Quick, while it's still legal ...!

Let me write this quickly while it's still legal. A new low watermark in humanity's march backwards has passed virtually unnoticed by the mainstream media, except perhaps significantly by a brave little Calvinist newspaper in the Netherlands, Reuters and the Jerusalem Post.

On Friday 30th March the United Nations Human Rights Council - yes, the one which was silently set up last year to replace the Human Rights Commission, which was simply too much disgraced to keep on - adopted a Resolution by 24-14, calling for combating defamation of religion. It was drafted and tabled by the OIC, the Organization of Islamic Conference [1].

Superficially this may seem beneficial for humanity as a whole - except perhaps for those radical enlighteners that like to bring trumped up charges to bear on Christianity, as if a giant autocratic theocracy headed by Benedict XVI or Bartholomew I is just a matter of days, not months. This Resolution however is almost exclusively drafted in defence of Islam at the expense of basic human rights.

The Resolution was an initiative of Pakistan's President Musharaf. Since he is not a democratically elected head of state and sits at the pleasure of radical elements in the army and elsewhere, it may be assumed his initiative primarily serves a domestic purpose. As a 'friend of the West' he is in a perpetual balancing act, playing two boards at once.

The telling lack of media interest perhaps stems from the fact that such politically motivated Resolutions are passed quite regularly and have no teeth to speak of. This new U.N. body for human rights is rapidly going the same way as its predecessor, as we shall see. Still, a trend has been already set, and bit by bit inroads are made towards exchanging Western inspired universal human rights for less enlightened ones, with the help and assistance of indigenous crypto-totalitarians who have declared war on occidental ethnocentricity in the name of multiculturalism.

The Resolution also sheds light on the Danish Mohammed cartoon hysterics of last year. It has been estabished that this was a carefully choreographed piece of agit-prop in the best Marxist-Leninist tradition, the Islamist's revolutionary model of choice. It was thought at the time that the ulterior motives of the riots of hate were, well ... the riots of hate. It is now becoming clear they may have been concerted to provide a context and excuse for tabling and pushing this U.N. sponsored ban on the freedom of expression where 'the good name of Islam' is concerned. Here's another suggestion.

It should however not be confused with blasphemy, the defamation of God. Rather, it is towards a ban on insulting the religion of Islam and its Prophet, a crime for which many people are rotting away in prison cells, at best: just recently an Egyptian blogger was jailed for four years.

This text on the contrary has nothing to do with anyone's God. It astonishingly speaks of "attempts to identify Islam with terrorism, violence and human rights violations, the ethnic and religious profiling of Muslim minorities in the aftermath of the tragic events of 11 September 2001" and "urges states to provide protection and take resolute action to prohibit the dissemination ... of racist and xenophobic ideas and material".

In Eurabian style it even goes on to urge supposedly democratic states "to ensure that all public officials, including members of law enforcement bodies, the military, civil servants and educators, in the course of their official duties, respect different religions and beliefs and do not discriminate against persons on the grounds of their religion or belief, and that any necessary and appropriate education or training is provided ... on all manifestations of defamation of religions and in particular on the serious implications of Islamophobia on the enjoyment of all rights". I'm sure there are some Purple [2] dominated governments to be found that are more than happy to oblige.

The full text can be read here: minutes of the entire session at the UN site. As it's a bit of a stretch and a puzzle, here's the digest on this particular Resolution.

As a genetically determined Roman Catholic I heartily thank the Organization of Islamic Conference for speaking on my behalf. But still I'd rather they didn't, for the following reasons:

As multiculturalists well know - reason why they want to abolish them as ethnocentric - the universal human rights as mentioned in the Resolution, are based on Christian teaching. As long as Christians are prevented from freely practicing their faith in Islamic countries, indeed are killed and prosecuted, this reads as hypocrisy.

The liberally used designation, especially in tuition text books, of Jews and Christians as pigs and monkeys, is not consistent with peaceful coexistence and are parts of Islam that for starters might hit the religious antiquities and curiosa cellar, just as a gesture of good will.

The text of the Resolution is specifically addressing the West, the source and vessel of universal human rights. There is not a country in the West however in which the rights are Muslims are not upheld, even to the point of positive action at the expense of the indigenous populations and at the detriment of social cohesion.

This Resolution should be addressed instead to the Governments of those Islamic countries that violate human rights on a daily basis - primarily because such rights are not rooted in their religion - as some Islamic radicals do not stop to point out.

Moreover, it is an attempt to curtail the freedom of expression that is also a basic right in Western societies. In fact, this is the reason the OIC is able to draft this Resolution and bring it to bear in an international forum, in the first place.

Furthermore it has the undesired effect, of confirming radical and assertive seculars in their belief that religion as a whole is against freedom, is dictatorial, undemocratic, backward, obscurantist, and a danger to those same human rights they portent not to believe in as occidental hegemonism. It thus provides these secular ignoramuses with a stick to beat Christianity in particular and religion as a whole: they see it as a matter of "freedom of speech versus religion". Islam is spared because of its socially constructed victimhood, while religion gets a bad name.

Implementation of laws against religious defamation will either lead us up the path of semi-Soviet or French style secularism (laïcité), the banning of all religious expressions to the fringes of society and seclusion within the home, the state and public space being thus religiously neutralized; or the Anglo-Saxon variety will breed a Hobbesian, sectarian, multicultural wasteland of perpetual tribal war, of all against all. We could call that also the Balkan, or Yugoslav model. Either way, it leads to a totalitarian dictatorship.