US seeks tolerance against minorities in Islamic countries

"One of the things that we tried very hard to do is to work with a number of countries, including Muslim-majority countries, the Organisation of Islamic Conference, to begin to change the dialogue from something they wanted to call religious defamation."

Ahmadiyya Times | News Watch | US Desk
Source/Credit: MSN News | India
By Lalit K Jha | PTI | 28/10/2011

Washington, Oct 28 (PTI) Expressing concern over increasing intolerance against religious minorities in Islamic countries, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has said this is the "biggest problems in the world" right now.

"On the question of persecution, obviously, what we''re seeing is deeply distressing. It''s not only against Christians or against Hindus; it''s also against different sects of Muslims. I mean, there are Islamic sects in Afghanistan and Pakistan and elsewhere that are also discriminated against, persecuted and their adherents brutally treated," Clinton told lawmakers at a Congressional hearing yesterday.

One of the biggest problems in the world right now is that there needs to be a greater acceptance of religious tolerance.

In so many places, there is no history of religious tolerance. And there is a need to search an effective way to solve this, she said in reply to a question.

"One of the things that we tried very hard to do is to work with a number of countries, including Muslim-majority countries, the Organisation of Islamic Conference, to begin to change the dialogue from something they wanted to call religious defamation.

"This would be a legal rationale for persecuting people who spoke out about their own religion or criticized someone else''s, to a broad acceptance that there needs to be an equation between freedom of speech and freedom of religion," Clinton said. .


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