"The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets,
the minarets our bayonets and the faithful our soldiers."
Infidels: freepmail me if you want on or off this list.
Posted on 12/13/2011 5:38:45 AM PST by IbJensen
The State Department began a three-day, closed-door meeting Monday to talk about U.S. free speech rules with representatives from numerous Islamic governments that have lobbied for 12 years to end U.S. citizens’ ability to speak freely about Islam’s history and obligations.
Free speech advocates slammed the event as an effort to gradually curb public criticism of Islam, but it was defended by Hannah Rosenthal, who heads the agency’s office to curb anti-Semitism.
The meeting is a great success, she said, because governments in the multinational Organisation for Islamic Cooperation have dropped their demand that criticism of Islamic ideas be treated as illegal defamation. Member countries include Pakistan, Iran, Saudia Arabia and Qatar.
In exchange for dropping the demand, she said, they’re getting “technical assistance [to] build institutions to ensure there will be religious freedom” in their countries, she told The Daily Caller.
“That’s a joke,” said Andrea Lafferty, a conservative activist who was repeatedly denied information about the meeting.
Rosenthal’s claim that the OIC is accepting freedom of speech and religion implies revolutionary changes in Islamic countries, she said. That’s because Islamic texts set myriad laws for behavior, and sharply restrict non-Muslim religions, free speech and women’s rights, said Lafferty, who is president of the Traditional Values Coalition, a conservative advocacy group.
If the OIC countries are giving up on their religious obligation to ban criticism of Islam, she said, “does this mean that Pakistan is no longer going to kill Christians and kill religious minorities? … Are women in Saudi Arabia going to vote, to drive, to live free lives?”
“We hope so,” said Rosenthal, who added that such progress will not occur rapidly.
The more realistic explanation for the three-day event, Lafferty said, is that administration officials, progressives and OIC officials are tacitly cooperating to gradually stigmatize speech that is critical of Islam.
Lafferty pointed to a July statement by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in which she said that free speech will be protected, but the U.S. government will “use some old-fashioned techniques of peer pressure and shaming, so that people don’t feel that they have the support to do what we abhor.”
Clinton’s statement was issued at Istanbul, where the United States and the OIC launched the joint project to combat “religious intolerance.”
Prior to the launch, OIC officials spent 12 years lobbying for a U.N. resolution that would declared criticism of religion to be defamation. U.S. officials strongly opposed this measure as a restriction on free speech and a barrier to Internet services.
In March, the OIC dropped the defamation resolution in exchange for passage of a resolution in the Human Rights Committee, dubbed 16/18.
The new resolution was titled “Combating Intolerance, Negative Stereotyping and Stigmatization of, and Discrimination, Incitement to Violence and Violence Against, Persons Based on Religion or Belief.” It urges all governments to counter “Islamophobia,” and declares opposition to “derogatory stereotyping, negative profiling and stigmatization of persons based on their religion or belief.”
However, it also urges states to promote tolerance of all believers, and to promote “a wider knowledge of different religions and beliefs.”
This week’s State Department meeting is intended to begin implementing the 16/18 decision. The meeting is titled “The Istanbul Process for Combating Intolerance and Discrimination based on Religion or Belief.”
Another meeting is slated for February or March, said Rosenthal.
But the OIC’s definition of religious intolerance collides with U.S. notion of free speech and robust debate, said Lafferty.
The meeting won’t curb freedom of speech in the United States, Rosenthal countered, because the U.S. government will protect free speech. “We would protect free speech,” she said.
However, “hateful” and “Islamophobic” speech, said Rosenthal, “needs to be called out.” Asked to define “hate speech,” she said that if critics of Islam’s ideology “are just taking out the hateful parts [of the Quran] or claiming [they’re] all superior to them … that can be very damaging.”
The term “Islamophobia” was developed by U.S.-based advocates to stigmatize critics of Islam. It is mimics the “homophobia” term used by advocates of rights for gays. It is now in common use by progressive’s groups, such as the Center for American Progress.
But Islam deserves to be criticized because it denies free speech, freedom of conscience and equality for women and non-Muslims, said Robert Spencer, an expert on Islamic texts and a best-selling author who is widely labeled by Islamists and progressives as “Islamophobic.” Today, he said, “there is no majority-Muslim country that fully protects those rights.”
Rosenthal’s reassurances of continued U.S. free speech are without merit, Lafferty said, partly because U.S. officials are already cooperating with Islamic countries to redefine criticism of Islam as not just ”Islamophobia,” but illegal “incitement to violence.”
In July, for example, Clinton told the international meeting that the 16/18 “resolution calls upon states … to prohibit discrimination, profiling, and hate crimes, but not to criminalize speech unless there is an incitement to imminent violence.”
The 16/18 deal won’t curb free speech, because incitement to violence can only be committed by speakers, not by listeners, responded Rosenthal.
But “here in America,” Lafferty said, “we have the right to speak freely, and we have open debate on variety of issues, but Islamists are claiming those conversations incite violence.”
“The State Department knows what they’re doing is wrong, otherwise they would not have been so evasive,” about the meeting, Lafferty said. The Dec. 12 to 14 meeting was quietly announced on Friday, Dec. 9, but few details were provided. Only two speakers were identified, and the government has not released the text of a speech given by the justice department’s civil-regulations chief, Tom Perez.
The 16/18 deal is tied to Obama’s outreach to Islamic countries and the OIC, which he launched in 2009 by giving a speech in Cairo.
To boost that outreach to the OIC, Obama appointed Rashad Hussain as his OIC ambassador in 2010. Hussein had tried to hide his attendance at a U.S. meeting of Islamic advocacy groups in 2004 where he declared the federal government’s prosecution of a Muslim terror leader was politically motivated, according to a Politico article.
The terror leader was Sami Al Arian, who also is a professor in Florida. He was a leader of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad group, which has used numerous suicide bombers to murder Israeli civilians in buses, nightclubs, shops and streets.
Obama subsequently kept Hussain as his OIC ambassador.
As part of that outreach to the OIC and to Arab Muslims, the administration has pushed hard to accelerate the elections in Egypt that have since given Islamists up to 65 percent of the vote. It has also dispatched U.S. airpower to kill Moammar Gadhafi, the dictator of Libya, which is now likely to be dominated by an Islamist government.
obama is a traitorous swine. Perez is worse than a viper. Clintoon is a power seeking opportunist who would sell her mother down the river to gain power. What a great batch of “leaders”.
When Ms. Rosenthal and a group of her Jewish friends and family can freely book a tour to Mecca and Medina, and visit a synagogue while in Saudi Arabia, then there might be some basis for discussion. Otherwise, she's just engaging in the self-destructive behavior that is all too common among the self-righteous left.
Don't let them label you that way, I certainly don't. a "phobia" is an irrational fear. First off, I don't FEAR islam. I have a very healthy distrust of it and those who claim to practice it. Secondly, that distrust is in no way irrational. It's from a long history or watching islamists throughout the history of my life.
Nope, nobody is allowed to label me as "islamaphobic."
Mark
Just so we all understand the nature of our enemy; here is a Jewish woman on the side of Islamists that want to eradicate the Jewish race.
Liberalism has replaced self-preservation for these folks, they are like cultists.
Of course they HATE the US because they HATE themselves! and who better to teach them HATE than a religion which has been perfecting it for 1,300 years.
HATE is their drug; their GOD. They want to destroy everything.
Islam is the mortal enemy of Western Civilization, and has been for nearly fourteen centuries. It is their intention to conquer the West. There will never be a peaceful coexistance with them.
In the Obamanation, Muslims get one set of rules, and Christians get a dhimmi set.
Great points... Funny how religious Christians (and Jews) who oppose homosexual marriage are deemed "haters," while muslims, who just stone homosexuals to death (a particularly brutal way to kill someone, btw), need to be protected against mean speech, or even anyone who speaks the truth about islam.
Mark
Proper State Dept position would be: NOT UP FOR DISCUSSION.
Islam is not a religion,
It is a ideology based on world domination masquerading as a religion.
No other religion requires total submission or death.
Islam does.!
ISLAM IS TERRORISM BY IT’S VERY NAT
.................While I can still say it !!!!
ooppsies.............correction
Islam is not a religion,
It is a ideology based on world domination masquerading as a religion.
No other religion requires total submission or death.
Islam does.!
ISLAM IS TERRORISM BY IT’S VERY NATURE
Political correctness running amok some more ! The ironic thing, the homosexuals ought to pay attention that the democrats will eventually sell out to the islamic folks and the gays will be first to be done away with ! This is with the disclaimer that I don’t condone what their lifestyle (deathstle) is all about !
But don’t stop stoning the homosexuals.
> There is a difference between criticism and hate speech.
No there is not.
The only difference is that “hate speech” involves a thought crime. I don’t think we want to go down that road.
Let people say what they’re going to say.
It’s their actions that are actionable.
“The State Department began a three-day, closed-door meeting Monday to talk about U.S. free speech rules with representatives from numerous Islamic governments”
This in and of itself is an unconstitutional act. The State Dept has no power or authority to enter into any type of discussion that limits the 1st Ammendment. Whoever authorized these meetings should be fired stat.
> Islam is in desperate need of a Reformation.
They have had a reformation, that is, a reckoning of how far they have strayed from the teachings of the pedophile polygamist pirate slave-trader murdering rapist tyrant Mahomet.
> And it should have had one on Sept. 12, 2001.
The action on Sept 11, 2001, highly celebrated in Islamic circles by the way, was the outworking of their reformation.
Gut instinct tells me Herman Cain knows a lot about this. Remember, he said he’d not have Muslims in his administration, were he to be elected. He walked that statement back a bit, then, went on to challenge Blacks living on the Dem Plantation.
Silence! I silence you without killing you! I silence your mouth!
"The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets,
the minarets our bayonets and the faithful our soldiers."
Infidels: freepmail me if you want on or off this list.
The truth is islam’s Achilles Heel.
Filthy koranimals.
Short/swedet!......& concise.
Short/swedet!......& concise.
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