Islamic governments angle for speech curbs in the US

A young Afghan girl covers her face as she is pictured next to burqa clad woman in Kabul on October 10, 2011. AFP PHOTO / ADEK BERRY (Photo credit should read ADEK BERRY/AFP/Getty Images)

But the OIC’s definition of religious intolerance collides with U.S. notion of free speech and robust debate, said Lafferty.

The meeting won’t curb freedom of speech in the United States, Rosenthal countered, because the U.S. government will protect free speech. “We would protect free speech,” she said.

However, “hateful” and “Islamophobic” speech, said Rosenthal, “needs to be called out.” Asked to define “hate speech,” she said that if critics of Islam’s ideology “are just taking out the hateful parts [of the Quran] or claiming [they’re] all superior to them … that can be very damaging.”

The term “Islamophobia” was developed by U.S.-based advocates to stigmatize critics of Islam. It is mimics the “homophobia” term used by advocates of rights for gays. It is now in common use by progressive’s groups, such as the Center for American Progress.

But Islam deserves to be criticized because it denies free speech, freedom of conscience and equality for women and non-Muslims, said Robert Spencer, an expert on Islamic texts and a best-selling author who is widely labeled by Islamists and progressives as “Islamophobic.” Today, he said, “there is no majority-Muslim country that fully protects those rights.”

Rosenthal’s reassurances of continued U.S. free speech are without merit, Lafferty said, partly because U.S. officials are already cooperating with Islamic countries to redefine criticism of Islam as not just ”Islamophobia,” but illegal “incitement to violence.”

In July, for example, Clinton told the international meeting that the 16/18 “resolution calls upon states … to prohibit discrimination, profiling, and hate crimes, but not to criminalize speech unless there is an incitement to imminent violence.”

The 16/18 deal won’t curb free speech, because incitement to violence can only be committed by speakers, not by listeners, responded Rosenthal.

But “here in America,” Lafferty said, “we have the right to speak freely, and we have open debate on variety of issues, but Islamists are claiming those conversations incite violence.”

“The State Department knows what they’re doing is wrong, otherwise they would not have been so evasive,” about the meeting, Lafferty said. The Dec. 12 to 14 meeting was quietly announced on Friday, Dec. 9, but few details were provided. Only two speakers were identified, and the government has not released the text of a speech given by the justice department’s civil-regulations chief, Tom Perez.

The 16/18 deal is tied to Obama’s outreach to Islamic countries and the OIC, which he launched in 2009 by giving a speech in Cairo.

To boost that outreach to the OIC, Obama appointed Rashad Hussain as his OIC ambassador in 2010. Hussein had tried to hide his attendance at a U.S. meeting of Islamic advocacy groups in 2004 where he declared the federal government’s prosecution of a Muslim terror leader was politically motivated, according to a Politico article.

The terror leader was Sami Al Arian, who also is a professor in Florida. He was a leader of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad group, which has used numerous suicide bombers to murder Israeli civilians in buses, nightclubs, shops and streets.

Obama subsequently kept Hussain as his OIC ambassador.

As part of that outreach to the OIC and to Arab Muslims, the administration has pushed hard to accelerate the elections in Egypt that have since given Islamists up to 65 percent of the vote. It has also dispatched U.S. airpower to kill Moammar Gadhafi, the dictator of Libya, which is now likely to be dominated by an Islamist government.

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