Silenced: How Apostasy and Blasphemy Codes Are Choking Freedom Worldwide

by Paul Marshall

  Despite the pope’s repeated attempted clarifications of his statements, there was continuing violence against Christians in Iraq. On October 4 and 5, gunmen opened fire on a Chaldean Catholic church in Mosul and injured one guard in an attack believed to be linked to outrage over the pope’s speech. On October 9, a Syrian Orthodox priest, Father Amer Iskender of the St. Ephrem Church in Mosul, was kidnapped by militants who gave the priest’s church two options: either to pay a $350,000 ransom or to provide $40,000 plus a statement denouncing Benedict’s comments. The church, which had already clarified that it did not support the pope’s comment, posted thirty billboards throughout the city criticizing the statement; and family members sought to raise the ransom money. In spite of these efforts, the body of Fr. Iskender, who appeared to have been tortured, was found beheaded and dismembered on October 11.149

  The papal comments remained in the minds of Islamic militants as late as March 2008, when Osama bin Laden released an audio tape. Besides calling for Palestinians to take up holy war, bin Laden charged Pope Benedict XVI with facilitating a “new Crusade” against Islam. He also warned of repercussions for the republication of the Danish cartoons.150

  In a more reasonable effort, on October 15, 2006, a group of thirty-eight Muslim scholars published an open letter to Pope Benedict in the U.S.-based Islamica magazine, which suggested an actual discussion of Benedict’s views. This letter criticized a number of Pope Benedict’s implications about Islam but also commended the pope’s criticism of materialism, as well as his statements of regret and respect for Muslims following the controversy. The signatories told the pope, “We share your desire for frank and sincere dialogue and recognize its importance in an increasingly interconnected world.” They also declared the murder of Sister Leonella and “any other similar acts of wanton individual violence” to be “completely un-Islamic.” Several grand muftis, including that of Egypt, were among the signatories.151

  Lars Vilks and “The Right to Blaspheme Religions”

  In August 2007, Scandinavian cartoons once again made it back into the headlines. This time, the artist-provocateur was Lars Vilks from Sweden, whose caricature depicted Muhammad’s head on a dog’s body. Along with two similar drawings, it had been removed from a dog-themed art exhibition and rejected by several other art institutions on security grounds. However, public protests and international criticism began when regional newspaper Nerikes Allehanda published one of the dog drawings alongside an August 18 editorial on “the right to ridicule a religion.” The op-ed stated: “A liberal society must be able to do two things at the same time. On the one hand, it must be able to defend Muslims’ right to freedom of religion and their right to build mosques. However, on the other hand, it is also permissible to ridicule Islam’s most foremost symbols—just like all other religions’ symbols.… The right to freedom of religion and the right to blaspheme religions go together.” The editorial also linked the galleries’ wariness to host Vilks’s drawings with the 2006 Danish cartoon crisis.152Nerikes Allehanda’s publication provoked a small, peaceful protest by about sixty Swedish Muslims. It also inspired a broader international controversy that took the editors by surprise, given that a number of other Swedish papers had previously published the cartoon.153

  On August 27, the Iranian foreign ministry summoned Sweden’s charge d’affaires in Tehran to complain about the cartoon.154 Iran’s president also chimed in to blame the cartoons on “Zionists” who “do not want the Swedish government to be a friend of other nations” since “they thrive on conflict and war.”155 On August 30, Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry condemned Nerikes Allehanda’s “offensive and blasphemous sketch of the Holy Prophet (PBUH)” and warned, “Regrettably, the tendency among some Europeans to mix the freedom of expression with an outright and deliberate insult to 1.3 billion Muslims in the world is on the rise.”156

  While there were some threats in connection with Vilks’s caricature, it did not produce anything like the violence of the Danish cartoons affair. However, as with other controversies, it created a lasting danger for its central figure. After Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard was attacked in January 2010, Vilks received telephone calls reportedly telling him, “Now it’s your turn.” In early March 2010, seven people were arrested in Ireland in connection with an international plot to kill the Swedish cartoonist. One plotter, American Colleen LaRose (who went by the Internet name of “Jihad Jane”), had been arrested in Philadelphia in late October 2009. LaRose and another American woman among those arrested in March, Jamie Paulin-Ramirez, are converts to Islam; the other suspects are reportedly Libyan, Algerian, Palestinian, and Croatian nationals. Five of those arrested in Ireland were quickly released, while the other two were held on unrelated charges. On March 4, LaRose was indicted on conspiracy charges; according to the indictment, she had agreed to murder a Swedish citizen (identified by a U.S. official as Vilks) after receiving orders to kill him and, in so doing, to frighten “the whole Kufar [non-believer] world.” In 2011, both LaRose and Paulin-Ramirez pleaded guilty to the terrorism charges in U.S. federal court.157 The conspirators reportedly felt that LaRose, a blond woman in her forties and a U.S. citizen, would be able to avoid unwanted attention during this assignment.158

  Nonetheless, in relative terms, the Swedish cartoons’ affair was a startling contrast with the previous year’s events. Despite the similarities—a derogatory cartoon of Muhammad appearing in a Scandinavian paper alongside an editorial in support of the right to mock religion—and despite international attention, there was no mass response along the lines of that allegedly provoked by Jyllands-Posten. This suggests that, while mocking Islam is dangerous, global protests and violence on the level of the 2006 cartoon controversy do not materialize directly as a result of every insult that crosses a certain threshold of offensiveness—at least, not without assistance.

  Geert Wilders’s Fitna

  Unlike most of the figures discussed thus far, the man at the center of the next major “insulting Islam” international crisis is self-avowedly anti-Islam. Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders was no stranger to controversy when, in November 2007, he announced that he had begun work on a film dedicated to illustrating “the intolerant and fascist nature of the Koran.” A politician who had issued repeated denunciations, not only of Islamic extremism, but also of the Muslim religion itself, Wilders had been under around-the-clock police protection and living in a secret location since the 2004 murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh.

  He had previously attracted negative attention from abroad after, in a February 2007 interview, he stated that Muslims who wanted to stay in the Netherlands “must tear out half of the Koran and throw it away. I’ve read the Koran … and I know that there are enough awful things in it.” He also said that Islam was “a violent religion” and that “if Mohammed lived here today I could imagine chasing him out of the country tarred and feathered as an extremist.” While the Dutch Contact Organization for Muslims and Government “[didn’t] want to react to the content [of Wilders’s comment] because we cannot take it seriously,” the Saudi government apparently took Wilders’s words seriously enough to demand an apology from the Dutch government through its embassy in The Hague.159 A Dutch foreign ministry representative explained that although Wilders’s opinions were “not the point of view of the Dutch government,” the MP enjoyed the “right to express himself.” Wilders, who “would not dream of taking any of it back,” found it “scandalous that a country which does not have freedom of speech teaches me a lesson.”160

  In January 2008, Wilders announced a March release date for his film, which he titled Fitna, the Arabic word for strife or discord. He promised that the film would link the Qur’an directly to violence, depicting it as “the latest test to Western democracies since Nazism and communism.” Long before the planned release, and as Wilders seems to have expected, his claims caused an outcry both in the Netherlands and internationally.161 Syria’s grand mufti, Ahmad Badr al-Din Hassoun, told the Europea
n parliament that, if rumors that Wilders would destroy a Qur’an in the film were correct, “this will simply mean he is inciting wars and bloodshed … It is the responsibility of the Dutch people to stop him.” In late February, a Dutch paper reported that Al-Qaeda had issued a death threat against Wilders.162 Threats, recriminations, and saber-rattling echoed around the globe.163

  The Dutch Islamic Federation sought legal action against Wilders, while the Netherlands’ National Moroccan Council promised it would attempt to “neutralize the threat” of violence were the film to be released but noted that they could not guarantee the success of such efforts. Wilders refused to budge. He argued that the threats proved his point: “We can never allow people who use nondemocratic means, people who use violence instead of arguments, people who use knives instead of debates, we can never allow them to set the agenda.”164

  When television stations refused to show an unedited version of his film, Wilders opted to release Fitna online. Plans for a press showing were cancelled when security costs proved to be prohibitive.165 Wilders’s original website for the movie was shut down by U.S.-based host Network Solutions on the grounds that it potentially violated the company’s policy on hate speech.166 After being turned down by other prospective hosts, on March 27, Fitna was posted on the U.K.-based website LiveLeak. However, just two days later, LiveLeak was forced to take down the film “following threats to our staff of a very serious nature.”167 By this time, however, the film was readily accessible on numerous websites, including YouTube, which placed a disclaimer on the film: “The diversity of the world … means that some of the beliefs and views of some individuals may offend others.”168

  In its final version, Fitna contained footage of Islamist terrorist attacks interspersed with quotations from the Qur’an and hateful sermons by imams; it featured headlines from Dutch newspapers about immigration problems juxtaposed with images of Muslim protesters. The film implied an impending Islamic takeover of the Netherlands and included bar graphs showing the number of Muslims in the country. These graphs appeared alongside images of radical Islamist atrocities such as female genital mutilation, executions of gays, and a beheading under the heading “The Netherlands in the future?!” The film opened and closed with Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard’s drawing of Muhammad with a bomb in his turban. (Westergaard has threatened to sue Wilders for copyright infringement.169)

  The rumored destruction of a Qur’an did not take place. The film opened with the sound of pages being torn, and then text states, “The sound you heard was a page being removed from the phonebook … For it is not up to me, but to Muslims themselves to tear out the hateful verses from the Qur’an.” Additional text toward the end of the film charged that “Islam … seeks to destroy our western civilization” and called for “Islamic ideology” to be defeated as were Nazism and communism. In an unusually open show of agreement with those who believe Islam to be linked with brutality and violence, radical Islamist Omar Bakri stated, “If we leave out the first images and the sound of the page being torn, [Fitna] could be a film by the (Islamist) Mujahedeen.”170

  European officials widely denounced the film, and the Secretary-General of the OIC, Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, issued a statement on March 28 that called Fitna “a deliberate act of discrimination against Muslims, incitement for hatred and an act of defamation of religions.”171 Secretary-General Saleh S. Al-Wohaibi of the Saudi-backed World Assembly of Muslim Youth warned that “attacks” like Wilders’s film would “lead to very serious repercussions, pushing mankind to a situation of chaos and conflict.” He contended, “If we do something against Christianity or target Christian interests in retaliation, the Netherlands, Europe and the whole world would object.”172 This statement is remarkable, given that the Saudis already ban the practice of Christianity in their country, and its state-funded imams make regular vitriolic attacks on other religions.

  The Egyptian, Moroccan, and Bangladeshi governments denounced the movie, while the Iranian government deemed it blasphemous and sought to compel the EU, the Netherlands, and even the United Kingdom (home of Live Leak) to remove it from the Internet. In a note of protest to the Dutch embassy, a Malaysian Islamic opposition party claimed that the film, if not withdrawn, would “invite vengeance” from Muslims.173 Indonesia and Pakistan added their voices to the complaints and demands for bans.174

  There was also a push for legal action against Wilders. In Jordan, the same country in which prosecutors targeted Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard, a media group announced plans to press charges against Wilders. A campaign called “The Messenger of Allah Unite Us” sought a boycott of Dutch and Danish products. On July 1, Prosecutor General Hassan Abdalat charged Wilders with five offenses under Jordanian law, vowing that the Dutch MP would receive a subpoena “through diplomatic channels.” He also suggested that if the Netherlands did not extradite Wilders, Jordan could seek to have him arrested elsewhere by Interpol. A representative of the Messenger of Allah campaign said Wilders could face up to three years in a Jordanian jail.175

  At the April 2008 session of the UN Human Rights Council, which included the Universal Periodic Review of the Netherlands, numerous delegates called for the Dutch government to take action against Wilders. Several of them sought to redefine freedom of expression so that Fitna would not be protected. Egypt and Turkey urged Dutch leaders to take legal measures, while Pakistan claimed that Fitna violated articles of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the International Convention on the Elimination on All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD).176 Citing Ministry of the Interior sources, an article in the Pakistan Daily Times stated that “the delegation would also tell the EU that if such acts against Islam are not controlled, more attacks on the EU diplomatic missions abroad could not be ruled out.”177 The report came in the wake of the car-bomb attack outside the Danish embassy in Islamabad that killed at least six people.178 As described in chapter 12, Wilders also faced prosecution in his own country on charges of group insult of Muslims and inciting hate and discrimination against Muslims because of their religion and against non-Western foreigners because of their race, in 2011, he was acquitted.

  Closing

  These international incidents reflect the alignment of a widespread popular belief that insults to religion should be prevented with a growing campaign to crush by force any criticism of Islam. This is true not only in cases of terrorist violence but also in the more subtle pattern of holding governments responsible for “allowing” blasphemous works or statements in a free press. In the aftermath of the Danish cartoons crisis, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe rightly declared that ideas “that may shock, offend or disturb the state or any sector of the population” are nonetheless protected by the freedom of expression.179 Yet, as we shall see in the next chapter, the extent of many governments’ commitment to this principle remains unclear. At the same time, attempts to undermine freedom of expression, whether genuinely spontaneous or carefully planned, continue in full force.

  More positively, some reform-minded Muslims have taken issue with some of their coreligionists’ reaction to Fitna as well as to the cartoons. Egyptian Ahmad Al-Aswani wrote:

  I do not think that cartoons, books, or films can harm a religion or affect the faith of those who adhere to it out of conviction…

  The ones who harm the Prophet are those who butcher and bomb innocents all over the world…

  The ones who harm the Prophet are those who call on the world to pass a resolution against disparaging religion, while they themselves denigrate other religions in each prayer in the mosques, as well as in their schools and on their satellite channels—and especially [the religion] of Christians and Jews, whom they curse in every prayer…

  The ones who harm the Prophet do not live in the West—they are among us, the Muslims.180

  11

  Legitimizing Repression

  Blasphemy Restrictions in the United Nations

  In 1994, Gasp
ar Biro, a young Hungarian lawyer and the UN Special Rapporteur on Sudan, concluded that Sudan was violating international human rights agreements due to what it claimed was its “sharia-based” penal code. Under this code, convictions for adultery, theft, and apostasy meant harsh penalties, including amputation or execution for anyone over the age of seven.1 Biro said: “It does not matter in this context who the drafter is nor what the sources of inspiration of these norms are. In terms of human rights, the only question is whether or not the national legislation is compatible with the existing international instruments to which Sudan is a party.”2

  Sudan’s UN delegation responded by calling Biro’s report “flagrant blasphemy and a deliberate insult to the Islamic religion, for which the author of the report must be interrogated and condemned by all States and Organizations that respect human and peoples [sic] rights,” and “brought to justice.”3

  When asked why Biro had not been permitted back into Sudan to collect information for a subsequent report, the delegation representative replied with a thinly veiled threat: “[W]e don’t want to speculate about his fate if he is to continue offending the feelings of Muslims worldwide…” He then demanded that the UN General Assembly “take the necessary remedial measures to comfort the feelings of Muslims worldwide for the unwarranted challenge to Islam posed by those references, otherwise no one would be in a position to guarantee that he would not face the fate of Mr. Salman Rushdie.”4