March 15, 2010

Like most butchers, Muhammad Bouyeri of the Hofstad Group is not a man of many doubts. When asked why he slaughtered the Dutch film-maker Theo Van Gogh, he was succinct: “I was motivated by the law that commands me to cut off the head of anyone who insults Allah and his prophet.” 

Most likely, Bouyeri was inspired by Chapter 47, verse 4 of the Qur”€™an which advises: “When you encounter the unbelievers on the battlefield, strike off their heads until you have crushed them completely” or Chapter 8, verse 39, which commands war against unbelievers until “€˜all chaos ceases and all religion belongs to Allah alone.”€™

As Ibn Khaldun pointed out centuries ago:  “€œIn the Muslim community, the holy war is a religious duty, because of the mission to convert everybody to Islam either by persuasion or by force… Islam is under obligation to gain power over other nations.”€

In this spirit, terrorists are not alone in their borderless inquisition: Enter the Organization of Islamic Conference, the self-described custodian of the worldwide Muslim community.

Playing Good Cop to terror’s Bad Cop, the OIC has been waging a campaign since 1999 to impose an international treaty that would make the criticism of Islam illegal. For this global outsourcing of Shari”€™a, the United Nations proved to be the ideal backdoor:
 
On December 21, 2009, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution to “€˜combat”€™ the “€˜defamation of religions”€™”€”creatively peddling blasphemy as a human rights violation.

“Because terrorists and tyrannies have successfully presented sacred Islamic texts justifying cultural and military imperialism, it is only strategic that the powerful elixir that weaponizes young men into becoming “€˜martyr”€™ bombs should remain above any questioning.”

 

When numerous governments and over 200 NGOs strongly urged the UN to abandon its subversion of freedom, the pleas fell on indifferent ears.

Or rather, it fell on Muslim ears.

A little investigation reveals that this resolution, which originated in the Human Rights Council, was submitted by the OIC itself, the same organization that explicitly rejected the Universal Declarations of Human Rights which the General Assembly disingenuously “€˜recalls”€™ and “€˜reaffirms”€™ in the preamble of its resolution. 

Citing the Shari”€™a as its sole source, on August 5, 1990, the OIC adopted and ratified The Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam to replace the UDHR because the latter was replete with “€˜Judeo-Christian”€™ secularism and freedoms which “€˜precludes Muslims from implementing them without transgressing Islamic law.”€™

Rendering all satire obsolete, one-third of the seats at the Human Rights Council is held by the OIC, which represents totalitarian dystopias like Saudi Arabia, which only banned slavery in 1962 and Iran, which still insists on “€˜elevating”€™ Muslim women by hanging them from cranes. 

Clearly, religious censorship can be achieved without the violence and public relations disaster of terror. As Sayed Abul Ala Maududi explained in 1937: “€œIslamic jihad is both offensive and defensive at one and the same time…As a party…[it] does not attack the home of the opposing party, but launches an assault on the principles of the opponent.”

Over decades, this assault on freedom has been so brilliant that a Do-It-Yourself jihad is now taking place in Holland, where on January 20, 2010, the leader of the Dutch Freedom Party, Geert Wilders, went on a heresy trial largely for producing the movie Fitna.

Adopting Kafkaesque double-standards, the government charged Wilders with “€˜hate speech”€™ for the apparent “€˜crime”€™ of documenting incitement and acts of mass murder made against non-Muslims by jihadists.  

From the Islamist perspective however, Wilders is not guilty of blasphemy as much as he is guilty of exposing the religious imperative of Taqqiya, which urges Muslims to conceal their beliefs from non-Muslims in order to advance the cause of Islam.

Because terrorists and tyrannies have successfully presented sacred Islamic texts justifying cultural and military imperialism, it is only strategic that the powerful elixir that weaponizes young men into becoming “€˜martyr”€™ bombs should remain above any questioning. 

For its part, the OIC condemned Wilders’s revelation of hate speech by Islamist ideologues rather than the ideologues themselves. The OIC also condemned reporting the death threats Wilders receives even as it threatened the very principle that allows Wilders to speak in the first place: freedom of conscience.

Not surprisingly, it was the OIC who urged “€˜the Dutch Government to complete its legal inquiry and examine steps to prosecute the author of the documentary under the Dutch law.”€™

As the chairman of the OIC declared: “€˜I don”€™t think freedom of expression should mean freedom from blasphemy. There can be no freedom without limits.”€™

Keeling at the idea of boycotts and strategically stoked mass hysteria, the Dutch government agreed:

When Wilders requested to bring in witnesses to establish whether his “€˜hate-speech”€™ is a repetition of truth, the prosecution (or the persecution?) stated: “€œIt is irrelevant whether Wilders’s witnesses might prove Wilders’s observations to be correct, what’s relevant is that his observations are illegal.”€

And so, with the zeal of a colonial overseer, the Ministry of Justice eliminated fifteen of Wilders’s list of eighteen witnesses and barred the remaining three from testifying publicly. To enhance Wilders’s prospects of getting assassinated, the prosecution also refused to provide him with a secure courthouse. 

Lest anyone misunderstand, this is not a matter of agreeing or disagreeing with Wilders”€”a modern day thought criminal if ever there was one. Nor is this about the “€˜defamation”€™ of religion: only living persons can be defamed, not their ideas. This is about the stealth sacrifice of the most precious of human rights at the altar of Islamic ideology, all the more dangerous because it dons the irreversible garb of legitimacy and legality.

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