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Sunday, November 25, 2012

Ibn Warraq on how Freedom of Expression is undermined by Islam with help from the UN


I am presently reading through the works of  Ibn Warraq and am compelled to post an  article of his from early 2008 which starts off with Warraq quoting  lines from Constantine Cavafy's  poem.  The poem as well as his article will speak to many of us on so many levels:

What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?
            The barbarians are due here today.     
Why isn't anything happening in the senate?
Why do the senators sit there without legislating?
            Because the barbarians are coming today.
            What laws can the senators make now?
            Once the barbarians are here, they'll do the legislating.                          
                        Waiting for The Barbarians. Constantine Cavafy [1864-1933].

The central issue, of which we should not lose sight, of the Fitna Affair is not whether the film by Wilders is good, bad, blasphemous, or offensive to Muslims, but rather freedom of expression. Human Rights begin with freedom of thought, and expression; democracy depends on it. Sixty years after the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, a noble document whose articles 18 and 19 guarantee freedom of thought, conscience and religion, and freedom of opinion and expression, Islamic countries on 28 March, 2008 managed to kill it. 

The 57 Islamic States with support from China, Russia and Cuba succeeded in forcing through an amendment to a resolution on Freedom of Expression. The UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression will now be required to report on the “abuse” of this freedom. Theo van Gogh, the Danish cartoonists and Geert Wilders, and anyone criticising Islam, or the Sharia will now be deemed to have "abused" the freedom of expression. In other words, instead of protecting freedom of expression, the amendment will now be limiting freedom of expression.

The nations that created the United Nations, and promulgated the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 were committed to the concepts of equality, individual freedom and the rule of law. In the last fifteen years, the UN has been taken over by the Islamic States, whose record on human rights is abysmal, and who have a very shaky notion of what constitutes democracy, and whose allegiance is to a seventh-century worldview defined exclusively in terms of man’s duties towards Allah. The Islamic States have been supported by those nations with a hatred of the United States of America, and those countries who see their future economic and political interests as being best served by their alliances with the Islamic States. .........

1 comment:

  1. Some day you may have to go out and get measured for a burka. Then you can look in the mirror and ask your husband 'Does this burka make my ass look big?"

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