The Obama Administration and the OIC: The Anti-Free Speech Coalition

The Obama Administration and the OIC: The Anti-Free Speech Coalition

Posted by Joseph Puder Bio ↓ on Oct 2nd, 2012 Comments ↓

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Reacting to the murderous rioting against the U.S. throughout the Arab and Muslim world and especially in Libya, where U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens was murdered, and in Egypt, President Obama, who authorized millions in aid to Libya, said on September 12^th: “Since our founding the United States has been a nation that respects all faiths.  We reject all efforts to denigrate the religious beliefs of others…Already, many Libyan have joined us…and this attack will not break the bonds between the U.S. and Libya[.]”

Obama and his administration officials have vehemently attacked the anti-Muslim video produced by a private American citizen, and yet they conveniently ignore the fact that the Obama administration supported the people who are now expressing visceral hate for America, in spite of Obama’s four-year record of appeasing Islam and Muslim countries. An example of which was obvious in the statement issued by the Embassy of Cairo: “The Embassy of the United States in Cairo condemns the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims.”

The Obama administration has yet to make the correlation between the killing of an American ambassador and the torching of U.S. embassies (which represent sovereign American territories) on the anniversary of September 11, and the rise to power of anti-American Islamists in Egypt and Libya, as well as elsewhere in the Arab Middle East.

Something else far more notorious has been occurring since March of last year.  The Obama administration has been giving the 56-nation Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), the most powerful bloc of nations inside the U.N., a platform on which to stifle free speech in America under the guise of fighting Islamophobia.

In March of 2011, U.S. diplomats helped push for the adoption of Human Right Council Resolution 16/18, which expresses concern about religious “stereotyping” and negative profiling.  It was a modification of an OIC resolution against the “defamation of religions” (ostensibly Islam), which would have protected religious institutions instead of individual freedoms. In July 2011, the Obama administration went back to Resolution 16/18 and used it as a springboard to “greatly invigorate the international effort to criminalize speech against Islam.”

The April 12, 2011 Resolution provides, inter alia, that

everyone shall have the right to freedom of thought, conscience, and religion or belief, which shall include freedom to have or adopt a religious or belief of his choice, and freedom, either individually or in community with others and in public or in private, to manifest his religion or belief in worship, observance, practice and teaching, Reaffirming the positive role that the exercise of the right to freedom of opinion and expression and the full respect for the freedom to seek, receive and impart information can play in strengthening democracy and combating religious intolerance, Deeply concerned about incidents of intolerance, discrimination and violence against persons based on their religion or belief in all regions of the world[.]

Ironically, it is in the Muslim world alone where intolerance towards other religions exists, which violates both the letter and spirit of the above document, yet the Obama administration is collaborating with OIC to enforce restrictions against anti-Muslim expressions.

Back in December 2005, the heads of state and governments of the OIC held an extraordinary summit in Mecca and adopted a “Ten Year Program of Action.” An observatory taskforce on Islamophobia was to be established to monitor Islamophobia and defamation of Islam.  Its goals were to get the U.N. to adopt an international resolution on Islamophobia, and call on all states to enact laws to counter Islamophobia, including deterrent punishments.

The OIC’s anti-defamation resolutions passed in both the United Nations Human Rights Commission and the U.N. General Assembly, and were adopted in December 2007 by a vote of 108 in favor to 51 against, with 25 abstentions.

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