Why Clinton skirted the Anti-Semitism issue at the OIC — a theory

I blogged about ten days ago about how, on July 15, Hillary Rodham Clinton spoke to the Organization of the Islamic Conference and brought up anti-Semitism — as strictly a European problem.

I wondered why, considering the mission to Muslim lands the secretary of state’s own envoy to combat anti-Semitism, Hannah Rosenthal, had just completed.

Robert C. Blitt, an associate professor of law at the University of Tennessee College of Law was in touch today — and he is an expert on the very issue that framed Clinton’s speech: The effort (squelched, for now) to include "defamation of religion" (in most cases, Islam) as a "rights" violation.

This is something the Jewish community has pushed back hard against, along with most western nations — Clinton, in fact, was thanking the OIC for helping out in the most recent effort to temove "defamation of religion" from the agenda in a U.N. forum. The bottom line argument against such a designation: It places the "evil" committed by the Danish cartoonists behind the Muhammad cartoons on par with the likes of bloody-handed despots like Bashar Assad.

Blitt pointed me to a passage in his forthcoming paper on this issue that might explain why Clinton, in her speech, was so ginger about Muslim anti-Semitism.

The gist of it is, in a 1997 report, the U.N. special rapporteur on racism quoted a Tel Aviv University study of anti-Semitism in the Muslim world that noted the European provenance of such anti-Semitism — but also noted that some Muslims were now quoting Muslim sources, including the Koran, to justify their anti-Jewish biases.

That set off something of a firestorm, and here’s where it gets interesting: Instead of arguing that the bigots the TAU folks were quoting were unrepresentative and had distorted the texts; or that the Koranic passages might once have been used to uphold bigotry but were now shown to mean something quite different (postures I’ve borrowed as examples from Christian churches and how they deal with anti-Jewish bias in the New Testament), officials from Muslim nations simply decried the reference as an "insult to Islam."

What has evolved, according to Blitt, is a culture in international fora that will not countenance criticism of how Islam is used or abused, even when the point is allowing people to criticize how Islam is used or abused.

The upshot, apparently, is a U.S. posture that seeks to slay the beast — religious hegemony — without quite saying so. The war against bias that dares not speak its name.

Below the jump is the whole passage from the paper, "The Bottom Up Journey of ‘Defamation of Religion’ from Muslim States to the United Nations: A Case Study of the Migration of Anti-Constitutional Ideas," to appear in the journal, "Studies in Law, Politics and Society:"

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A Norm Struggles to Be Born: Defamation of Islam Knocks at the UN’s Door

The first reference to defamation of Islam at the UN came in the wake of a 1997 report released by Maurice Gle´le´-Ahanhanzo, Special Rapporteur on Contemporary Forms of Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance. Among other sources of discrimination contemplated in the report, the special rapporteur devoted a four paragraph section to ‘‘Islamist and Arab anti-Semitism’’ (Gle´le´-Ahanhanzo, 1997, January 16, p. 13), wherein he cited to an annual worldwide survey on anti-Semitism published by Tel Aviv University. The survey noted that the ‘‘use of Christian and secular European anti-Semitism motifs in Muslim publications is on the rise, yet at the same time Muslim extremists are turning increasingly to their own religious sources, first and foremost the Qur’an, as a primary anti-Jewish source’’ (Gle´le´-Ahanhanzo, 1997, January 16, p. 14; Wadlow & Littman, 1997). Confronted with this passage, Indonesia’s representative to the UNCHR, speaking on behalf of OIC member states, averred, ‘‘Apart from the fact that such a statement constituted blasphemy against the Qur’an, the Commission could not allow itself to become a silent spectator of such defamation of one of the great religions of the world.’’ The representative then called upon the Chairman ‘‘to condemn that defamatory statement on behalf of the Commission’’ (UNCHR, 1997, September 3, para. 14). Other OIC member states reiterated this view, and Pakistan’s representative demanded that the UNCHR ‘‘delete the passage in the report of the Special Rapporteur that constituted an insult to Islam’’ (UNCHR, 1997, September 3, para. 30). This occasion marked the first time that the Commission considered a proposal to delete part of a special rapporteur’s ostensibly independent report (UNCHR, 1997, September 3, para. 44). Within eight hours, the UNCHR Chairman read out a proposed draft decision that branded the passage in question an ‘‘offensive reference to the Holy Qur’an’’ and sought to

1. express[the Commission’s] indignation and protest at the content of such an offensive reference to Islam and the Holy Qur’an,
2. Affirm[] that this offensive reference should have been excluded from the report, and
3. Request[] the Chairman to ask the Special Rapporteur to take corrective action in response to this decision (UNCHR, 1997, April 28, para. 22).

Without further debate or concern for the precedent being established, the Commission – including representatives from United States, Austria, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, and the United Kingdom – moved to adopt the draft decision without a vote (UNCHR, 1997, April 28, para. 23, 1997, April 18). Shortly thereafter, Gle´le´-Ahanhanzo (1997, July 8) issued a corrigendum effectively deleting the controversial text from his report. Meeting (1997, November 20) as a group following this incident, the UN’s special rapporteurs expressed their agreement ‘‘that it was inappropriate for the Commission to request a special rapporteur to amend his report’’ and that rapporteurs ‘‘should not be requested to amend their reports merely because certain passages were deemed offensive by a particular Member State or group of Member States’’ (para. 23). This statement had little practical effect, and since 1997 no reference has been made specifically to ‘‘Islamist and Arab anti-Semitism’’ in any UN report.

In a revealing comment on the nature of this controversy, the observer for Indonesia remarked in the UN Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities (1997, December 22) that ‘‘it could only be assumed that the motive of those who insulted Islam was to generate conflict with Islamic peoples or even to justify the injustices to which they were currently being subjected’’ (para. 14). Accordingly, Indonesia – along with other OIC states – maintains the view that no critical comment concerning Islam is justifiable – regardless of whether the forum is academic or the objective pursued is a worthy one, such as the elimination of discrimination. Underscoring this perspective two years earlier, a representative from Iran informed the UN that ‘‘in the opinion [of] the Organization of the Islamic Conference the right to freedom of thought, opinion and expression could in no case justify blasphemy’’ (UN, 1995, February 3). This adamant position is worth keeping in mind as the following sections analyze the effort to enshrine a prohibition against ‘‘defamation of religions’’ and the OIC’s intent regarding the scope and application of such a ban.