{"id":60290,"date":"2012-12-04T11:54:39","date_gmt":"2012-12-04T09:54:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/?p=60290"},"modified":"2014-01-07T22:09:36","modified_gmt":"2014-01-07T20:09:36","slug":"america-again-submits-to-the-istanbul-process","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/2012\/12\/04\/america-again-submits-to-the-istanbul-process\/","title":{"rendered":"America Again Submits to the Istanbul Process"},"content":{"rendered":"
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By\u00a0<\/a>Nina Shea<\/div>\n
December 3, 2012 12:28 P.M.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Round three of the \u201cIstanbul Process\u201d opens today, December 3, and runs through Wednesday, at Canada House, in London, hosted by the U.K. and Canada.\u00a0The Istanbul Process is Secretary of State Hillary Clinton\u2019s major transnational law initiative, undertaken in partnership with the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC). It was established last year to \u201cimplement\u201d measures against speech and expression that negatively \u201cstereotype[s]\u201d Islam and Muslims, with a particular emphasis on enacting them in the West.<\/p>\n

This initiative was started as an inexplicable, gratuitous gift to the Muslim world following the March 2011 adoption of a non-binding<\/em> U.N. Human Rights Council resolution (16\/18) on the same theme. While the Obama administration claims that it doesn\u2019t intend for the process to adopt regulations beyond the American free-speech standard, our partner, the OIC, is only too eager to do just that.<\/p>\n

For over a decade within the U.N., the OIC has relentlessly pushed for a universal law to punish blasphemy, or \u201cdefamation,\u201d of Islam. This 56-member-state organization, an essentially religious body, is in fact chartered to \u201ccombat defamation of Islam.\u201d It issues fatwas and other directives to punish public expression of apostasy from Islam. Its current action plan calls for \u201cdeterrent punishments\u201d in all states for \u201cIslamophobia,\u201d a term that encompasses a broad range of constitutionally protected speech, judging from the OIC website\u2019s black list of Americans and other perpetrators of \u201cIslamophobia.\u201d The OIC\u2019s\u00a0stated understanding\u00a0of the Istanbul Process is that it will \u201chelp in enacting domestic laws for the countries involved in the issue, as well as formulating international laws preventing inciting hatred resulting from the continued defamation of religions.\u201d<\/p>\n

Corner readers will remember that the Istanbul Process\u2019s first conference was co-chaired by Clinton and the OIC secretary general in July 2011, in Istanbul, with the foreign ministers of the Muslim countries in attendance. The second\u00a0was held over three days of closed-door meetings last December, at the offices of the U.S. Department of State in Washington. That meeting drew enough controversy within free-speech circles to raise questions about whether the process would continue. But thanks to a leak last week by OIC head Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, we now know the event will go ahead, even if its agenda is still being treated like it\u2019s \u201cclassified.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/a>Judging from the 2011 session I was partially able to observe as a commissioner on the official U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, the point of the Istanbul Process is for the governments of the developed West give an accounting to the governments of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan, Qatar, and other key Muslim states on measures taken to stop American and other Western citizens from disparaging Islam. This puts our diplomats.in a tight spot: Unlike virtually every other country represented in the conference hall, America does not protect any religion or any other body of ideas from criticism and ridicule. However, when we\u2019re in the dock this time around, the U.S., represented by Dr. Suzan Johnson Cook, the administration\u2019s severely marginalized ambassador-at-large for religious freedom, will have some measure of \u201cprogress\u201d to report.<\/p>\n

For example, the U.S.\u2019s top intelligence official and its top commander in Afghanistan were again deployed to suppress blasphemy against Islam in Florida and, this time around, they succeeded. Last year, the efforts of our top authorities to stop Florida micro-church pastor Terry Jones from desecrating a Koran ended in failure. But this year, their resort to the \u201cgood offices\u201d of Tampa socialite Jill Kelley proved an effective strategy. Her persuasive emails resulted in Florida talk-show host Bubba the Love Sponge\u2019s standing down from deep frying a Koran, something he had threatened to do on-air. The OIC\u2019s Ihsanoglu would likely rule Bubba was about to \u201cabuse\u201d freedom of expression by not being able (incontrovertibly, I should note) to pass a \u201cresponsible use\u201d test.<\/p>\n

That leads to our next plea: The administration has also adopted the OIC\u2019s own standard of condemning the \u201cabuse of free expression.\u201d Or at least that is what it appeared to do on the website of the pivotal U.S. embassy to Egypt on September 11 this year. Our embassy declared on its homepage: \u201cWe firmly reject the actions by those who abuse the universal right of free speech to hurt the religious beliefs of others.\u201d<\/p>\n

But perhaps, the best evidence of America\u2019s \u201cimplementation\u201d in response to the Istanbul Process is the Justice Department\u2019s dispatching the FBI a couple months ago to investigate Mark Basseley Youssef (a.k.a. Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, or Sam Bacile), the California Coptic filmmaker of \u201cInnocence of Muslims,\u201d the YouTube trailer that blasphemed the Muslim prophet. As Ambassador Cook can point out, this investigation has resulted in a creative criminal conviction of Youssef, and his being sentenced by a federal court to a year in prison. All the better for the U.S.\u2019s reputation as implementers is that it will be lost on the conferees that Youssef has been imprisoned on a probation offense, \u00e0\u00a0la Al Capone \u2014 though, unlike Capone, his underlying offense, without which he would not have been investigated, was making a crude, insulting video, which is hardly equivalent in American law to gangland massacres or racketeering. It, in fact, is not a crime at all. Thus, most important, the OIC\u2019s take-away will be that in defense of Islam the U.S. government can and will regulate speech.<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, none of this is likely to impress the Istanbul Process gathering. On its opening day last December, Saudi Arabia \u2014 headquarters to and godfather of the OIC \u2014 beheaded a Sudanese woman for \u201csorcery.\u201d Last week, Egypt sentenced to death Youssef, Terry Jones, and six other Americans implicated in the blasphemous YouTube trailer. For the Istanbul Process that\u2019s \u201cbest practices\u201d for \u201cimplementation.\u201d Thus, again, America will be judged to have fallen short, indignation will rise, and the Istanbul Process will need to ramp up its pressure.<\/p>\n

\u2014\u00a0Nina Shea is director of the Hudson Institute\u2019s Center for Religious Freedom and co-author with Paul Marshall of\u00a0<\/em>Silenced: How Apostasy and Blasphemy Codes Are Choking Freedom Worldwide.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By\u00a0Nina Shea December 3, 2012 12:28 P.M. Round three of the \u201cIstanbul Process\u201d opens today, December 3, and runs through Wednesday, at Canada House, in London, hosted by the U.K. and Canada.\u00a0The Istanbul Process is Secretary of State Hillary Clinton\u2019s major transnational law initiative, undertaken in partnership with the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC). It […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":83,"featured_media":60291,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[922],"tags":[7729],"class_list":["post-60290","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world","tag-istanbul-process"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60290","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/83"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=60290"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60290\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/60291"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=60290"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=60290"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=60290"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}