President Barack Obama addressed the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) Tuesday and sent confusing messages about free speech at a tenuous moment for international blasphemy laws.
The Obama administration, by most accounts, has been very strong in fighting UN “defamation of religions” resolutions over the past four years. But the administration’s response to the inflammatory video, Innocence of Muslims, has been muddy just at a time when the momentum for blasphemy resolutions is growing again.
The U.S. State Department and various religious freedom groups celebrated last year when the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) didn’t introduce a “defamation of religions” resolution at the UN Human Rights Council for the first time in about a decade. The resolutions, which passed annually and criminalized blasphemy, were nonbinding but helped legitimize oppressive blasphemy laws in Muslim...
"Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who currently heads the defamation-sponsoring OIC, said in a speech in Bosnia before the UNGA started that “Islamophobia” should be deemed a “crime against humanity,” according to the Turkish newspaper Today’s Zaman.
"When it is in the form of a provocation, there should be international legal regulations against attacks on what people deem sacred, on religion,” Erdogan said. “Freedom of thought and belief ends where the freedom of thought and belief of others start."
Hypocrisy shows up in interesting ways. Notice this freedom only applies in one direction? How about applying it to Muslims? How about freedom of thought and belief of Muslims ending where the freedom and thought of the maker of the video starts? Christians have to put up with video insults quite regularly.
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