Inhuman Rights: The UNs Human Rights Council, friend to Islamists and tyrants everywhere
In December 2006, the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), an international group established in 1971 and representing 57 countries, hosted an emergency summit in Mecca. The event became infamous after two angry imams from Denmark presented a dossier of cartoons published in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten that mocked the Prophet Mohammed. In the ensuing uproar, Muslims murdered several people in Europe and torched the Danish embassy in Beirut.
But the cartoon episode wasn’t the summit’s starkest example of Muslim outrage over free speech. The most critical decision that the OIC made in Mecca was to adopt a zero-tolerance policy toward perceived insults to Islam. In its “Ten-Year Programme of Action,” the OIC announced that it would create an “observatory” to monitor acts of “Islamophobia.” It would also “endeavor to have the United Nations adopt an international resolution to counter Islamophobia, and call upon all States to enact laws to counter it, including deterrent punishments”—essentially the goal of its nonbinding UN resolution on “combating defamation of religions,” which the UN’s General Assembly adopted in March 2008. And it would “participate and coordinate effectively in all regional and international forums, in order to protect and promote the collective interests of the Muslim Ummah, including UN reform [and] expanding the Security Council membership.”
The goal was simple: to infiltrate and weaken secular democratic covenants and institutions from within, in a manner reminiscent of revolutionary Marxist groups’ “entryism” into the British Labour Party in the seventies and eighties. The OIC’s plan for implementing its Islamist agenda hasn’t succeeded on all fronts, of course. But it has succeeded spectacularly on one: the United Nations Human Rights Council.
