The whole point is to stop people from telling everyone the truth about Islam – until it’s too late.
Nina Shea: America Again Submits to the Istanbul Process
Ekmeleddin İhsanoğlu
Round three of the “Istanbul Process” opens today, December 3, and runs through Wednesday, at Canada House, in London, hosted by the U.K. and Canada. The Istanbul Process is Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s major transnational law initiative, undertaken in partnership with the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC). It was established last year to “implement” measures against speech and expression that negatively “stereotype[s]” Islam and Muslims, with a particular emphasis on enacting them in the West.
This initiative was started as an inexplicable, gratuitous gift to the Muslim world following the March 2011 adoption of a non-binding U.N. Human Rights Council resolution (16/18) on the same theme. While the Obama administration claims that it doesn’t intend for the process to adopt regulations beyond the American free-speech standard, our partner, the OIC, is only too eager to do just that.
For over a decade within the U.N., the OIC has relentlessly pushed for a universal law to punish blasphemy, or “defamation,” of Islam. This 56-member-state organization, an essentially religious body, is in fact chartered to “combat defamation of Islam.” It issues fatwas and other directives to punish public expression of apostasy from Islam. Its current action plan calls for “deterrent punishments” in all states for “Islamophobia,” a term that encompasses a broad range of constitutionally protected speech, judging from the OIC website’s black list of Americans and other perpetrators of “Islamophobia.” The OIC’s stated understanding of the Istanbul Process is that it will “help in enacting domestic laws for the countries involved in the issue, as well as formulating international laws preventing inciting hatred resulting from the continued defamation of religions.”
Corner readers will remember that the Istanbul Process’s first conference was co-chaired by Clinton and the OIC secretary general in July 2011, in Istanbul, with the foreign ministers of the Muslim countries in attendance. The second was held over three days of closed-door meetings last December, at the offices of the U.S. Department of State in Washington. That meeting drew enough controversy within free-speech circles to raise questions about whether the process would continue. But thanks to a leak last week by OIC head Ekmeleddin İhsanoğlu, we now know the event will go ahead, even if its agenda is still being treated like it’s “classified.”
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More here.
Here’s the OIC “hit list” in PDF format. No, 1389 Blog isn’t on it, but Rev. Terry Jones and our colleagues at Gates of Vienna certainly are, as are various other authors that we quote from and link to.
