Muslim leaders demanded international action to stop religious insults in a challenge to US President Barack Obama’s defense of freedom of expression at the UN General Assembly.
Obama made a strong condemnation of “violence and intolerance” in his speech at the UN headquarters on Tuesday. He said world leaders had a duty to speak out against the deadly attacks on Americans in the past two weeks caused by an anti-Islam film made in the United States. But Muslim kings and presidents and other heads of state said Western nations must clamp down on “Islamophobia” following the storm over the film which mocks the Prophet Mohammed.
President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono of Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim nation, said the film was another “ugly face” of religious defamation. Yudhoyono quoted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as saying that “everyone must observe morality and public order” and commented: “Freedom of expression is therefore not absolute.” He called for “an international instrument to effectively prevent incitement to hostility or violence based on religions or beliefs.”
King Abdullah II of Jordan, a close US ally, spoke out against the film and the violence it sparked. Pakistan’s President Asif Ali Zardari condemned what he called the “incitement of hate” against Muslims and demanded United Nations action. “Although we can never condone violence, the international community must not become silent observers and should criminalize such acts that destroy the peace of the world and endanger world security by misusing freedom of expression,” he told the assembly.
Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai condemned “the depravity of fanatics” who made the “Innocence of Muslims” film which set off the storm. “The menace of Islamophobia is a worrying phenomenon that threatens peace and co-existence,” he added in his address to the General Assembly. Obama said he could not ban the video, reportedly made by Egyptian Copts, because of the US Constitution which protects the right to free speech.
“As president of our country, and commander-in-chief of our military, I accept that people are going to call me awful things every day, and I will always defend their right to do so,” Obama told leaders at the UN summit.
“The attacks of the last two weeks are not simply an assault on America. They are also an assault on the very ideals upon which the United Nations was founded – the notion that people can resolve their differences peacefully,” he added. Obama has sought a new start in relations with the Muslim world during his first term, but the legacy of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan where US troops will remain for more than a year have been hard to shake off. Stewart Patrick, a specialist on international institutions for the Council on Foreign Relations think-tank, said the film furor had “exposed a huge fault line regarding the balance between free speech, which obviously is healthier in the United States, and the defamation of religion, which is really a red line for many people.” But beyond the question of freedom of speech, some Muslim leaders also say the United States has still not gone far enough to balance its relations with Muslim nations.
The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution itself are both utopian, and both over 200 years old. But unlike other utopias, the one our forefathers embraced works.
It has an ingenious mechanism to revitalize its institutions: Freedom of speech.
As John Stuart Mill explained, when a society allows its citizens to question its government, its values and its most sacred beliefs, the examination finds errors and things for improvement.
But even when no correction at all is needed, the challenge in itself works miracles — it forces us to defend them.
If things prove fine after such "stress test," we learn that we are on the right track. Merely knowing this wipes away uncertainty and replaces it with life and vigor.
Such is the hidden benefit of open debate — and the reason why institutions elsewhere stagnate and die.
And no one rushes to save them because people have forgotten long before why they are there in the first place. This is the grave danger John Mill warned us about.
The fathers of this country gave heed to his words.
Perhaps the fathers of new democracies should do the same.
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