- American film maker hanged in effigy in Bangladesh
The two sides of the same coin
For all the coverage that Islamic riots over “insults against Islamic faith” have received, there is an angle to the story that remains unexplored: while rioters on the street kill, burn and destroy, it is their politician buddies that are doing the dirty work of trying to achieve what the rioters have failed to accomplish: to get us to shut up.
Look, for example, at this poorly worded excerpt describing the sentiments among the foreign ministers of the member nations of the Organization of Islamic Conference:
The Foreign Ministers of all the participating nations, while expressing severe response against the movie, stated that Anti-Islamic content was regularly being produced and promoted within the name of ‘freedom of speech’, and this was contrary to the measures provided by the International Human Rights which promotes liberty of religion.
Well isn’t that sweet. If they honor the freedoms supported by the International Declaration of Human Rights, why are they so dismissive of freedom of expression? And besides, dummies, freedom of religion doesn’t mean you can’t criticize anyone’s religion, it means that unlike what often happens in Iran and Saudi Arabia, you are not supposed to raid the gathering places of new converts to a different religion and put them behind bars merely for what they think.
But don’t you get comfortable thinking this is what we hear only from Islamists abroad. Look at this comment that we get from Cyrus McGoldrick, the civil rights director of the American Islamic Relations Council in New York, spoken in an interview with a news channel run by the Iranian theocracy, no less:
“I think it’s much less, though, of the question of freedom of speech [or] freedom of religion than it is about power politics”.
Americans enjoy “allegedly a freedom of speech, a freedom of expression –political expression and religious expression,” he explained. “And of course, that comes with it some rights, but also, of course, some responsibilities.”
The unholy apologetics that we get on behalf of the well-dressed Islamists on behalf of their rioting brethren will continue. But it is important to see through the facade of niceties and recognize that in fact they are working for the same goal: to chip away at our basic human rights.
