UN Caves To Vicious Defamers of Islam

Last week, the United Nations Human Rights Council adopted its annual resolution concerning religious intolerance. But unlike the past resolutions, the Christian Crusaders and the perfidious Jews bullied the Council into producing a document that encourages tolerance but throws out all language concerning "defamation" of religion.

That's the first time that has happened since the halcyon days of the predecessor of the HRC, the Commission on Human Rights, first introduced defamation into the recipe back in 1999. For those twelve years, the Organization of the Islamic Conference had managed to get the two commissions to include language that encompassed both "defamation of religion" in general and Islam specifically. The only thing that remains of the former Islamic-leaning resolutions was wording that encourages nations to "adopt measures to criminalize incitement to imminent violence based on religion or belief." That sounds amazingly like America's own "clear and present danger" test.

We can only hazard intelligent guesses as to why the Mad Muslims at the Geneva meeting lost control of the Council's agenda, but there are a few recent events that may have contributed to the change. Pakistan is at the forefront of the debate. Pakistan's draconian blasphemy laws have resulted in the deaths and injuries of countless human beings, ranging from moderate Muslims to Christians, Jews and Buddhists. There was a particular emphasis on apostates. But the murder of two prominent Muslim opponents of the capital punishment provisions of Pakistan's blasphemy laws was a particular spur to reform on the Council. The mass murders and displacement of Christians in Ethiopia and Sudan haven't helped the Muslim cause either.

It appears that the support for defamation of religion resolutions in the General Assembly has eroded seriously. Since 2005, the General Assembly has adopted the Council's resolution without modification. But last year, the resolution was passed by a narrow margin of twelve votes. In 2007, the margin was 57 votes. All signs are that the General Assembly will adopt the new resolution verbatim. This would come after several years of dilution of the language of the ongoing resolutions. Each successive year, the number of references to Islam specifically have been decreased, while such neologisms such as Judeophobia and Christianophobia were added to the ever-present Islamophobia. But this resolution is a landmark in that all moral equivalencies are off the table, and no "phobias" of any kind are included.

Previous resolutions had conflated victim and perpetrator by using language that spoke of "discrimination against Muslim minorities following the events of September 11, 2001." Events? Did they mean the mass murder of 3,000 civilians of all races and creeds by Muslims flying planes into buildings? This time, the resolution is much more in line with the reality that blasphemy laws result in the deaths of political figures who are Muslims themselves. The murder of Pakistani Minorities Minister Shabhaz Bhatt and Punjab Governor Salmaan Taseer seemed to put the Council over the top. Both were assassinated for their opposition to religious blasphemy penalties, and both assassinations were followed by massive celebrations of the murders among mainstream Muslims.

A prime mover in the initiative to end blasphemy laws, Human Rights First, summed it up nicely: "This resolution is an important shift away from efforts at the UN to create an international blasphemy code." Shehrbano Taseer, the daughter of the slain Punjab Province governor, spoke for Human Rights First at the Geneva hearings on the resolution. Taseer and the religious rights group contended that ". . . states need to do more to adopt measures to combat violence and discrimination on the basis of religion or belief, as well as address religious hatred without restricting speech." That is a radical departure from the past, and the Council adopted both the words and the reasoning.

Human Rights First documented more than seventy cases in fifteen Muslim nations in which blasphemy penalties resulted in death sentences and/or lengthy prison terms and provoked attacks by murderous mobs. They were even able to cite a western example in that an Austrian writer was convicted of "denigrating the teachings of a legally-recognized religion." She had given lectures on jihad and the horrific treatment of women in Islamic lands, and said that today Mohammed would be considered a pedophile. As for the latter charge, she had merely cited a Koranic Hadith which itself stated that Mohammed consummated his marriage to his youngest wife when she was nine years old.

Giving the devil his due, President Barack Obama allowed Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to praise the new resolution. She called the resolution "a landmark achievement which must be followed by sustained commitment." The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom stated more specifically that "tragically, it took the assassination of two prominent Pakistani officials who opposed the country's draconian blasphemy laws to convince the OIC that the annual defamation of religions resolutions embolden extremists rather than bolster religious harmony."

Before we start dancing in the streets over this, we need to be reminded that the heavily American-subsidized government of Pakistan immediately announced to its population that there will be no changes whatsoever to Pakistan's blasphemy and religious defamation laws. We await the State Department's statement on that issue.