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Universal Islamic 'Blasphemy' Law?
American Thinker February 24 2008
Almost two weeks ago, "three men with a Muslim background" were arrested by Danish police on anti-terrorism charges, suspected of having plotted to murder Kurt Westergaard, a cartoonist for Jyllands-Posten. Westergaard is one of the 12 cartoonists who on September 30, 2005 published cartoons of the Muslim prophet Muhammad to protest the tacit enforcement in Danish society of Islam's taboo on depictions of Muhammad, no matter how banal, or inoffensive, through intimidation -- a clear violation of Western freedom of expression.
Upon learning of the arrests, Westergaard (noted for this cartoon) commented aptly,
"I think...that the impact of the insane response to my cartoon will last for the rest of my life. It is sad indeed, but it has become a fact of my life."
And within 3 days, by February 15, 2008, confirming the pervasive fear of violent Muslim reprisal that apparently grips Danish society, Westergaard was ejected from his police-protected hotel room having been deemed, "too much of a security risk." Now the 73-year-old cartoonist and his wife are homeless.
Not surprisingly, when newspapers in Denmark, and across Europe re-published the 12 original cartoons in solidarity with the threatened cartoonist, violent protests ensued by Danish Muslims (including burnings, and perhaps a bombing). Other violent demonstrations took place in Muslim communities across the Middle East and Asia.
Yet scant attention has been paid to a remarkable -- and remarkably chilling -- statement that was issued on Friday February 15, 2008 by Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, the Turkish Secretary General of the Jeddah-based Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), the world's unique pan-Islamic political body, comprised of 57 members, including secular Turkey. Conveniently ignoring that the re-publication in Denmark of 12 banal cartoons depicting the Muslim prophet Muhammad was an urgent, sane protest of the disrupted plot by Muslims to murder one of the original Danish cartoonists, Kurt Westergaard, and oblivious to the immoral equivalence he was making, Ihsanoglu stated,
By reprinting these cartoons we are heading toward a bigger conflict and that shows that both sides will be hostages of their radicals.
Continuing, Ihsanoglu further demonstrated both the complete absence of self-criticism, and triumphalism of the Islamic worldview that seeks to impose its Shari'a-based conceptions -- antithetical to true freedom of conscience and expression -- on all of humanity. And he concluded with a thinly veiled threat of violence:
It is not a way of improving your rights and exercising your freedoms when you use these rights for insulting the most sacred values and symbols of others and inciting hatred...This is a very wrong, provocative path -- unacceptable.
(...)
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