Faith and free speech: The danger of defamation prevention

The international campaign to enact laws that criminalize Islamophobia and other forms of religious defamation is being led by the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), a body consisting of 56 Islamic states, according to the scholars.

Ahmadiyya Times | News Watch | US Desk
Source/Credit: WJW | Washington, DC
By Adam Kredo | November 9, 2011

Laws preventing the defamation of religions may actually empower Muslim extremest to carry out violent attacks, according to a conservative panel of legal scholars who discussed the issue of hate speech last week during a briefing on Capitol Hill.

At first glance, it might seem reasonable to enact laws that prevent individuals from insulting religions such as Islam. But in reality these laws stifle free speech and foster violent attacks, the panelists said.

"These laws themselves chill speech and diminish the value society places" on the unbridled exchange of ideas - particularly those that are offensive to religious believers, Nina Shea, director and senior fellow of the Hudson Institute's Center for Religious Freedom, told a room full of Hill staffers and academics on Friday during a conference sponsored by The Federalist Society, a conservative law group.


By diminishing the right to free speech, those laws also encourage Islamists to mete out punishment to those who criticize their religion, conferees said. The international campaign to enact laws that criminalize Islamophobia and other forms of religious defamation is being led by the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), a body consisting of 56 Islamic states, according to the scholars. The OIC's ultimate goal, they believe, is to outlaw any criticism of - and, by proxy, debate about - Islam across the globe.

"Islamists, claiming they want only respect for their religion, are imposing brutal punishments for apostasy and blasphemy in the non-Muslim as well as the Muslim world," former CIA director James Woolsey recently wrote in a review of the book Silenced, which was co-authored by two of the panelists at Friday's briefing. "For us to accommodate this, anywhere, would be disastrous - weakening truly moderate Muslims and those of us who support them, and seriously crippling our own freedoms of speech and religion."

Next month, in fact, the U.S. government is scheduled to partner with the OIC to hold a conference on how the United Nations can combat the negative stereotyping of Islam. Scholars such as Shea believe that this partnership is unacceptable, as it confers undue legitimacy on the group and its mission.

"We should not [be in] partnership with a group working to limit freedom of speech," Shea said, explaining that the OIC is co-opting the tenets of political correctness in an effort to install an "Islamic blasphemy regime here in the West."

By hammering the issue in various bodies at the U.N. - which has adopted resolutions against hate speech and stereotyping over the past few years - "some U.S. court could find a hate-speech ban valid," Shea speculated in an essay on the topic earlier this year. "The bottom line is that the OIC is making hate-speech laws the new battleground for stopping criticism of Islam. The question is: Will the U.S. roll back the First Amendment to conform?"

Added Jacob Mchangama, director of legal affairs at the Center for Political Studies in Denmark: Religious defamation statutes are being exploited in order "to limit free speech in the West - and all of this in the name of freedom and tolerance."

The hypocrisy of the OIC's entire effort, said attorney Amjad Mahmood Khan, is that many Islamic countries routinely limit free expression and persecute Christians, Buddhists, Jews - and even their fellow Muslims.

In Pakistan, for instance, a small sect of Muslims called the Ahmadis are violently oppressed by the government, which has effectively outlawed their very existence.

"Their belief is irrelevant under the law" because Pakistan "defines who is and who isn't a Muslim in its constitution," explained Khan, who serves as one of the Ahmadiyya Muslim community's top representatives in America.

Rather than partner with the OIC's member nations, "the U.S. must push these countries to dismantle [blasphemy] laws," Khan added.

Mchangama also noted that "without American leadership, there is no state willing to" lead an effort against what he believes is the OIC's corrosive agenda.

  -- Edited by Ahmadiyya Times


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