The UN caves in to the farce of ‘defamation of religion’

United Nations building, New York, NY (photo: Ashitakka via Flickr.com)

As an avid connoisseur of the ironic and the absurd, I was drawn to a headline that ran in the International Herald Tribune last week:

Saudi Arabia to lead UN talks on religious tolerance

A nation that forbids the public practice of any religion other than Islam (and only one particular brand of Islam at that) and has “religious police” (read: gangs of thugs) roving the streets beating women who show an ankle is going to host a conference on religious tolerance?

I’m afraid they don’t make irony metes strong enough to withstand that kind of blow. As Ali Al-Ahmed, a Shiite Muslim dissident from Saudi Arabia, said in the article, “It’s like apartheid South Africa having a conference at the UN on racial harmony.”

The UN conference was suggested, promoted and hosted by King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. Unfortunately, other world leaders, including President Bush, actually took him seriously and attended the talks. But the reality of what is going on here has very little to do with religious tolerance and everything to do with a movement to impose limits on the criticism of religion through international law.

There has been an effort at the UN, sponsored primarily by the Organization of the Islamic Conference, a group of 57 predominately Muslim countries, to pass an international law forbidding the “defamation of religion.” Beginning in 2005, a resolution has been passed every year calling for such a law, with increasing support for the resolution each year. This year the Bush administration has, quite rightly, attempted to use its influence to persuade other nations to vote against the resolution.

It is not a coincidence that Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann, the president of the UN General Assembly, held a press conference the day before this meeting ostensibly devoted to religious tolerance, a press conference specifically about this event, and said that defamation of religion should be banned as a form of intolerance.

The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty recently published a backgrounder on such laws, noting that when the first UN resolution was submitted on the matter in 1999 by the OIC, the resolution was titled “Defamation of Islam.” Particularly in the wake of the controversy over cartoons in a Danish newspaper in 2006 that sparked worldwide protests and violence by Muslims, support for laws banning the “defamation” of religion has been growing. Beginning in 2001, resolutions calling for such laws were passed by the UN Commission on Human Rights. In 2005 the resolution was moved to the General Assembly, where it has passed each year.

This is an extraordinarily dangerous idea. Let me state the obvious: Religions are ideas and all ideas, no matter how deeply held, are open to criticism. So are actions motivated by religious fervor. In yet another level of irony, those who support such a resolution most often point to those Danish cartoons, some of which focused on the penchant for violence by radical Islamists, as an example of such defamation.

In the aftermath of the Danish cartoon controversy, protests and rallies were held around the world. In the Middle East they erupted into violence, including setting the Danish embassy on fire in Syria. In European cities, the protests were slightly less violent but equally vitriolic. Here are a couple of pictures from one such protest in London. Note the hypocrisy of the first one as the protesters complain about being portrayed as violent zealots while calling for the “extermination” of those who dare to criticize their religion:

The second one simply states the obvious:

If we do not want freedom to go to hell, we must resist these attempts to ban religious criticism both here and around the world. A good start would be passing HR 6146, sponsored by Rep. Steve Cohen, D-Tenn., and co-sponsored by Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich. That bill would prevent any court in the United States from recognizing or enforcing any foreign court action for defamation that was not consistent with the First Amendment.