Questionable Motives

January 4, 2012

How do Islamic nations abuse the United Nations?

I have written many times about this push by Islamic states at the United Nations to outlaw blasphemy through the UN Human Rights Council, to make it a ‘human rights’ violation to dare to criticize this odious religion. They have now succeeded. Resolution 16/18 is all about combating intolerance, negative stereotyping and stigmatization of, and discrimination, incitement to violence and violence against, persons based on religion or belief.

The problem here is that some religious beliefs like Islam are themselves intolerant and discriminating against universal human rights and are in desperate need of sustained reasonable and rational criticism. The irony of fooling western secular democratic representatives at the UN into supporting this obscene piece of tripe by those whose sole intention is to undermine human rights and put all of us under the yoke of their assumed religious authority is rank and shows just how colossal is our collective stupidity in thinking that tolerating intolerance under the guise of respecting religion magically enhances human rights. It doesn’t. It enslaves us by undermining our human rights and replacing them with religious authority.

All those who voted in favour of this Resolution are a menace to all people everywhere and every single western secular democracy should denounce this Resolution in the strongest possible terms. Our governments need to fire those who dared to use their democratic vote representing us at the UN to undermine our basic democratic right to freedom of speech. Such decisions as this Resolution are incompatible with showing support and respect for human rights. This Resolution is a travesty, an abuse of democracy at the UN to reduce human rights in order to protect vile religious sensibilities from criticism.

But perhaps the most disturbing part of this disgusting Resolution is the notion of resorting to use  ‘combat’ against those who dare to criticize anti-human, anti-life authoritarian religious belief.  This open door to combat justified intolerance, justified discrimination, justified condemnation of religious authority, now needs to be closed firmly in the face of these religious stormtroopers who have a Resolution from the UN Human  Rights Council to intrude into your home, your head, your thoughts, your opinions and cartoons and editorials and blogs and commentary, and subject you by threat of force to paying homage to their religious beliefs that reduce your human rights.

For shame, people. For shame.

7 Comments »

  1. To listen to 20 minutes of The Hitch on this topic, please go here (with thanks to Eric for posting this video).

    Comment by tildeb — January 4, 2012 @ 11:14 pm | Reply

  2. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16424659

    I guess it can cut both ways…

    Comment by misunderstoodranter — January 5, 2012 @ 10:23 am | Reply

    • The only difference between ‘pirates’ and ‘a priest’ is… the order of the letters. Coincidence? Or divine revelation?

      Comment by tildeb — January 5, 2012 @ 10:50 am | Reply

  3. Oh it must be divine… it is the only explanation.

    Comment by misunderstoodranter — January 6, 2012 @ 2:32 am | Reply

  4. Okay so they don’t want their religion criticized. Can their actions still be criticized?

    Comment by chad.moyles@gmail.com — January 9, 2012 @ 2:59 pm | Reply

  5. It is my understanding that muslims believe the koran to be the perfect word of god (I have yet to come across a muslim who disagrees with this statement), and as such it cannot contain any errors or contradictions. Science, therefore, must be compatible with it. Because it is the perfect word of god (clearly filled as it is with borrowed bit of the bible) muslims believe it to be of divine, rather than human, origin.

    Actions undertaken under koranic direction (ie death in Sudan and Saudi Arabia in law for apostasy, murdering gays in Iran, stoning women in Afghanistan, the push for sharia in multicultural countries, etc) cannot be criticized without bringing into question the notion that the koran may not be the perfect word of god. This is why islam is not in any way similar to western biblical theologies subject to interpretation and liberalization but exists as an incompatible threat to the acceptance of human rights and freedoms that stand in conflict with koranic passages. In other words, there is no middle ground, although many muslims agree to be temporarily bad muslims while living and working in secular western liberal democracies. Perhaps this helps to explain how well-educated and affluent native born muslims in these countries whose laws respect human rights (that are in conflict with koranic passages) can still be so easily recruited to various jihads around the world. This religion is a problem in that it is not susceptible to moderation and tolerance necessary for a modern citizen in a modern world but is a major influence in trying to drive everyone back to the pre-enlightenment eighth century.

    Comment by tildeb — January 9, 2012 @ 4:47 pm | Reply

    • So following that would they not have to somehow prove that it was god and not a human that wrote the words thereby eliminating all chance of mistake? Would this resolution not also apply to all religions therefore adding a huge level of hypocrisy to the whole thing? What I mean is since christianity and islam say their faith is the correct and ultimate truth and word of god, not being able to criticize one for some morally reprehensible act (say bombing an opposing faiths church) would indirectly be allowing some sort of condemnation of the group on the receiving end and support on the end of the faith committing the violent act.

      Comment by choyles — January 9, 2012 @ 7:58 pm | Reply


RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

Create a free website or blog at WordPress.com.

%d bloggers like this: