http://www.smh.com.au/world/push-to-call-blasphemy-a-crime-20120922-26dlu.html

THE divide in world opinion over what constitutes free speech will be on display again this week at the United Nations, where arguments over a proposed blasphemy law were an annual feature for a decade.

This time it is the global reaction to a YouTube video that disparages Islam's prophet Muhammad that is sure to roil the meeting of the UN General Assembly.

Muslim leaders have vowed to discuss the offensive video from their UN platforms, sowing concern among free-speech activists of a fresh push toward an international law that would criminalise blasphemy. Human rights groups and Western democracies resisted such a law for years and thought they had finally quashed the matter after convincing enough nations that repressive regimes used blasphemy laws to imprison or execute dissidents.

''I expect that we'll regress to where we were a couple of years ago,'' said Courtney Radsch, program manager for the Global Freedom of Expression Campaign at the non-profit group Freedom House.

''Human rights are not about protecting religions; human rights are to protect humans,'' she said. ''Who is going to be the decision-maker on deciding what blasphemy is?''

At one end of the spectrum is France, where a magazine on Wednesday published cartoons of Muhammad as a naked, cowering man to underscore a point that even the most offensive expression should be protected.

At the other end of the spectrum is the UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, who disappointed many free-speech activists last week by suggesting limitations to freedom of speech when it was ''used to provoke or humiliate''.

For years the Organisation of Islamic Co-operation, a 57-member bloc of countries, has proposed a resolution criminalising the defamation of religion. By last year free-speech proponents had persuaded so many countries to ditch the cause that no new defamation-of-religion resolution was proposed.

Now, Turkey heads the Organisation and the Turkish Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has said he would raise the topic in New York next week.

I'm sorry; but if freedom to you is the denigration of someone's faith, then you have a long way to come as a person.

I think the core foundation of Islam should be attacked - the Quaran.
Koran or Quran.

What 'facts' of these man made writings can be disassembled with logic?
And you have proof they man made writings

When these writings are disassembled and Muslims (as expected) hold on to their beliefs vehemently in the face of the truth, what is exposed is that deep down they fear death. Yep, the narcissistic fear of death.
We dont fear death, we fear judgement. Maybe ask a muslim instead of drawing to conclusions

Shows all the signs of a mental illness.
So wait, is that what that doctors appointment was for?>..

I object to having "blasphemy" law inserted into modern, post-Enlightenment law.

If you want to have it in Muslim countries - whatever, just add it to stonings, beheadings and clitoris removals. But don't start that shit over here.

Jesus turned up 800 years before Muhammad claiming to be god incarnate. Muhammad turns up & says "sorry guys, he wasn't the son of god, just a prophet. He got it wrong."
Major message to get wrong, don't you think? :lol:
Even more strange for god to take 800 years to correct the mistake...:lol:

Time is irrelivent when you're a super natural being who lives outside of time and space.

Although, you'd think that if you live outside of time and space you'd just go back to the startig point of the mistake and correct it there as it really doesn't matter if you mess with your creation.

Actually God has very rarely messed with His creation, most miracles occured through nature rather than against nature. Jesus was the one through whom creation was messed with.

But there is no point talking to ozboy about religion as he likes to perpetuate the mental illness fallacy.

Actually God has very rarely messed with His creation, most miracles occured through nature rather than against nature. Jesus was the one through whom creation was messed with.

But there is no point talking to ozboy about religion as he likes to perpetuate the mental illness fallacy.

So now you object to aspects of religious belief according to what is acceptable according to western countries' 'fluid', changing views?

All religious texts were Man made writtings. God did not write the Quran, Muhammad did at his request, as the bible was written by men in the name of God and the whole New testement was written by men about a man or from visions had whilst wondering around the desert.

Edited by Rocknerd: 25/9/2012 12:55:50 PM

I believe there was temptation, a giant flood and sending a bloke up a mountain and a burning bush that can be considered messing with his creation, not to mention the impregnation of an unmarried virgin.

Not that I believe any of it but you know, each to their own as long as it does not impinge my human rights to think and say what ever I want, even if others don't like it.

The very same rights that allow Ozboy to promote his views on religion and mental illness.

False. The book of Mormon was written by God, Joseph Smith just translated it.

In October 2006 the Sydney Imam, Sheik Taj el-Din al-Hilali, delivered a Ramadam sermon in which he excused the convicted gang rapist, Bilal Skaf, declaring him innocent. Hilaly said that the true responsibility for such crimes lay with women, those who did not keep themselves veiled and, preferably, hidden away from the public eye.

Throughout the ensuing uproar, the imam’s supporters claimed that his remarks had been taken out of context. I wondered whether this was true, so I googled for the transcript, found it, read it, and was horrified.

Hilaly had compared women to cat meat. If such meat was left uncovered and the cat came along and ate it, whose fault was it, the cat’s or the uncovered meat’s?

It had never before occurred to me that someone in Australia, a community leader, a teacher commanding moral authority would be ‘allowed’ to say such things. Surely we had anti-discrimination laws; were they not in effect here? I was distressed. I couldn’t sleep. I dreaded to imagine what the victims and their families would be going through – the sheik and his cat meat were top of the news for days, so there would be little chance of escape.

Now that the national spotlight was on Hilaly it became apparent that he was in the habit of making controversial comments. These included assertions that the Holocaust was exaggerated, Muslims had more right to Australia than dishonest ‘convicts’, and 9/11 was God’s work against oppressors.

I turned to the BBC’s online coverage of the story and worked through hundreds of comments from members of the public. These were disappointing. Many of Hilaly’s supporters claimed that, due to that most cherished of liberties, free speech, the imam had a right to say these things and therefore should not be criticised. There was a profound, almost wilful misunderstanding here. Fortunately there were plenty on board to point out the bleeding obvious, that free speech is a two-way street, and Hilaly had set himself up for as much criticism as could be mustered.

Those demanding free speech — true free speech, as a two-way discourse — won me over. I realised that no matter how much we might loathe Hilaly’s words, if we really want to live in a society where we can be aware of unpalatable points of view, discuss them and explain why they are wrong, we must let him speak.

Which brings us to recent events.

You’d have to be living in an underground bunker to be unaware of the riots, violence and murders perpetrated in various parts of the world over the past couple of weeks, all because of a sordid, low-grade film, ‘Innocence of Muslims’. The death toll, as I write, has reached 49. Of concern, too, is the fact that these events will play into the hands of certain Australian shock-jocks, and right-wing extremists such as Geert Wilders, currently awaiting visa approval for a visit to Australia. Moderate Muslims are well aware of this; we’ve seen a deluge of commentary, much of it highlighting the non-violent nature of the greater Muslim community, some of it focused on attempts to understand the Sydney demonstrators in particular. We’ve heard differing viewpoints, the most popular being that it’s not ‘about the film’, but more an expression of disempowered Muslim youth, lacking identity, frustrated with perceived western contempt and an undeniable element of local racism.

Apart from the patronising tone some of these analyses, they do not quite add up. If western contempt were the main problem, we would be witnessing demonstrations against continuing Israeli incursions into Palestinian lands, we’d find Muslims marching in the streets against questionable US foreign policy, we’d hear much greater condemnation every time Sunnis murder scores of Shiites, or Shiites murder Sunnis, acts which now occur with such depressing regularity that they struggle for the status of ‘newsworthy’. Where are the public protests over the deaths of tens of thousands of Syrian men, women and children, victims of sectarian violence at the hands of their own government? Where are the wide-scale demonstrations when shocking images like those that came out of Abu Ghraib are splashed across newspapers worldwide?

Instead, such outrage is reserved for a novel, a set of cartoons, or for a puerile and amateurish video ridiculing a religious military leader who died in the late seventh century.

Add to that the nature of many of the placards, and we should conclude that the protests were, to at least some degree, a result of religious offence, and that it was, indeed, ‘about the film’.

Which begs the question: if it is so easy to press the buttons of thousands of believers around the world, that even a mischievous schoolboy could accomplish pandemonium, shouldn’t we, as a responsible society, silence the provocateurs?

Politicians in both the US and Australia have approached Google with requests or encouragement to remove the video, resulting in YouTube bypassing its own policies to block viewing in certain Middle Eastern countries. These are short-term, short-sighted political responses to the situation. They do no good once the material has gone viral, and will serve only to ensure similar violence on the next and inevitable instance of religious offence, in addition to providing legitimacy for such reactions.

If we do not censor for security reasons, should we do so – as best we can, given the constraints of the internet – on the basis of material that could be categorised as hate speech?


The term ‘hate speech’ has become a convenient label of late, but I see few attempts in the media to define what it is. Hate propaganda has been used throughout history to enable human beings to overcome instinctive taboos against killing each other. It involves lies and manipulation to dehumanise the target individual or group and to instil fear or repugnance for that group in the wider community. Thus Nazi propaganda described Jews as ‘beasts of prey’, literally depicting them as vermin or swarming rats, while Rwandan Hutus referred to Tutsis as parasites, cockroaches. Hilaly’s description of women as ‘cat meat’ could well fall into this category.

There are two key points to be made here. The first is that hate speech incites violence against the group, rather than by the group. The second is the distinction between commentary assigning negative attributes to people, and that directed at ideas. People are not ideas. People have ideas, change their minds about ideas, reject ideas. A society that embraces the free competition of ideas is a society that is capable of change; if this were not so we would still be stuck with a White Australia Policy. Religious beliefs are ideas, and like all ideologies are subject to any form of criticism, including satire and mockery; they cannot claim exemption simply because those beliefs are deeply held. Religious offence, or blasphemy, is not hate speech, however hurtful it may be.

Religious ideas are not only personal convictions; they also have a nasty habit of crossing over into the political sphere. Some religions, in particular the three great Abrahamic faiths, are political systems as much as they are religions, due not only to the fact that many proponents cannot accept any rule of law over and above that of scriptures. In today’s world we have theocracies, ranging from the Vatican State to Iran. We see the tragic consequences of blasphemy laws in Pakistan, we see extreme religious positions of Republican Party leaders in the US, and even in Australia we see religious incursions into politics and legislation. Blasphemy laws therefore become not only undesirable, but dangerous.

In the case of ‘Innocence of Muslims’, the alleged writer and producer, however disreputable his background and unsavoury his tactics, is an Egyptian-born Coptic Christian. In this light, there could well be a political context to the film. Had he produced, instead, a sober and well-researched critique of Islam, it could have achieved similar levels of violence, as evidenced by the threatening reactions to UK-based Tom Holland’s historical documentary.

There is also an argument that suppression of free discourse will fail to have the intended effect. In the case of Nazi Germany and to a lesser extent the Weimar Republic, the anti-Jewish propaganda flourished in an environment of extreme censorship, where voices that would have condemned the bigotry were muzzled. Furthermore, as Russell Blackford points out in ’Freedom of religion and the secular state’, ‘Laws relating to hate speech or vilification can vary widely between jurisdictions, defy legal interpretation, lead to tortuous and expensive litigation, and prove counterproductive in promoting mutual tolerance.’

It is unfortunate that some people find reasons to mock the beliefs of others. It is even more unfortunate that certain religious leaders find it necessary to make racist, misogynous or homophobic pronouncements to their followers. In some parts of the world and at former times in history they are/were free to put such ideas into practice. Here and now in Australia they are criticised, but are still free to speak. When religion itself is the subject of criticism or parody, the same must hold true.

Most unfortunately, it seems there is a renewed push within the United Nations to capitulate to the demands of violence, and to reintroduce blasphemy laws at the international level. For the sake of us all, I hope these attempts fail. Freedom is a two-way street, otherwise it is not freedom at all.

Jesus turned up 800 years before Muhammad claiming to be god incarnate. Muhammad turns up & says "sorry guys, he wasn't the son of god, just a prophet. He got it wrong."
Major message to get wrong, don't you think? :lol:
Even more strange for god to take 800 years to correct the mistake...:lol:

All religious texts were Man made writtings. God did not write the Quran, Muhammad did at his request, as the bible was written by men in the name of God and the whole New testement was written by men about a man or from visions had whilst wondering around the desert.

Edited by Rocknerd: 25/9/2012 12:55:50 PM

So you believe. Muslims believe Jesus (Issa) was a prophet and not an incarnation of god. We also believe that Muhammad SAW was not an incarnation of god, but the final prophet.



Muhammad did not make up the verses in the Quran. God revealed it to him and he noted it down. Hence, he literally wrote it down, but in this sense, God writing the Quran is used figuratively.

Why is it it is religious deities choose the crazy, exiled and those who are alone to bestow their whim to? Gods and Aliens don't seem to like crowds.

Sure they do. We just laugh at them. They're called televangelists.

I have no issue with ozboy thinking they way he does, but [size=7]he tries to interject it into every discussion[/size] - it would be like [size=7]me deciding to say that everyone who rejects God is going to hell all the time[/size], unecessary and [size=7]offensive[/size].

You have no factual proof of that, the same as Joseph Smith can not be proven to have translated the writings of God in his hat with his magical rock

there isn't even a witness of these events that can vouch for the credibility of the Prophet.

Why is it it is religious deities choose the crazy, exiled and those who are alone to bestow their whim to? Gods and Aliens don't seem to like crowds.

You have no factual proof that the Quran was not revealed to Muhammad PBUH via the angel Gabriel from Allah.....