Wednesday, September 19, 2012
Like I have been telling you ........ they have the media and
the politicians, but they don't have freedom loving peoples -- that's you and
me. This is war in the information battlespace -- get ready to rumble.
"reopen quest"
oyish
"Islamic states to reopen quest for global blasphemy
law" Reuters
GENEVA | Wed Sep 19, 2012
(Reuters) - A leading Islamic organization
signaled on Wednesday that it will revive long-standing attempts to make insults
against religions an international criminal offence.
The bid follows uproar across the Muslim world
over a crude Internet video clip filmed in the United States and
cartoons in a French satirical magazine that lampoon the Prophet Mohammad.
But it appears unlikely to win acceptance from
Western countries determined to resist restrictions on freedom of speech and
already concerned about the repressive effect of blasphemy laws in
Muslim countries such as Pakistan.
Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, secretary-general of the
Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), said the international community
should "come out of hiding from behind the excuse of freedom of
expression", a reference to Western arguments against a universal
blasphemy law that the OIC has sought for over a decade.
He said the "deliberate, motivated and
systematic abuse of this freedom" were a danger to global security and
stability.
Separately, the Human Rights Commission of the
OIC, which has 57 members and is based in Saudi Arabia, said "growing
intolerance towards Muslims" had to be checked and called for "an
international code of conduct for media and social media to
disallow the dissemination of incitement material".
Western countries have long argued that such
measures would run counter to the U.N.'s core human rights declaration on
freedom of expression and could even open the door to curbs on academic research.
As if to underline the point, a conference in
Geneva of the World Council of Churches (WCC), which groups the world's major
Protestant, Orthodox and Evangelical churches, urged Pakistan to abolish its
blasphemy law, which carries a possible death penalty.
Critics say the law is widely misused
to persecute non-Muslims, and cite this month's case of a Muslim cleric
detained on suspicion of planting evidence suggesting that a 14-year-old girl
had burned Islamic religious texts.
Pakistani Christians and Hindus at the WCC
gathering said a global law against blasphemy, or "defamation of
religion", would only endorse on an international scale the religious
intolerance seen in Pakistan and in other Islamic countries.
Posted by Pamela Geller on
Wednesday, September 19, 2012 at 11:33 PM in
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