Tag Archives: Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam

Organization of Islamic Cooperation on the Defensive Over Shariah in America

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20110225_Shariah4Americaby CLARE M. LOPEZ

For all who’ve been working hard to educate Americans on the facts about  Islamic Law (shariah), there are some encouraging signals. The Organization  of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) and its affiliated network, including the  Muslim Brotherhood in America, would seem to be in full-on defensive mode about  shariah if a recent Brotherhood conference and a couple of new reports are  indicative.

At the Muslim American Society (MAS)-Islamic  Circle of North America (ICNA) conference in Chicago, Illinois 21-25  December 2012, a few thousand mostly Arabic speaking Muslims circled the wagons  for a five-day program aimed at rousing them to defense of Islam. The Islamic  Circle of North America (ICNA), acknowledged in the Brotherhood’s 1991 “Explanatory  Memorandum” as one of its organizations, and the Muslim American Society  (MAS) co-sponsored the 11th Annual MAS-ICNA  Convention. The Convention speakers roster featured Tariq  Ramadan, scion of the Brotherhood’s al-Banna founding family; Nihad  Awad, the Executive Director of HAMAS’  U.S. branch, CAIR  (Council on American Islamic Relations); Siraj  Wahhaj, Imam of the al-Taqwa Mosque in Brooklyn, NY and included on a list  of unindicted  co-conspirators from the 1993 World Trade Center bombing trial;  and  Mohamed Magid, president of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA),  the largest Muslim  Brotherhood front group in the U.S.

The Convention theme of “Renaissance” was all about getting American Muslims  to experience a “double revolution in intellect and psychology,” as Ramadan put  it, so they’d be energized enough to stand up to an alleged atmosphere of   “Islamophobia” in the U.S. that has shariah in its sights. This theme, of  course, is straight out of the OIC’s “Islamophobia  Observatory” which hyperventilates about such things at Foreign Ministers  meetings and in regular reports posted to its website.

A 19 January 2013 report from the Brookings Institute’s Doha Center entitled,  “A  Rights Agenda For The Muslim World,” presents a full-throated apologia for  the OIC’s allegedly frustrated efforts to get its recalcitrant member states to  integrate shariah with modern international standards on human rights. The  problem seems to be that the OIC allows some of those countries with a “conservative  brand of Islam” too much leeway to cling to their  “emphasis  on national sovereignty,” which just wrecks the OIC Secretary General  Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu’s sincere efforts to implement more effective “supra-national  human rights mechanisms.”  Apparently, according to the report’s  author, Turan Kayaoglu, Ihsanoglu wants to make human rights the centerpiece of  the OIC agenda, which Turan says “shows  a gradual move away from emphasizing the centrality of shariah.” Supposedly,  Ihsanoglu increasingly is willing to “discuss  these issues in the context of international human rights rather than  exclusively within that of Islamic law and tradition.” A quick check of the  OIC website shows the “Islamophobia Observatory” is still up and the Human  Rights page features the UN Human Rights Council Resolution 16/18 (the one  about restricting free speech criticism of Islam) and other items about “combating intolerance,  negative stereotyping, and stigmatization of, and discrimination, incitement to  violence and violence against persons, based on religion or  belief“-i.e., Islam.

Nothing much about international standards of human rights superseding  shariah anytime soon, but the OIC did establish an “Independent Permanent  Commission on Human Rights” (IPHRC) in 2011, the Brookings report says, that is  supposed to “promote  the civil social, and economic rights enshrined in the organization’s human  rights documents.” Of course, the 1990 Cairo  Declaration that abrogates the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human  Rights in favor of shariah is still posted in its usual spot on the OIC’s Human  Rights page, so maybe they just haven’t gotten around to updating that yet. But  in the meantime, the OIC wants everyone to know that its focus on shariah is  definitely on the wane. Really.

Read more: Family Security Matters

Islamic Scholars: American Muslims Must ‘Prosecute Those Who Offend Islam’

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by: Dave Reaboi

The most prestigious group of Sunni Islamic scholars and jurists in the world called on American Muslims to “immediately start legal action to prosecute those who offend Islam” and called on the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) to wage lawfare against those who insult Islam and its prophet.

The statement—issued in Arabic this past weekend on the website of the International Union of Muslim Scholars (IUMS), and signed by the Arab world’s leading shariah authority, Yusuf al-Qaradawi—sheds light on the cause of riots around the Muslim world, and illustrates the importance of mainstream Islamic law as a cause of the rancor generated by the YouTube video “Innocence of Muslims.”

The IUMS’s statement, as well as Qaradawi’s influential imprimatur, is a significant escalation in the Islamic world’s offensive to institute shariah globally and criminalize criticism of Islam.

The Islamic governments of Egypt, and Iran—as well as Muslim clerics both abroad and in the United States—have since echoed the essence of the IUMS statement, and called for legal action against those responsible for the video which, “should be considered a violation of the rights of Muslims and an attack on Islamic symbols and holy sites.”

Understanding the Islamic legal reasoning on which this statement is based is essential. In the context of Islamic law, Innocence of Muslims constitutes an encroachment on shariah’s clear prohibition against blasphemy or slander against Islam, its prophet or on shariah itself. Furthermore, the phrase “violation of the rights of Muslims” is a 20th Century Islamic legal convention; according to the Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam (served at the UN in 1990), “human rights” is understood as shariah only. According to that definition, the video is a violation of “human rights.”

The statement also urges the 57-member Organization of Islamic Cooperation—which has already taken steps to implement a Ten Year Programme to curtail speech considered blasphemous toward Islam through international law—to “adopt lawsuits” aimed at circumscribing free speech rights in non-Muslim countries.  Alarmingly, the Obama State Department has already indicated its willingness to participate in discussions along these lines, in a series of high-level meetings called the “Istanbul Process.”

Wednesday, Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, secretary-general of the OIC, pressed again for what would, in effect, be shariah anti-blasphemy laws, calling on the international community to “come out of hiding from behind the excuse of freedom of expression” and adopt  “an international code of conduct for media and social media to disallow the dissemination of incitement material.”

The 86-year-old Qaradawi, whose notorious exhortations to jihadist violence against Jews and Americans are widely available on YouTube, is an international Islamic phenomenon; he is known as the Muslim Brotherhood’s chief jurist and, as the host of al Jazeera’s “Shariah and Life,” his sermons reach an estimated 60 million viewers worldwide.

Read more at Breitbart

Islam’s OIC: The World’s Thought Police

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by Mudar Zahran at Stonegate Institute:

On December 19, 2011, the U.N. General Assembly adopted a resolution condemning the negative stereotyping and stigmatization of people based on their religion, and urged member states to take effective measures towards addressing and combating “such incidents.” This resolution, based on an initiative from the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), was supported by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who hosted a closed-door three-day meeting – apparently one of many in a series called the “Istanbul Process”– in Washington D.C. with OIC representatives to discuss ways to implement the resolution.

What might sound like a step toward “tolerance,” however, is in reality an assault on freedom of speech: a UN-endorsed violation of human rights, co-sponsored by the US, and prompted by the OIC, an organization of 57 Muslim nations, most of which hold the world’s worst records on freedom of speech.

The OIC initiative for a UN resolution against “defamation of religion” is not new; the OIC has been promoting it for the last 13 years despite earlier opposition from Western countries. What changed recently was dropping the word “defamation of religion” and stressing “freedom of speech”– something about which Secretary of State Clinton seems to be enthusiastic.

What resulted, however, from this new “Resolution 16/18,” as it is called, is a US-endorsed UN proposal that urges the restriction of freedom of speech by using a vague terms, such as combating “religious profiling” – a term that can be interpreted by anyone any way he likes.

Placing such language into an international legal context forces people to have to think twice before practicing their constitutionally-secured right of free speech – in the US, at least — when it comes to discussing religion.

What is also alarming, even to me as a practicing Muslim, is the fact that the resolution seems to revolve around just one religion: Islam. But will the OIC countries implement any resolution for themselves, taking measures against their government-sponsored demonization of the Jewish faith and the systematic proliferation of anti-Semitism?

Does Resolution 16/18 mean that Muslims will still be free in their textbooks to call Jews the sons of swine and monkeys — perhaps on some trumped-up excuse that that a such a remark is not religious but “only” racial?

Will the Palestinians’ highest religious authority, the Mufti, Muhammad Hussein, still be able to say, as he did in early January at a Fatah (not Hamas) event to celebrate the 47th anniversary of its founding, that the destiny of Muslims is to kill Jews [sic], and, quoting a Hadith [a saying attributed to the prophet Mohammad] that “The Hour [of Resurrection] will not come until you fight the Jews… come and kill [them]” – and then have Palestinian TV repeat it?

Will the Egyptian police still run over unarmed Christians with armoured vehicles and burn down churches, as has happened in recent weeks? Or will Resolution 16/18 simply evolve as it has now in Egypt, where the Egyptian courts prosecute only Christians in “contempt of religion” cases, loosely based on Facebook or twitter postings of cartoons deemed to be “insulting to Islam” [AINA: Double Standard in Application of Egyptian Law], but constantly fail to prosecute members of the security services who mow down Christians with armored vehicles or torch churches?

Since the Jews have already been ethnically cleansed from most of these countries, the Christians are next in line. As they say in Arabic, “Saturday’s job first, then get to Sunday’s job.”

Will the Palestinian Authority, an OIC member, remove the signs banning Jews from entering areas under its control that are labeled “Type A-areas” and that read “Israelis [Jews] are not allowed”? Would Jordan stop banning the entry of “visible Jews” with “Jewish prayer items”?

Worse, the resolution, if implemented, would hinder the efforts of those seeking further to understand Islam, or even discuss it in an un-self-censoring way– including Muslims seeking to bring it out of its often brutal tribal roots. The values of Islam, for example, encourage the military conquest of non-Muslim nations. Although this value is within my religion, as a Muslim, I would like to see it being dropped—Now, is that a defamation of my own religion?

Is Obama’s, Clinton’s and the US’s current message that some religions are “more sacred” than others?

There is more here


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