CNSNews.com - U.N. Urged to Stop 'Defamation of Islam' Campaign

July 15, 2008
By Patrick Goodenough, International Editor, CNSNews.com

(CNSNews.com) Tens of thousands of people have signed a petition urging top United Nations officials to oppose a drive by Islamic governments to outlaw the defamation of Islam. Critics say the move is aimed at shutting down legitimate debate and restricting the freedom to share other faiths.
 
The initiative is being organized by the Washington-based American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), which says the push by the 57-nation Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) is anti-Christian.
 
Still in its early days, the petition is drawing considerable interest, with online signatories alone exceeding 55,000 as of Tuesday.
 
The campaign follows the passage last December of a controversial U.N. General Assembly resolution on the defamation of religion.
 
When the General Assembly meets for its annual session later this year, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon will be called on to give a report on the implementation of the Dec. 2007 measure, which was introduced by Pakistan on behalf of OIC and passed by a 108-51 vote.
 
While the resolution ostensibly covers the defamation of all religions, only one religion is referred to by name. The text expresses deep concern that Islam is frequently and wrongly associated with human rights violations and terrorism.
 
It also protests the negative projection of Islam in the media and complains that Muslims had been subjected to ethnic and religious profiling after 9/11.

A similar resolution, again sponsored by the OIC, was passed in March by the U.N.s Geneva-based Human Rights Council, one-third of whose members are Islamic states. The U.N.s top rights official, the high commissioner on human rights, will also have to report back on the matter to that body, next year.
 
At the invitation of the high commissioners office, interested parties are making submissions on religious defamation aimed at assisting both the secretary-general and high commissioner in compiling their reports.
 
Among these is the European Center for Law and Justice (ECLJ), an ACLJ affiliate based in Strasbourg, France.
 
Much of the OICs campaign against what it calls religious defamation and Islamophobia has been targeted at Europe, where controversies have raged over newspaper caricatures of Mohammed and a documentary linking the Koran with violence and terrorism.
 
In its legal analysis, the ECLJ turned the focus back onto the OIC countries themselves, where it said domestic laws aimed at combating religious defamation tend to selectively target non-Muslim minorities, often Christians.
 
It said the OIC uses the religious defamation concept as both a shield and a sword. In Islamic countries, blasphemy laws are used as a shield to protect the dominant religion, but even more dangerously, they are used to silence minority religious believers and prevent Muslims from converting to other faiths, which is still a capital crime in many Islamic countries.
 
The ECLJ acknowledged the need for proper respect for religions, but said there was an urgent need to distinguish between valid criticism of religions or religious practices and speech that does not serve any purpose except to offend the beliefs of individuals or religions.

Conflating race and religion
 
Another submission to the U.N. has come from the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which took issue with the OICs attempts to equate acts of defamation of Islam with acts of racism against Muslims.
 
There is a stark distinction between race, which is immutable, and religion, which, though often exercised and expressed communally, requires and cannot exist without choice guided by individual conscience, the Washington-based public interest law firm said.
 
Treating racial and religious discrimination as the same thing could lead to the conflation of racist hate speech and the suppression of peaceful, but controversial, discussions of truth claims about and within religions.
 
Both the Becket Fund and ECLJ argued that, instead of the defamation of religion route favored by the OIC, the U.N. should look to article 20 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights as the appropriate framework.
 
The article prohibits any advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence.
 
The Becket Fund pointed out that this focuses on protecting religious people from discrimination, rather than trying to protect religious ideas against defamation which is what the OIC is trying to do.
 
The Becket submission argued that defamation of religions, as opposed to the defamation of people, requires the state to determine which ideas are acceptable.
 
It looked at three OIC countries which have pushed forward the defamation of religion campaign most energetically Pakistan, Iran and Egypt.
 
In each case it cited instances where the state decides which religious viewpoints are acceptable:  Pakistans penal code calls for the death penalty for defiling Islam or its prophets; Iran has sentenced to death an academic for calling for the reformation of religion; and an Egyptian university professor was declared an apostate for teaching students to read parts of the Koran metaphorically.
 
Turkish writer Ziya Meral argues that OIC states are using the defamation issue to protect themselves, rather than Islam, against criticism.
 
If one condemns human rights abuses committed by the Saudi police, what is criticized is not Islam, but particular individuals who live in a certain location and time, he wrote in Turkish Daily News this week.
 
[But] in order to get rid of the headache created by human rights arguments, Saudi Arabia might declare that Islam is being attacked and defamed, Meral said.