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On July 15th, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spoke on freedom of expression at the Organization of Islamic Cooperation’s meeting on Combating Religious Intolerance. The religious intolerance in the title is not practiced by Muslims against Christians in Pakistan, Egypt and Malaysia, of course, but that of Muslims being offended by cartoons of a bearded man wielding a sword.
Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, the Secretary General of the OIC, had previously said that the Mohammed cartoons were the Muslim world’s version of September 11 and called for punitive action against cartoonist Lars Vilks.
Human Rights Council draft resolution (A/HRC/4/L.12) actually demanded that states prohibit the dissemination of xenophobic ideas aimed at any religion. If taken literally this would lead to a ban on the Koran. Their aim however was not the Koran, but the cartoon.
Now Hillary Clinton is racking up a victory for supposedly getting the OIC to back off its war against freedom of expression. In remarks at the Center for Islamic Arts and History, she thanked the OIC for getting behind Resolution 1618, which stops short of asking states to criminalize dissent against Islam, but does implicitly express support for criminalizing attacks on the Burqa (6b) and profiling (6d) and blurs the lines between illegal violence and legal hostility (3).
This blurring of the lines has been at the heart of the OIC’s campaign. The term Islamophobia is meant to conflate criticism of Islam with violence against Muslims. With the long term aim of banning both.
“We cannot and must not ignore the implications of hate speech and incitement of discrimination and violence.” Ihsanoglu’s statement at the meeting followed that same track. And Resolution 1618 follows a slower course to the same destination.
For the OIC and Ihsanoglu, Resolution 1618 is not an end point, but the beginning of a process of “sustained and structured engagement” meant to yield policy options. Those policy options will drop a heavy curtain over freedom of expression.
By linking satirical cartoons, law enforcement profiling, critical articles and violent attacks and by classifying them all as Islamophobia, and convincing nations to tackle them together under the category of hate crimes and discrimination, the assault on freedom of expression will be indirect and at the same time extremely effective. Just follow the “implications”.
In her remarks, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spoke of, “the false divide that pits religious sensitivities against freedom of expression.” But there is nothing false about that divide to the OIC, whose position has always been that freedom of expression cannot take precedence over religious values. If the divide were actually false, the issue would never have come up to begin with.
The OIC’s own Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam states in Article 22 that, “Everyone shall have the right to express his opinion freely in such manner as would not be contrary to the principles of the Shari’ah.” It concedes that information is important, but warns that it may not be used to undermine the “dignity of Prophets” or weaken the faith.
Is the OIC about to retract or modify that declaration as a result of Hillary Clinton’s visit? Obviously not. She didn’t change its agenda or its emphasis on the supremacy of Islamic law. But then the point of the process is not to bring the OIC into line with Western norms, but to bring the West in line with Islamic norms.
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