’an’s promise of Paradise to those who “kill and are killed” for Allah (Qur’an 9:111).

This is a few weeks old, but as we missed it then, it is well worth noting now. “Dix informant: Men spoke of sniper training,” by Geoff Mulvihill for The Associated Press, December 2 (thanks to Diana West):

 

CAMDEN, N.J. — Jurors in the case of an alleged plot to attack Fort Dix heard recordings Tuesday in which some of the five defendants talked about buying weapons, sniper training and killing soldiers.

One of the men, Eljvir Duka, asked whether a rifle would be a powerful enough weapon.

“Can you shoot an American soldier from a mile away and kill him?” he said.

Duka’s words were captured on recordings secretly made by an FBI informant in February 2007, during a trip he and the defendants made to Pennsylvania’s Pocono Mountains. The informant, Besnik Bakalli, testified that he hoped the trip would be a vacation but that he believed it was really training for jihad — holy war.

Government prosecutors used the recordings and Bakalli’s testimony to support their claims that Duka, his two brothers and two other men were plotting to kill soldiers on the Army’s Fort Dix. Defense lawyers, who have not yet been able to question Bakalli in cross-examination, say the men were not seriously planning anything. [...]

The suspects, who were in their 20s when they were arrested, are all foreign-born Muslims who have lived for years in the comfortable Philadelphia suburb of Cherry Hill.

All five men could face life in prison if they are convicted. They face charges of conspiracy to kill military personnel, attempted murder and weapons offenses. [...]

During one taped conversation, one of the suspects, Shain Duka, asks a group of men, “Where does it say in the Quran that you can’t do suicide bombs?”

A few moments later, Shain Duka says the suicide bombs deployed in Iraq against U.S. military targets were permissible. “The way they do in Palestine,” he said, referring to Israel, “I’m not for that.”

Don’t link Islam to terror, Islamic chief urges

 

The world’s top diplomat for Islam called on Friday for an end to what he termed efforts to equate the religion with terrorism and said the ‘demonisation’ of Muslims around the world must be fought.

Link