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Derius
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Tony
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 Posted: Fri Nov 14, 2008 6:14 pm Post subject: |
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Tell you what, when the imams stop calling Jews pigs, dogs and Nazis, and stop referring to anyone who isn't a member of their disgusting club "kuffars" and infidels then I might stop calling them dross and scumbags... but then again, I probably wouldn't until they stop calling for a worldwide caliphate and accept that other people's beliefs are equal in every respect to their own.
That seems fair to me... but then I'm not trying to take over THEIR world.
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Philosopher's Stoned
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| Posted: Fri Nov 14, 2008 6:36 pm Post subject: |
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Hmmmmm.........
Perhaps the UN might do better if it decied to ban deformation of religion.
That would leave all the militant rabble rousing Imams and clerics rather discombobulated.
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Percy
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| Posted: Thu Nov 27, 2008 5:35 pm Post subject: |
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This important story rumbles on and it seems that the penny is starting to drop in some quarters - even in Canada.
This report from the Calgary Herald
Anti-blasphemy measures could limit free speech
Steven Edwards, Canwest News Service
Published: Thursday, November 27, 2008
Islamic countries Monday won United Nations backing for an anti-blasphemy measure Canada and other western critics say risks being used to limit freedom of speech.
Combating Defamation of Religions passed 85-50 with 42 abstentions in a key UN General Assembly committee, and will enter into the international record after an expected rubber stamp by the plenary later in the year.
But while the draft's sponsors say it and earlier similar measures are aimed at preventing violence against worshippers regardless of religion, religious tolerance advocates warn the resolutions are being accumulated for a more sinister goal.
"It provides international cover for domestic anti-blasphemy laws, and there are a number of people who are in prison today because they have been accused of committing blasphemy," said Bennett Graham, international program director with the Becket Fund, a think-tank aimed at promoting religious liberty. "Those arrests are made legitimate by the UN body's (effective) stamp of approval."
Passage of the resolution is part of a 10-year action plan the 57-state Organization of Islamic Conference launched in 2005 to ensure "renaissance" of the "Muslim Ummah" or community.
While the current resolution is nonbinding, Pakistan's Ambassador Masood Khan reminded the UN's Human Rights Council this year that the OIC ultimately seeks a"new instrument or convention" on the issue. Such a measure would impose its terms on signatory states.
"Each time the resolution comes up, we get a measure of where the world is on this issue, and we see that the campaign has been ramped up," said Hillel Neuer, executive director of the Geneva-based monitoring group UN Watch.
While this year's draft is less Islamcentric than resolutions of earlier years, analysts note it is more emphatic in linking defamation of religion and incitement to violence. That" risks limiting a broad range of peaceful speech and expression," Neuerargues.
The 2008 draft "underscores the need to combat defamation of religions, and incitement to religious hatred in general, by strategizing and harmonizing actions at the local, national regional and international levels."
Western democracies argue that a religion can't enjoy protection from criticism because that would require a judicial ruling that its teachings are the "truth."
"Canada rejects the basic premise that religions have rights; human rights belong to human beings," said Catherine Loubier, spokeswoman for Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon.
Canada says governments have abused laws against defamation or contempt of religions to "prosecute and imprison journalists, bloggers, academics students and peaceful political dissidents."
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Tony
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| Posted: Thu Nov 27, 2008 5:58 pm Post subject: |
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| Quote: | | Islamic countries Monday won United Nations backing |
It's no wonder that we consider North Americans to be all but illiterate when they write as badly as that. |
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Tony
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| Posted: Thu Nov 27, 2008 7:16 pm Post subject: |
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| We all know the agenda but the muslim OIC is nothing less than a political body seeking Islamic world dominance, distinct from Islamic-world dominance... not that the Americans would understand the difference. |
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Philosopher's Stoned
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| Posted: Fri Nov 28, 2008 9:37 am Post subject: |
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Remember Lenin: break up, discredit destabalise social order, structure and values in order to dominate.
The West is presently far too stupid to realise how the Islamic ploy is working.
They now have the idiot UN in thrall; as well as every dumb dickhead government apparatchik in Britain.
The Bleeding Heart Ivory Tower Dwelling Liberal Oozing from Every Pore Left Wing cannot wait to get into work and find another subject for Diversity Strategy!
It ought to more proplery named Diversion Strategy, as it's taking their idiot minds of the core reality.
Dominance of the West: by fair means and foul.
And considering the events in Mumbai, foul is eminent.
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Oh dear! We've swapped BLiar for a Calvanist called Prudence! |
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Percy
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| Posted: Mon Mar 16, 2009 3:30 pm Post subject: |
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As this Australian blogger says:
| Quote: | | To have such laws on an international scale would achieve as much for the Islamists as 9/11 ever did. As always, eternal vigilance is the price of freedom, and this goes for religious freedom as well. The question is, will the West resist this clampdown on freedom of speech, or will it instead submit to appeasement and dhimmitude? |
That is the question.
From Quadrant Online
Bill Muehlenberg's Culture Watch
The Islamic Assault on Free Speech
by Bill Muehlenberg
March 16, 2009
It is one of the many benefits of Christianity that the West enjoys religious freedom and freedom of conscience. The properly understood notion of the separation of church and state arose from the Christian worldview, and goes back to the words of Jesus: “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s”.
Islam of course knows of no such separation. Church and state are one in Islam. There is no sacred-secular distinction in the Muslim world. Everything is religious and everything is political. As Rodney Stark wrote, “Muhammad was not only the Prophet, he was head of state. Consequently, Islam has always idealized the fusion of religion and political rule, and sultans have usually also held the title of caliph” (The Victory of Reason).
Or as Dinesh D’Souza put it, “The prophet Muhammad was in his own day both a prophet and a Caesar who integrated the domains of church and state. Following his example, the rulers of the various Islamic empires, from the Umayyad to the ottoman, saw themselves as Allah’s viceregents on earth” (What’s So Great About Christianity?).
As Bernard Lewis explains, “In classical Arabic and in the other classical languages of Islam, there are no pairs of terms corresponding to ‘lay’ and ‘ecclesiastical,’ ‘spiritual’ and ‘temporal,’ ‘secular’ and ‘religious,’ because these pairs of words express a Christian dichotomy that has no equivalent in the world of Islam” (Islam and the West).
It is the genius of the West to have run with the Christian version of events in this regard, and not the Islamic one. But these cherished freedoms are ironically now being whittled way in the West as we increasingly seek to appease militant Islamists.
In many parts of the Western world Muslims are demanding, and getting, preferential treatment. And in the process, freedom of religion is slowly being eroded. A classic example of this can be seen in Victoria’s Racial and Religious Tolerance Act.
This bit of scurrilous legislation has been used to silence Christians from proclaiming their faith, and from making rational criticism of Islam. The nefarious Victorian law effectively cramps real freedom of speech and religious diversity.
Of course hyper-sensitive Muslims around the world are seeking to implement such censorship on all non-Muslims. At the UN level, for example, Muslims are hoping to use UN Resolution 62/154, which has to do with "combating defamation of religions” to allow Islam to be above all criticism and critique.
A number of people have written about this recently, expressing their concerns. Atheist Christopher Hitchens for example wrote in the Australian warning of “so-called mainstream Muslims, grouped in the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, who are now demanding through the UN that Islam not only be allowed to make such absolutist claims, but that it be officially shielded from any criticism as a result.”
The Resolution is full of typical UN balderdash: “For example, paragraph five ‘expresses its deep concern that Islam is frequently and wrongly associated with human rights violations and terrorism’, while paragraph six ‘notes with deep concern the intensification of the campaign of defamation of religions and the ethnic and religious profiling of Muslim minorities in the aftermath of the tragic events of September 11, 2001’.”
“You see how the trick is pulled? In the same weeks this resolution comes up for its annual renewal at the UN, its chief sponsor-government (Pakistan) makes an agreement with the local Taliban forces to close girls' schools in the Swat Valley region (a mere 150km or so from the capital in Islamabad) and subject the inhabitants to sharia law. And this capitulation comes in direct response to a campaign of horrific violence and intimidation, including public beheadings.”
One reason why the Victorian legislation is so fatally flawed is that it mixes two quite different things: racial or ethnic vilification, and religious vilification. There may be a case to seek to reduce wrongful discrimination based on race, but to seek to isolate religious views from theological scrutiny and public debate is ludicrous. This is just what is happening in the UN Resolution:
“Yet the religion of those who carry out the campaign [of Islamist violence] is not to be mentioned, lest it ‘associate’ that faith with human rights violations or terrorism. In paragraph six, an obvious attempt is being made to confuse ethnicity with religious allegiance. Indeed this insinuation (incidentally dismissing the faith-based criminality of September 11 as merely tragic) is in fact essential to the entire scheme. If religion and race can be run together, then the condemnations that racism axiomatically attracts can be surreptitiously extended to religion, too. This is clumsy, but it works: the useless and meaningless term Islamophobia, now widely used as a bludgeon of moral blackmail, is testimony to its success.”
The muzzling of free speech is the sure outcome of this: “See where the language of paragraph 10 of the resolution is taking us. Having briefly offered lip service to the rights of free expression, it goes on to say that ‘the exercise of these rights carries with it special duties and responsibilities and may therefore be subject to limitations as are provided for by law and are necessary for respect of the rights or reputations of others, protection of national security or of public order, public health or morals and respect for religions and beliefs.’ The thought buried in this awful, wooden prose is as ugly as the language in which it is expressed: watch what you say, because our declared intention is to criminalise opinions that differ with the one true faith. Let nobody say that they have not been warned.”
The five-year-long court case involving two Christian pastors should suffice to demonstrate the lunacy of Victoria’s anti-vilification laws. The entire case was a travesty of justice, and was simply an attempt by Muslims to silence Christian voices which dared to question Islam.
To have such laws on an international scale would achieve as much for the Islamists as 9/11 ever did. As always, eternal vigilance is the price of freedom, and this goes for religious freedom as well. The question is, will the West resist this clampdown on freedom of speech, or will it instead submit to appeasement and dhimmitude?
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Percy
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| Posted: Tue Mar 17, 2009 8:07 am Post subject: |
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It must be bad if the EU is thinking of boycotting the conference!
From Reuters
EU threatens to boycott U.N. anti-racism conference
Mon Mar 16, 2009 2:30pm EDT
BRUSSELS (Reuters) - The EU threatened on Monday to withdraw from a U.N. conference on racism next month unless its final declaration is changed, joining a number of countries concerned the meeting could become an anti-Semitic forum.
Israel and Canada have already withdrawn from the April 20-24 World Conference Against Racism in Geneva amid fears Arab nations will use it against Israel. The United States and Australia have said they are considering doing the same.
"The main voices were very skeptical about the direction of the papers prepared there," Czech Foreign Minister Karel Schwarzenberg said after EU foreign ministers discussed the Geneva meeting on Monday.
"Probably we will send now from the EU a suggestion of ours and if the conference papers are in line with that, we will stay, otherwise there is a strong call to withdraw," said Schwarzenberg, who chaired the talks.
"Some of the wording (in the conference's draft documents) is considered to be anti-Semitic," one EU diplomat said.
The bloc was also concerned about the mention of defamation against religion, he said. "The EU thinks this has nothing to do with human rights," the diplomat told Reuters.
German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said he was concerned the conference "might be abused for one sided statements on the Middle East conflict."
"I plead that we would cancel our participation unless there is in the next few days a change in the preparation," he told reporters in Brussels.
The United States has also said it will not attend the conference unless the wording of the final declaration is altered radically. Israel is calling for a boycott of the event.
The issues of freedom of speech and anti-Semitism have been set by Western countries, including the United States, as among their "red lines" for participation in the gathering, dubbed Durban II.
U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay, who will preside over the conference, has sought to reassure doubters, arguing fears of anti-Semitic outbursts are unfounded.
But diplomats have said that memories of street marches targeting Jews in general at the first U.N. racism conference in Durban in 2001 remain strong and fears of a repeat have grown after protests in Europe over Israel's war against Palestinian militants in Gaza.
(Reporting by David Brunnstrom and Ilona Wissenbach; Writing by Ingrid Melander)
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Tony
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| Posted: Tue Mar 17, 2009 8:15 am Post subject: |
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They are missing, or appear to be missing, the point of the 'conference'. It isn't about anti-semitism, but that is a consequence of the drive to firstly protect Islam and then provide a vehicle for it to drive through every legal system on the planet, establishing a superior and unchallengeable position from which to dominate and take over.
As I've said many times, it is a ratchet and once another notch is gained there is no going back... without a war. Given that the Sharia creep has got a foothold in every country on the planet, except Israel, it would virtually involve worldwide civil war to get rid of it... could that happen? Almost certainly not. Game, set and match to Islam. The end of the human race as we know it and it's both more certain and faster than global warming/climate change! |
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Percy
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| Posted: Tue Oct 27, 2009 1:45 pm Post subject: |
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It must be bad if...
...Mrs Clinton has come out so strongly opposed! (sorry Tony)
From AP
US hits out at bid to bar religious defamation
By MATTHEW LEE (AP) – 14 hours ago
WASHINGTON — The Obama administration on Monday came out strongly against efforts by Islamic nations to bar the defamation of religions, saying the moves would restrict free speech.
"Some claim that the best way to protect the freedom of religion is to implement so-called anti-defamation policies that would restrict freedom of expression and the freedom of religion," Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton told reporters. "I strongly disagree."
Clinton said the United States was opposed to negative depictions of specific faiths and would always fight against belief-based discrimination. But she said a person's ability to practice their religion was entirely unrelated to another person's right to free speech.
"The protection of speech about religion is particularly important since persons of different faith will inevitably hold divergent views on religious questions," Clinton said. "These differences should be met with tolerance, not with the suppression of discourse."
Her comments came as the Organization of the Islamic Conference, a 56-nation bloc of Islamic countries, is pressing the U.N. Human Rights Council to adopt a resolution that would broadly condemn the defamation of religion.
The effort is widely seen as a reaction to perceived anti-Islamic incidents, including the publication in Europe of several cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed.
Michael Posner, the assistant U.S. secretary of state for human rights, democracy and labor whose office prepares the religious freedom report, said the resolution "goes too far."
"The notion that a religion can be defamed and that any comments that are negative about that religion can constitute a violation of human rights to us violates the core principle of free speech," he said.
Posner was part of a delegation at the Human Rights Council that successfully negotiated with Egypt a compromise over another similar resolution that had aimed to condemn religion-related harassment or discrimination.
He said the administration wanted to differentiate between such harassment and defamation and would do so both in the Human Rights Council and the U.N. General Assembly.
"There are limits to free expression and there are certainly concerns about people targeting individuals because of their religious belief or their race or their ethnicity," he said.
"But at the same time, we're also clear that a resolution, broadly speaking, that talks about the defamation of a religion is a violation of free speech."
Clinton and Posner spoke as they released the State Department's annual report on international religious freedom, which, as in years past, criticized Saudi Arabia, Uzbekistan, Myanmar, China, Eritrea, Iran, North Korea and Sudan for violating religious freedom.
Those eight nations are designated "countries of particular concern" for abuses of religious worshippers. The Obama administration is currently reviewing the designations, which can be accompanied by sanctions.
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