Human Rights: Other Views - Part II

by Denis MacEoin • May 15, 2018 at 5:00 am

Palestinian human rights organizations such as Al-Mezan, along with their many supporters abroad and even within a substantial part of the Jewish diaspora, have turned the very concept of human rights on its head.
Although genuine and widely praised for their advocacy of human rights internationally, even Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, the International Federation for Human Rights and the humanitarian relief body Oxfam International have reputations of extreme bias against Israel.
What are any of these people doing actually to help the Palestinians -- such as creating jobs, assuring good governance, establishing schools, hospitals, health care and dental clinics, safeguarding legal standards, stopping the arrests of journalists or others who dare to criticize the current governments and so on? Rather, the issues they address seem more a rationalization to destroy Israel.

Pictured: A session of the UN Human Rights Council, in Geneva, Switzerland. (Image source: United Nations/Flickr)

We have seen in Part One of this article how far Western standards of human rights differ from those guaranteed by Islam. One obvious outcome of this disparity is, of course, that citizens of Muslim countries are accorded fewer rights than their counterparts in liberal democracies. Thus, women, girls, gays, members of religious minorities, "blasphemers", bloggers (notably in Bangladesh and Saudi Arabia) reformers and others may be subjected to partial or total deprival of what the rest of the world considers to be unquestionable or God-given rights. Women may be forced to dress in all-encompassing clothing or hijabs. Minorities may be imprisoned or killed. Women even alleged to have committed adultery – but often just the victims of rape – may be flogged or else stoned to death. LGBT individuals may imprisoned or killed, while bloggers, reformist intellectuals, moderate Qur'an interpreters face flogging and murder by mobs.

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Turkey Slams Proposed French Changes to Quran

by Uzay Bulut • May 15, 2018 at 4:00 am

"We must revolutionize our religion," — Egyptian President, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, December, 2014.
"A Muslim is to hate what Allah hates and love what Allah loves. Allah hates the Kafir, therefore, a Muslim is to act accordingly." — Dr. Bill Warner, "Sharia Law for Non-Muslims," a publication of the Center for the Study of Political Islam.
"The point is not that these things are written in Islamic scripture, but that people still live by them." — Bruce Bawer, author.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. (Photo by Lintao Zhang/Pool/Getty Images)

On April 21, the French daily Le Parisien published a "Manifesto against the new anti-Semitism," written by Philippe Val, a co-founder and former director of the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, the target of the 2015 terrorist attack that left 12 employees dead.

The declaration -- signed by more than 250 prominent French intellectuals, artists and politicians, among them former President Nicolas Sarkozy – calls on Islamic theologians to remove the verses of the Quran that call for the killing and punishment of Jews, Christians and Muslim non-believers.

The manifesto reads, in part:

"Anti-Semitism is not the business of the Jews. It's the business of all of us. The French, who have demonstrated their democratic maturity after each Islamist attack, are living through a tragic paradox. Their country has become the arena for murderous anti-Semitism.

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