"Muzzling in the Name of Islam
By Paul Marshall
Special to washingtonpost.com's Think Tank Town
Saturday, September 29, 2007; 12:00 AM
Some of the world's most repressive governments are attempting to use a controversy over a Swedish cartoon to provide legitimacy for their suppression of their critics in the name of respect for Islam. In particular, the Organization of the Islamic Conference is seeking to rewrite international human rights standards to curtail any freedom of expression that threatens their more authoritarian members.
In August, Swedish artist Lars Vilks drew a cartoon with Mohammed's head on a dog's body. He is now in hiding after Al Qaeda in Iraq placed a bounty of $100,000 on his head (with a $50,000 bonus if his throat is slit) and police told him he was no longer safe at home. As with the 2005 Danish Jyllands-Posten cartoons, and the knighting of Salman Rushdie, Muslim ambassadors and the OIC have not only demanded an apology from the Swedes, but are also pushing Western countries to restrict press freedom in the name of preventing "insults" to Islam.
The Iranian foreign ministry protested to Sweden, while Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad asserted that "Zionists," "an organized minority who have infiltrated the world," were behind the affair. Pakistan complained and said that "the right to freedom of expression" is inconsistent with "defamation of religions and prophets." JB comments:Consider your religion and its prophet defamed here as well. Formerly these threats were directed at moslem apostates, but now look: they are explicitly making their death threats against others for publishing what Islam doesn't like. This is what the War of Religion is like, and more Islamic hostiles into the better countries means more and worse war of this kind.
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This is an interesting movement which probably deserves the protection and support that it seems likely to need for years to come. Is it Islamic though, in some sense, that is , more than, for example, Unitarianism is Christian? Also, since they use the term Islamophobia, attempting diagnosis of those with no Islamic background, this raises certain questions in terms of their loyalty to Americans or citizens of western nations, who may be getting falsely diagnosed, but correctly considered anti-Islamic. At the same time, they post information on abuses of immigration loopholes by potential terrorists, which sounds loyal. As of now, it is not clear that a peaceable Islam can exist.
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