Killing Free Speech

The OICs [Organisation of Islamic Cooperation] highly ambitious plans to do away with freedom of speech go severely underreported in the West. Mainstream journalists do not appear to find it dangerous that their freedom of speech should be supervised by the OIC, while Western governments, far from offering any resistance, appear, perhaps for votes, to be cozily going along with everything....

In June, the first "1st Islamic-European Forum for examining ways of cooperation to curb hate speech in the media," initiated by the OIC, ironically but sadly took place at the Press Club Brussels Europe.

The director of the information department of the OIC, Maha Mustafa Aqeel, explained that the forum is part of the OIC's media strategy to counter "Islamophobia":

"Our strategy focuses on interacting with the media, academics, and experts on various relevant topics, in addition to engaging with Western governments to raise awareness, support the efforts of Muslim civil society bodies in the West, and engage the latter in developing plans and programs to counter Islamophobia."

...

Today, many Western European governments are prosecuting their own citizens for criticizing Islam or Muslims in, for example, Sweden, Germany and the UK, although it is unclear, whether or how much of this development can be directly attributed to the OIC.

In Sweden, for instance, pensioners especially have been prosecuted for making critical comments about Islam on Facebook. A 71-year-old woman referred to so-called unaccompanied minors as "bearded children" and said -- not inaccurately (here and here and here) -- that some seem to be "engaged in rape and demolishing their [asylum] homes". In February 2018, a Swedish court sentenced her to a fine for "incitement of hatred against an ethnic group".

In Germany, a journalist, Michael Stürzenberger, was handed a six-month suspended jail sentence for posting on his Facebook page a historical photo of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, shaking the hand of a senior Nazi official in Berlin in 1941. The prosecution accused Stürzenberger of "inciting hatred towards Islam" and "denigrating Islam" by publishing the photograph....

CAIRCO Note

American readers may be surprised that freedom of speech is not a guaranteed right in Europe. Yet in the United States, corporate and media interests are censoring free speech at an alarmingly increasing rate.