Read Silenced: How Apostasy and Blasphemy Codes Are Choking Freedom Worldwide for Free Online

Blasphemy Restrictions
     
    In part III , “The Globalization of Blasphemy,” we give an overview of attempts to transplant restrictions on “insulting Islam” to the West. These instances have occurred in particular Western countries and in the United Nations,taking place in commissions, conferences, courts of law, or in the streets through vigilante action. Some of the larger and more famous examples in the West have had such a complex and long-lasting international backlash and effect that they must be treated as special cases. These are detailed in chapter 10 and include the continuing affair of
The Satanic Verses
, renewed when author Salman Rushdie was given a knighthood by the British government. We also focus on the so-called Danish cartoons crisis of 2005–6, which continues to reverberate when the images are republished or forbidden to be printed, as in 2009 when Yale University Press censored them and other images from a book detailing the cartoons crisis itself. Other examples include the
Newsweek
account of a Qur’an flushed down a toilet at Guantanamo, a report which was later disproved; Pope Benedict XVI’s controversial speech at Regensburg; and Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders’s provocative film,
Fitna
. One feature of these upheavals was that they frequently involved political manipulation. For example, the Danish cartoons were first published in September 2005 and later republished, even in Egypt, Morocco, and Indonesia, without any outcry. It was only in January 2006, following a decision by the OIC in its Mecca meeting to make an issue of the caricatures, when riots, violence, and boycotts erupted and some 200 people were killed.
    Chapter 11 moves from wide international upheaval over blasphemy accusations to more formal efforts to legislate antiblasphemy laws through international fora, particularly the United Nations. This chapter examines a twenty-year campaign driven by authoritarian governments to subject international human rights standards to an undefined version of Islam. The campaign includes the promotion of the 1990 “Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam” and, in the 1990s, blasphemy-based threats against the UN Special Rapporteur on Sudan, Gaspar Biro, and the Special Rapporteur on Contemporary Forms of Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance, Maurice Glele-Ahanhanzo. The main effort has been the OIC’s push, begun in 1999, to use the United Nations to win official endorsement for a global ban on blasphemy against Islam. First called “defamation of Islam,” then retitled “defamation of religions” at the insistence of other delegations, a resolution had been debated and adopted annually for more than a decade in the United Nations. This effort had been losing support and the resolution was not proposed in the Human Rights Council in March 2011. It is being replaced with an initiative, which also has some Western support, to establish an international religious hate-speech standard, relying on undefined terms such as “incitement to hostility” and “negative stereotyping.”
    Related questions are being debated in Western national law. Many Western countries already accept the principle that their governments should limit religious criticism. Chapter 12 investigates how these countries are creating, amending, and enforcing laws that limit what may and may not be said about religious beliefs. These laws range from literal blasphemy bans, originally intendedto protect Christianity, to twentieth-century hate-speech prohibitions, devised primarily as antiracism measures, but which are now increasingly applied to religious categories as well. While largely anachronistic, some blasphemy laws have been used to prosecute offenses against Islam; for instance, in Finland in 2009, a city politician was convicted of “violating the sanctity of religion” for deriding the Muslim prophet and Muslim child marriages. Most European Union countries, as