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National
Review
By Bat Yeor
February 16, 2009
Does defending Western values constitute “inciting
hatred”?
Britain has just witnessed the spectacle of a duly
elected parliamentarian from another EU country, Geert
Wilders of the Netherlands, being denied entry to the
country because he constituted “a threat to public policy.”
Wilders, after being detained briefly at Heathrow, was
sent back to Holland — where he has further legal troubles.
Three weeks earlier, a Dutch appeals court had ordered
prosecutors to begin criminal proceedings against Wilders
for “inciting hatred and discrimination” and “insulting
Muslim worshippers” through his public statements and
his 2008 film, Fitna. The order to proceed with the
criminal prosecution resulted from pressure put on European
states and on the UN Human Rights Council by the Organization
of the Islamic Conference (OIC). The OIC’s aim is to
punish and suppress any alleged Islamophobia, around
the world but particularly in Europe, and it has been
a leader in creating the conditions that made the U.K.’s
Wilders ban possible.
The OIC is one of the largest intergovernmental organizations
in the world. It encompasses 56 Muslim states plus the
Palestinian Authority. Spread over four continents,
it claims to speak in the name of the ummah (the universal
Muslim community), which numbers about 1.3 billion.
The OIC’s mission is to unite all Muslims worldwide
by rooting them in the Koran and the Sunnah — the core
of traditional Islamic civilization and values. It aims
at strengthening solidarity and cooperation among all
its members, in order to protect the interests of Muslims
everywhere and to galvanize the ummah into a unified
body.
The OIC is a unique organization — one that has no
equivalent in the world. It unites the religious, economic,
military, and political strength of 56 states. By contrast,
the European Union represents half as many states and
is a secular body only, and the Vatican — which speaks
for the world’s 1.1 billion Catholics — is devoid of
any political power. Many Muslims in the West resist
the OIC’s tutelage and oppose its efforts to supplant
Western law with sharia. But the OIC’s resources are
formidable.
The organization has numerous subsidiary institutions
collaborating at the highest levels with international
organizations in order to implement its political objectives
worldwide. Its main working bodies are the Islamic Educational,
Scientific, and Cultural Organization (ISESCO), which
seeks to impose on the West the Islamic perception of
history and civilization; the Observatory of Islamophobia,
which puts pressure on Western governments and international
bodies to adopt laws punishing “Islamophobia” and blasphemy;
and the newly created Islamic International Court of
Justice. As stated in its 1990 Cairo Declaration on
Human Rights in Islam, the OIC is strictly tied to the
principles of the Koran, the Sunnah, and the sharia.
In a word, the OIC seeks to become the reincarnation
of the Caliphate.
The OIC regularly reiterates its commitments to protecting
the political, historical, religious, and human rights
of Muslims in non-OIC states, especially Muslims who
form the majority in specific regions of non-Muslim
countries — such as the southern Philippines, southern
Thailand, and western Thrace in Greece — as well as
Muslims in places like the Balkans, the Caucasus, Myanmar,
India, and China. The OIC supports Hamas and the Palestinians
in their struggle to destroy Israel, as well as the
Muslim fight for “legitimate self-determination” in
“Indian-occupied Jammu and Kashmir.” It has condemned
the “continual Armenian aggression against Azerbaijan,”
and it expresses its full solidarity with “the just
cause of the Muslim Turkish people of Cyprus” and with
Sudanese President Omar Hassan Al-Bashir, whom many
hold responsible for encouraging the massacres in Darfur.
The seat of the OIC is in Jeddah, but the organization
regards that location as temporary: Its headquarters
will be transferred to al-Kods (Islamized Jerusalem)
when that city has been “liberated” from Israeli control.
In its efforts to defend the “true image” of Islam
and combat its defamation, the organization has requested
the UN and the Western countries to punish “Islamophobia”
and blasphemy. Among the manifestations of Islamophobia,
in the OIC’s view, are European opposition to illegal
immigration, anti-terrorist measures, criticism of multiculturalism,
and indeed any efforts to defend Western cultural and
national identities. The OIC has massive funding from
oil sources, which it lavishly spends on the Western
media and academia and in countless “dialogues.” It
influences Western policy, laws, and even textbooks
through pressures brought by Muslim immigrants and by
the Western nations’ own leftist parties. Hence, we
have seen Kristallnacht-like incitements of hate and
murder against European Jews and Israel conducted with
impunity in the cities of Europe — where respect for
human rights is supposed to be one of the highest values.
Geert Wilders is the latest victim of this enormous
world machinery. His crime is maintaining that Europe’s
civilization is rooted in the values of Jerusalem, Athens,
Rome, and the Enlightenment — and not in Mecca, Baghdad,
Andalusia, and al-Kods. He fights for Europe’s independence
from the Caliphate and for its endangered freedoms.
He had received serious death threats even before Fitna
was released.
Many Muslims in the West support him, but Geert Wilders’s
principal weapons are his courage and his willingness
to resist even his own government, which is slowly submitting
to the OIC’s pressures. Wilders’s enemies pretend that
he is an insignificant personality who makes “provocative”
statements only in search of fame. In fact, if his motivation
were self-interest, he could do far better by courting
the OIC’s favors — as so many Europeans are doing, consciously
or unconsciously — rather than risking his freedom and
indeed his life.
— Bat Yeor is the author of studies on the conditions
of Jews and Christians in the context of the jihad ideology
and the sharia law. Recent books include: Islam and
Dhimmitude: Where Civilizations Collide and Eurabia:
The Euro-Arab Axis, both from Fairleigh Dickinson University
Press.
From National
Review
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