...born with the gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad

“Balancing” free speech and sharia: Here in the northern marvel of social engineering we call Canada, we try to “balance” our Charter-enshrined right to speak freely with human rights codes that bar “hate speech”; the Charter giveth and the codes taketh away. The way it works on the ground, though, is that some “hate speech” is perfectly acceptable—like the kind that describes Jews as, I believe the colourful phrase is “apes and pigs”—while other “hate speech”—the kind dredged up from the bowels of the Internet by a guy playing “gotcha” with Hitler-buffs—could cause the miscreant a lot of grief, including an order to shut up, forever.

Over at the UN, they’re mighty concerned about striking some sort of “balance,” too.  Under the influence of its largest voting bloc, an ummah that has joined forces in an organization called the OIC, they're looking to “balance” the rights of Muslims to never again hear any sass from kafirs and dhimmis, with the “rights” of kafirs and dhimmis as encoded in Allah's law. The exact wording of that law and the wording of Canada’s censorship provisions may differ, but the results are essentially the same. Some people get to speak; others--and you know who you are--do not.

FrontPage Magazine has a report about the jihad against free expression that’s underway at the UN—the same war occurring in Canada under the auspices of our “human rights” bodies:

The Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC) is an Islamist supremacist organization.  Composed of 57 member states with Muslim majority populations, the OIC is the largest Islamic body in the world.  It is also the largest international organization of any kind, second only to the United Nations.  It represents an estimated 1.5 billion Muslims across the Middle East, Asia and Africa. 

The purpose of the OIC is to promote Islamic values, to revitalize Islam’s pioneering role in the world, to strengthen and enhance the bond of solidarity and unity among Muslim states, to support “the Palestinian struggle” and to defend Islam.  Its charter claims that OIC works to promote peace, tolerance, and fight terrorism.  However, its actions are dissonant with these claims, as it strives to define these words through the extraordinarily skewed views of radical Islam.

Since 1999, the OIC has been pushing incrementally and strategically toward its goal of internationally outlawing all criticism of Islam, Muslims, Muslim theocracies, and Islamic extremism.  Subsequent to September 11, 2001, it professed concern about alleged backlash against Muslims.  

In 2005, the OIC urged the United Nations Commission on Human Rights (“UNCHR”) to pass a resolution called “combating defamation of religions.”  Although the title of the resolution referred to religions generally, the text cited concerns only Islam specifically.  It lamented negativity towards Islam in the media and the use of broadcast, print and the internet to incite violence, discrimination or intolerance towards Islam and other religions.  It revealed alarm over the backlash against Muslims since 9/11, and law enforcement measures that “target Muslims.”  It expressed deep concern over statements which “attack” religions generally, and Islam and Muslims in particular, and concern over the ethnic and religious profiling of Muslim minorities.  It alleged that Islam was frequently and wrongly associated with human rights violations and terrorism.  Additionally, it proclaimed that defamation of religions plays a role in the denial of fundamental rights of the target groups.

The Commission urged resolute action to prohibit “racist, and xenophobic ideas and material aimed at any religion or its followers… and to protect against acts of discrimination, intimidation, hatred, and defamation of religion.”  It called on the international community to begin a “global dialogue” on religious diversity and to combat defamation of religions.  It further required the Special Rapporteur to report on the discrimination faced by Muslims and Arabs.  Not surprisingly, the countries that voted in favor of the resolution included many Muslim countries such as Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, Qatar, Kuwait, and Sudan, among others.  Freer nations such as the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Ireland, and Japan, all voted in opposition to the resolution.

The OIC’s insistence on prohibiting defamatory speech against Islamic countries was without reciprocity.  No effort to silence anti-Jewish or anti-Israeli speech has been made.  At an OIC Special Session in 2006, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad freely expressed his goal to eliminate the “Zionist regime.”  Indeed, the OIC backs Iran’s nuclear program, supports Hamas, and rationalizes 9/11.  Moreover, the OIC insists that the definition of terrorism should exclude the killing of innocent civilians where there is a “legitimate resistance to foreign occupation,” i.e. Israel.  It is for this reason that the UN has been unable to pass a comprehensive convention against international terrorism.

At the OIC’s 2006 summit in Mecca, it adopted a zero tolerance policy regarding insults to Islam, going so far as to include “hostile glances” in its definition of Islamophic (sic) behaviour. The immediate goal of the summit was to obtain “protection” for Islam in European parliaments and the UN including the Human Rights Council (which replaced the Human Rights Commission with the failed hope of becoming an effective advocate for human rights).  It also proposed the creation of an “Islamic Council of Human Rights” and a “Charter of Human Rights in Islam.”  Both would be based on Sharia law and run contrary to the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights…

Of course, the “Canadian context” is entirely different. In our country, Jewish spokesmen are fully onside with efforts to curb “Islamophobia,” and I suspect they’d banish “hostile glances,” too, if they could. (Did you know that “hostile glances” are "dehumanizing" and can lead to genocide?) And anyway, the jihad isn’t going to touch Canadian Jews because at this very moment there’s been an immense “paradigm shift” and Jews are “building bridges” and busily “mentoring” Somalis. And that’s bound to earn us scads of Brownie points (Prophet points?) if and when we need to cash them in, right?

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:39 | link | comments

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