Proposed Global Ban on Blasphemy

There are certain well-defined and narrowly limited classes of speech, the prevention and punishment of which have never been thought to raise any constitutional problem. These include the lewd and obscene, the profane, the libelous, and the insulting or "fighting words" those that by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace. It has been well observed that such utterances are no essential part of any exposition of ideas, and are of such slight social value as a step to truth that any benefit that may be derived from them is clearly outweighed by the social interest in order and morality.

West must learn to respect wishes of new Arab leaders
September 29, 2012 / the AGE/Sydney Morning Herald
Paul McGeough,Senior foreign correspondent

Something truly remarkable unfolded in New York this week - the leaders of Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen and Libya came to the green-marbled dais at the United Nations as genuine representatives of their people.

For too long, autocratic predecessors in the first three had come to town as puppets of the West. Utterly unembarrassed, they would collect cheques, in return for paying lip-service to the rights and dignity of their people, before adjourning to backrooms to do deals more in the service of foreign capitals. The fourth, Libya, was long a pariah - until Colonel Gaddafi saw commercial gain in coming in from the cold.

The context for this week's speeches was remarkable too.

Instead of arriving only for another round of hand-wringing on the conflict in Syria and Israel's demands for a pre-emptive strike against Iran, these new Arab leaders strode to the lectern with heartfelt expressions of their peoples' hurt and frustration over a crude blasphemy of the Prophet Muhammad, in the form of a video devised and produced in distant California - but served up in villages and cities across the Islamic world by the marvels-without-borders that are the instant news and social media of our time.

Western leaders and commentators were quick to frame management of the protests as a test of the leadership skills of the new headmen in the Middle East. They were right - but only up to a point.

The greater test is for the West. After decades of happily making the rights and aspirations of ordinary Arabs subservient to global demands for energy and ''stability'', which the likes of Hillary Clinton, the US Secretary of State, clung to until minutes before last year's collapse of the Mubarak regime, the West now needs to be more respectful of the demands of the Arab masses as expressed by their newly accountable leaders.

Similarly, this blasphemy debate is being conducted across a cultural gulf made that much wider by long-standing Western indifference to the educational, censorship and human-rights shortcomings of old allies like Mubarak, the House of Saud and, when it suited the West, even the Saddams and Assads of the region.

This is not to say that the West must cave in to Arab demands to criminalise blasphemy. But patience and a preparedness to work with, rather than against, the new leaders as they attempt to bed down democracy amid chaos could pay dividends when, say, Egypt's President Mohammed Mursi moves on his stated wish to rewrite aspects of Cairo's peace treaty with Israel.

American policy responses are contorted by the straitjacket of presidential campaigning - at least until the vote in November.

The Republican presidential hopeful, Mitt Romney, decries the election of a Muslim Brotherhood president in Egypt, his implicit argument being that President Obama ought not to have abandoned Mubarak and that as president, he would provide tougher US leadership in the region.

At the UN on Tuesday, Mr Obama condemned violence and urged that those who resorted to it be marginalised. But in acknowledging ''tensions between the West and an Arab world moving towards democracy'', he added: "Just as we cannot solve every problem in the world, the US has not, and will not seek to dictate the outcome of democratic transitions abroad, and we do not expect other nations to agree with us on every issue."

From there, he pivoted to the ''crude and disgusting'' video, to mount a defence of Americans' First Amendment right to freedom of expression. "Like me, the majority of Americans are Christian, and yet we do not ban blasphemy against our most sacred beliefs," he said. "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 defend their right to do so."

That was not good enough for the Egyptian president, Mursi. Pointedly billing himself as the first democratically elected Egyptian leader to come before the UN General Assembly, Mursi pushed back, arguing that the ''obscenities'' in the video were part of an organised campaign against ''Islamic sanctities''.

"We reject this. We cannot accept it - we will not allow anyone to do this by word or deed," he warned. The Egyptian leader condemned violence but he stopped short of fully embracing freedom of expression.

After similar pitches from Yemen's new President, Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi, and Tunisia's President, Moncef Marzouki, the Secretary-General of the 21-strong Arab League, Nabil Elaraby, argued: "If the international community has criminalised bodily harm, it must just as well criminalise psychological and spiritual harm."

Elaraby gave notice that the Arab League would push ahead with calls for global restrictions on insults to all religions.

The US has a body of law on hate crimes. And according to a 2009 survey, 43 per cent of Americans agree that people should not be allowed to speak offensively about religion in public.

Californian university professor Lawrence Rosenthal, in addressing the legality of the Innocence of Muslims, told reporters: "The thing that makes this particularly difficult for the US is that we treat what most of us would refer to as hate speech as constitutionally protected speech and Americans don't appreciate how unusual this position seems in the rest of the world."

It involves treating the countries of the middle east with respect.

Finding a Path Toward Global Free Speech
(Suzanne Nossel, Commentary, HuffingtonPost.com, September 29, 2012)

This week's salvo over free speech at the opening of the U.N. General Assembly has the potential to devolve into a polarized global debate pitting freedom of expression against the impulse to protect religions from insult and offense. Global leaders are rightly seized with addressing the explosive impact of insults to religion and the violent backlash they can unleash. But without great care, insight and leadership, the decision of world leaders to wade into this emotionally charged territory will deepen rather than bridge global divisions.

In his remarks at the U.N. earlier this week, President Obama set out the perspective embodied in the U.S. First Amendment and case law, namely that the right response to insults and denigration is not to prohibit the expression or punish the speaker, but to enable free rein for "the voices of tolerance that rally against bigotry and blasphemy, and lift up the values of understanding and mutual respect." He rejected efforts to ban even the most incendiary forms of expression on the basis that prohibitions on speech "can become a tool to silence critics, or oppress minorities." His approach reflected the U.S.'s approach toward free speech, probably the most protective in the world, which permits prohibitions only in cases where expression is judged to constitute incitement to imminent violence.

He was met with equally robust calls from other leaders urging a global ban on so-called blasphemy. Egypt's new President, Mohammed Morsi, proposed that the U.N. Security Council and General Assembly consider measures to prevent religious insults along the lines of those in the anti-Muslim video that sparked last week's protests. "There are limits to the freedom of expression especially if such freedom blasphemes the beliefs of nations and defames their figures," said Yemeni President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi. Qatar's emir went a step further, urging the drafting of "laws, procedures, and controls to prevent insulting religious and faiths under any pretext."

This split has the potential to widen into a chasm that feeds rather than tempers the explosive popular reaction to offensive speech. An unhappy, yet not unlikely scenario is that Egypt, Qatar, Yemen and others press forward with introducing U.N. resolutions or proposed treaty texts that would impose international bans on blasphemy. The U.S., Western Europe, Canada, Australia and potentially some South American and African democracies will oppose these efforts vociferously. The result could be years of bitter impasse that only fuel global differences over thorny questions regarding the interplay of religion and human rights.

For U.N. insiders the battle is a familiar one; though now being waged at the level of heads of state. For most of the last ten years at both the U.N. General Assembly in New York and its Human Rights Council in Geneva, Pakistan led a group of Islamic delegations in tabling an annual resolution decrying the "Defamation of Religion" and calling for measures to prohibit and punish offensive speech. These resolutions were the subject of sharply divided votes twice a year, with considerable diplomatic energies expended in battling for or against them. It was the U.N. at its worst, with years of fruitless debates contributing nothing to achieving actual improvements on the ground for those confronting religious intolerance.

In March, 2011, Western delegations, the Organization of the Islamic conference and delegations from Africa, South America and Asia came together to finally overcome the drawn out battle,uniting behind a consensus alternative to the traditional Defamation resolution. The new resolution, introduced by Pakistan, focused on combatting religious intolerance through concrete measures including education, interfaith dialogue, forceful political leadership and aggressive action against hate crimes. Following passage of the resolution, global leaders met in Istanbul in the summer of 2011 to throw their weight behind its implementation and expert meetings were set up to share best practices.

Rather than returning to battle stations and reviving a tired debate that will end in deadlock, global leaders should redouble their commitment to this consensus approach to addressing the underlying concerns that Presidents Obama, Morsi and all their counterparts ought to share -- namely, ensuring respect for religious differences, preventing violence and ensuring respect for fundamental human rights, including freedom of speech.

The multi-year process of shifting the U.N. debate away from bans on defamation and toward practical steps to address intolerance yields lessons that can prevent world leaders from being drawn back into opposing camps. Efforts to address intolerance should center on the victims whose rights are at stake -- including the right to question and challenge state and religious authorities; the right to practice religion freely without feeling threatened or targeted and the right to be free from violence. Strategies to address religious intolerance need to uphold all human rights that are implicated, without privileging any one set over all others.

Such efforts depend on unified global leadership. The explosive events of recent weeks may have left little room for global leaders to consult ahead of their U.N. speeches, but the spectacle of heads of state so sharply divided over the issues does not help. When the debate over defamation of religion was overcome, it was because foreign ministers and heads of international organizations from all regions came together, acknowledged their differences and sought out common ground.

Finally, what broke the impasse over defamation was an emphasis not on trying to resolve thorny questions of when particular speech should be considered out of bounds, but rather a focus on concrete actions that states and others could take to promote respect for religious differences -- work that departments of justice, education, and foreign ministries could do to promote understanding and settle disputes before they explode. There are measures set out in the new resolution that have been proven to work in addressing intolerance that form the basis of a shared global agenda.

Global leaders now face the choice of reverting back to trench warfare over insults to religion, or moving together in unison behind an agenda to which they have all agreed. The approach they take could well determine whether the violent outbreaks of recent weeks become a thing of the past, or a pervasive part of our collective future.

Should the US Supreme Court go **** itself too, then? In a 9:0 decision in the 1940s, it specifically denied the view, so prevalent in this thread, that the First Amendment confers an unlimited license to insult:

The Supreme Court wrote:

There are certain well-defined and narrowly limited classes of speech, the prevention and punishment of which have never been thought to raise any constitutional problem. These include the lewd and obscene, the profane, the libelous, and the insulting or "fighting words" those that by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace. It has been well observed that such utterances are no essential part of any exposition of ideas, and are of such slight social value as a step to truth that any benefit that may be derived from them is clearly outweighed by the social interest in order and morality.

Source: Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire (1942).

I haven't seen The Innocence of Muslims, but from what I hear about it, it seems to fall well within this exception. So what's the big difference between what America's own Supreme Court says and what Alaraby says? As far as I can tell, the difference is one of degree, not of principle. These comparisons between Alaraby and theocrats who stone people are completely uncalled for, whether they come from Roger, or Lustig Andrei, or anybody else in this thread.

It bothers me that blasphemy as a means of inciting violence seems
only to apply to blasphemy against Islam. Surely those so incited
bear some responsibility.

If my comments early on in this thread offended Thomas, or anyone else, I sincerely apologize.

Under U.S. law, the "Innocence of Muslims" filmmaker would be subject to criminal penalty if it can be proven that his intent was to incite violence.

Quote:

Under U.S. law, the "Innocence of Muslims" filmmaker would be subject to criminal penalty if it can be proven that his intent was to incite violence.

and how wouldthis be proven unless some event had occured that could link the film to some violent acts.
Establishing intent is kinda dicey without admission, indesputible knowledge before hand , or some event.or

Simply saying that violence resulted because someone offered a film clip as an excuse isn't going to work.

A conspiracy to incite violence can be proven through the testimony of third parties or, as I mentioned before, through correspondence, e-mails, recorded conversations....