OIC “Workshops” Speech Crime

Stealth and violent jihadists have discovered the alchemist’s secret of turning gold into lead – that is, of turning freedom of speech into a risky and unwanted liability. It’s really quite simple, obvious for all to see. The formula is similar to the “good cop/bad cop” routine of detective movies.

Start with a cartoon of Mohammad, or a dozen of them, or with public remarks that directly or indirectly hold Islam and Muslims responsible for terrorism, or publish a scholarly, cogent paper on the totalitarian and brutal natures of Islam, or give a mooning “arse-lifter” on a public street the literal boot in a heart-felt moment of disrespect for a manqué bowing to meteorite and who’s in your way.

Of course, the remarks, the charges, the papers, and even the disrespect are responses to about thirty years of irrational Muslim behavior.

Any one of those actions will precipitate riots, calls for death to apostates and insulters of Islam, noisy, ugly demonstrations, chants of “Islam will dominate,” the waving of black jihad flags, and general pandemonium across the globe. And a few dozen or few score deaths at the hands of the insulted. All incidents starring Muslims. Not to mention the self-censorship of newspapers and book publishers, who abandon the issue for safety reasons; who, to borrow a line from “Seinfeld,” draw their heads into their shells like frightened turtles.

When the fires have been put out and the streets cleared of debris and the signs stashed away until the next defamation or insult, things will be quiet for a while.

Then will come calls to tone down the anger and the rhetoric – addressed, not to the rioters, murderers, and Muslim clerics – but to those whose words, cartoons, or actions “offended” the congenitally offendable. The calls will be made by those responsible for keeping law and order and establishing policy. In order to maintain civil order and manageable budgets, it is decreed that anyone criticizing Islam or making fun of Islam and Muslims, will be charged with hate speech, or exhibiting disrespect for one of the world’s oldest religions, or some such, in order to prevent more destructive and costly demonstrations. It’s a matter of cause and effect, you see. If Muslim feelings weren’t hurt, if their beliefs weren’t examined or satirized or opened to the cruel sunlight of rational scrutiny, Muslims wouldn’t resort to mayhem, rape, murder, and car-burning.

It’s quite simple. Almost scientific. Just like global warming.

The calls come basically from two sets of liberals: those who are outraged that Islam has been insulted or defamed, because they are so tolerant and non-judgmental and it makes them feel good and virtuous to be so tolerant and non-judgmental; and from those who are intimidated by brute force and ugly chants and irrational behavior of any kind, and they’d just rather people shut up in the name of “community cohesion” so they won’t need to hear or see the brute force and ugly chants of those less “cohesed” than they might want to imagine.

The pattern has been repeated numerous times over the last few decades. It works. It gets results. Why? Because our political and intellectual establishments are governed by egalitarianism, multiculturalism, and moral relativism. That is, by the irrational. And irrational policies benefit only the irrational, and punish the rational. There are two classes of irrationalists: those who are irrational on principle – otherwise known as nihilists – and those whose minds have been enfeebled by egalitarianism, multiculturalism, and moral relativism. Both classes can be identified by their political correctness.

But it takes some shoulder-rubbing and much intensive study to distinguish between the nihilists and the white-tailed deer, between those who want to just shut you up and reduce you to rags, and those who flee at the first sign of a wolf.

Having proven that their mumbo-jumbo works on the cowardly and credulous infidels, the irrationalists are taking their alchemy to a new level: a ban – by hook or by crook, by shame or by sedition, by ostracism or by force – of any and all criticism of Islam and Muslims, by way of the United Nations and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC). The OIC is a gang that works within that club of tyrannies, dictatorships, religious régimes, and clueless, compliant, and wimpy “democracies.”

On February 13th, Bernama, the Malaysian state news agency, announced:

The Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) is to hold a media workshop in Brussels on Feb. 15 to 16 pertaining to the smear campaigns against Islam in newspapers and media institutions in the West. […]

Muslim, and non-Muslim leading civil society organisations, journalists, intellectuals and academicians are among the participants of the workshop, which will consist of brainstorming sessions to develop mechanisms for cooperation with external partners, and to develop an action plan to address the phenomenon of Islamophobia.

On February 15th, the OIC announced the “workshop.”

The Organization of Islamic Cooperation is holding a workshop in Brussels as of 15th February 2012, on the subject of Islamophobia, the first workshop of its kind aimed at establishing information mechanisms to face up to the slanderous campaigns against Islam in the media.

This workshop, held under the title of “Smearing Islam and Muslims in the Media”, is being attended by major civil society institutions in the Islamic world along with the press community from the Islamic and Western worlds, in addition to many intellectuals and academics. It constitutes a watershed event in terms of effecting a real shift away from mere theorizing towards a more pragmatic action aimed at countering the phenomenon of Islamophobia.

It is now late February, and search as one might, one will not find a press release about what had been “work-shopped” and resolved. Who were the attendees? What Western academics, intellectuals and journalists were on the session rosters? What “mechanisms” were suggested and discussed? We Islamophobes, whose mouths may be gagged and our hands crippled by Muslims or by our own government, rendering our pens and keyboards useless, would like to know.

And we would also like to know which newspapers have been conducting smear campaigns against Islam. Which other media institutions? But for a pitiful handful of newspapers, such as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post and Britain’s Daily Mail, I do not know of any other publication that is guilty of that charge, that is, of having written objectively about Islam. Perhaps, occasionally, Canada’s National Post. And the Daily Mail has actually identified Muslim culprits, and called them Muslims. I know of no other mainstream print magazines that have waged an information war on Islam. The rest, including The New York Times and The Washington Post, are either frightened turtles, or Gila monsters for Islam.

The only other realm of information that can be charged with waging a “smear campaign” against Islam and Muslims is the blogosphere. It, and not the mainstream media, is the prime media institution in which real information about Islam and Muslims can be found. So, the whole “workshop” idea is merely an means to come up with ideas to shut down whatever blog sites have bad-mouthed or “defamed” Islam.

Robert McDowell, in his Wall Street Journal article of February 21st, “The U.N. Threat to Internet Freedom,” wrote:

On Feb. 27, a diplomatic process will begin in Geneva that could result in a new treaty giving the United Nations unprecedented powers over the Internet. Dozens of countries, including Russia and China, are pushing hard to reach this goal by year's end. As Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said last June, his goal and that of his allies is to establish "international control over the Internet" through the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), a treaty-based organization under U.N. auspices.

Of the 193 members of the ITU, 57 of them are OIC members, meaning that the ITU cannot help but be influenced by OIC’s clout, aside from that of Russia and China, both of them established dictatorships. One can guess what the new “treaty” will advocate or accomplish: the suppression of freedom of speech across the globe.

The OIC announcement does not mention the role of the United Nations in this “brainstorming” for “social justice,” but Bernama does:

The organisation noted that the workshop is of particular importance as it will be held only weeks before the convening of the United Nations Human Rights Council meeting in Geneva in March, at which Resolution 16/18 will come to a vote for the second time after its unanimous endorsement in the previous session.

Resolution 16/18 aims to combat intolerance, negative stereotyping and stigmatisation of discrimination, incitement to violence, and violence against persons based on religion or belief….The resolution was an outcome of bilateral talks between the OIC and a number of Western countries, including the U.S. Two meetings were held in Istanbul and Washington, respectively, to develop operational mechanisms to implement the resolution at the level of the United Nations.

Resolution 16/18…was backed by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at the most recent Istanbul Process Conference in Washington in December.

“Operational mechanisms”? What a subtle term for blackmail, extortion, harassment, political and economic pressure, the enforcement of politically correct speech codes, tire-slashing, anonymous phone call threats, envelopes filled with white powder, perhaps a little creative road-rage, house trashing, and strange men loitering beneath the street lamp or in the shadows outside your home. What else could the euphemism mean? Other than direct, brute force?

And Lady Macbeth reappears for an encore audition. Doubtless she will be a star witness and co-conspirator in Geneva next month. It will be all cocktails, canapés and censorship chatter before the vote. This subject has been discussed before, last August, in “Hillary Clinton Auditions for Lady Macbeth.” And because of the paucity of information about the Washington Conference last December, and about the Brussels “workshop,” all we can do is repeat what was reported before. We plead ignorance of what transpired during those conferences – which is how the OIC would have it.

“Resolution 16/18 aims to combat intolerance, negative stereotyping and stigmatisation of discrimination, incitement to violence, and violence against persons based on religion or belief”?

But what creed and what group are notorious for all those things? Because the OIC is behind Resolution 16/18, the “combat” will not be launched against Islam and Muslims. But it is precisely Islam and its consistent practitioners that are perpetrators of rabid and violent intolerance, and of stereotyping and stigmatizing themselves through their actions and agenda and sensitivity to the least criticism.

The resolution’s stated intention is an instance of Grand Taqiyya, or, the Big Lie, of saying one thing to the public (or to dhimmi Western diplomats) but meaning something else entirely. The Koran permits it. The Hadith permits it. And Reliance of the Traveler, that mammoth Islamic handbook on the methodology of conquest, permits it. To wit:

"Speaking is a means to achieve objectives. If a praiseworthy aim is attainable through both telling the truth and lying, it is unlawful to accomplish through lying because there is no need for it. When it is possible to achieve such an aim by lying but not by telling the truth, it is permissible to lie if attaining the goal is permissible (N:i.e. when the purpose of lying is to circumvent someone who is preventing one from doing something permissible), and obligatory to lie if the goal is obligatory... it is religiously precautionary in all cases to employ words that give a misleading impression...Reliance of the Traveler, p. 746 - 8.2 (Shaffi Fiqh)

In May of 2006, in my Rule of Reason commentary, “Moving towards freedomless speech,” I noted that:

The Mohammedan enforcer of politically correct speech is ready with his scimitar, watching your every movement and listening to your every word, eager to behead unrepentant infidels of the First Amendment. "Slay them wherever you find them." Or take them to court.

The enforcer no longer need be a Muslim. He can be a Presbyterian, or a Catholic, or a Baptist, or an agnostic, working for the government at the behest of the United Nations, authorized by Resolution 16/18 to silence you. It can be Hillary Clinton, whose State Department hosted the December 2011 OIC conference on what to do about the First Amendment. To accomplish the “praiseworthy” goal of silencing all criticism of Islam, the OIC can depend on the DHS, which now monitors all Internet traffic, looking for those “red flags” of “hate speech,” “bigotry,” and “Islamophobia.”

Hillary Clinton is up to her neck in complicity to subvert freedom of speech in America, and in aiding and abetting the OIC’s methods and ends. Nina Shea and Paul Marshall reported in The Wall Street Journal last December, before the Washington conference:

Last July in Istanbul, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton co-chaired a "High-Level Meeting on Combating Religious Intolerance" with the Saudi-based Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC). Mrs. Clinton invited the OIC to Washington for a conference to build "muscles of respect and empathy and tolerance." That conference is scheduled for Dec. 12 through Dec. 14.

For more than 20 years, the OIC has pressed Western governments to restrict speech about Islam. Its charter commits it “to combat defamation of Islam,” and its current action plan calls for “deterrent punishments” by all states to counter purported Islamophobia. […]

OIC pressure on European countries to ban “negative stereotyping of Islam” has increased since the 2004 murder of Theo Van Gogh for his film “Submission” and the Danish Muhammad cartoon imbroglio in 2005. Many countries (such as France, Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, Finland, Italy and Sweden), hoping to ensure social peace, now prosecute people for “vilifying” Islam or insulting Muslims’ religious feelings.

Shea and Marshall conclude, not quite believing then that the march of events could overcome their optimism:

Encouraging a more civil discourse is commendable, and First Amendment freedoms mean the U.S. won’t veer down Europe’s path any time soon.

It has been veering down that path since at least 9/11. The First Amendment is no longer sacrosanct, no longer a guarantee of freedom of speech – not if our own government is seeking to regulate it for its own statist ends in an unholy alliance with this nation’s dedicated enemies.

Those who value that particular liberty should initiate “workshops” of their own, to combat the frightened turtles and Gila monsters at large in America and abroad.