"Amid widespread protests against an amateur movie that denigrates Islam's Prophet Mohammad,"
reports the Washington Times, at least one Muslim leader — with the backing of the 57 states of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation — wants the United Nations to criminalize blasphemy against his religion:
“We call for legislation or a resolution to criminalize contempt of
Islam as a religion and its prophet,” Emad Abdel Ghaffour, who heads the
ultra-orthodox [Egyptian] sect’s Nour political party, told Reuters over the
weekend.
Jonah Goldberg
writes about a recent parody, headlined "
No One Murdered Because of This Image" in the faux-newspaper
Onion, in which 4 "cherished figures from multiple religious faiths were depicted engaging in a lascivious sex act of considerable depravity." Missing was Islam's prophet Mohammed.
The Onion’s point should be obvious. Amidst all of the talk of
religious tolerance and the hand-wringing over free speech in recent
days, one salient fact is often lost or glossed over: What we face are
not broad questions about the limits of free speech or the importance of
religious tolerance, but rather a very specific question about the
limits of Muslim tolerance and the unimportance of free speech to much
of the Muslim world.
It’s really quite amazing. In Pakistan, Egypt, and the Palestinian
territories, Christians are being harassed, brutalized, and even
murdered, often with state support, or at least state indulgence. And
let’s not even talk about the warm reception Jews receive in much of the
Muslim world.
And yet, it seems you can’t turn on National Public Radio or open a
newspaper or a highbrow magazine without finding some oh-so-thoughtful
meditation on how anti-Islamic speech should be considered the
equivalent of shouting “fire” in a movie theater.
But there is no equivalency, argues Goldberg. Muslims are people, not a force of nature. They have free will. They
choose to riot.
There’s nothing wrong with exercising sound judgment, even caution,
when it comes to offending another’s most cherished beliefs. But the
First Amendment isn’t the problem here, the dysfunctions and
inadequacies of the Arab and Muslim world are.
James Burnham famously said that when there is no alternative there
is no problem. If free speech in America causes a comparative handful of
zealots to want to murder Americans, the correct response is to protect
Americans from those zealots (something the Obama administration
abjectly failed to do in Libya) and relentlessly seek the punishment of
anyone who succeeds. Because, as far as America is concerned, there is
no alternative to the First Amendment.
If only we had national leadership who would defend Americans' cherished freedoms and beliefs as strongly.
