(Washington, D.C.; 7/13/2023) – Leaders of the US Council of Muslim Organizations (USCMO), the nation’s largest umbrella group of national, regional, and local Muslim organizations, today commended the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) for passing a resolution condemning the rise of acts of anti-religious hate and desecration, including the recent Eid Al-Adha Quran-burning in Sweden. USCMO leaders also noted their great disappointment at the United States and European Union nations’ “moral inconsistency” in voting no to yesterday’s resolution and called on the Biden Administration to make its long-overdue appointment of a Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Global Islamophobia.
“We commend the United Nations Human Rights Council for acting to prohibit hateful acts of anti-religious bigotry maliciously intended to spark lawless discrimination and violence against Muslim communities. We are also deeply troubled by the morally inconsistent opposition of the U.S. and several EU nations to such a crucial safeguard for this fundamental human right,” USCMO Secretary-General Oussama Jammal said in a statement.”
“No government has an obligation to give assistance and approval to an extremist who attempts to threaten and intimidate a religious community by standing outside its house of worship while ripping apart, burning, stomping, and otherwise desecrating its holy book.”
The UNHRC resolution, introduced by Pakistan and supported by Palestine, on behalf of the 57-nation Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), comes in the wake of Sweden permitting and providing government assistance and protection for a Quran desecration by an anti-Muslim extremist who publicly stomped on the holy book, filled it with bacon, tore out its pages, and burned it outside Stockholm’s largest mosque as Muslims solemnized the Sacrificial Holiday of Eid Al-Adha inside and worldwide.
The Limits of Free Speech
The statement noted that many European nations limit other forms of free speech and few of them would tolerate the act of hatred that took place in Sweden where it was directed at minority religious communities other than Muslims.
The United Kingdom and numerous other European nations criminalize Holocaust denial. Yet they did not support the UNHRC resolution.
It called out the U.S. for widely upholding, increasingly by law, restrictions on free speech for Palestinian human rights, while also repeatedly using its UN Security Council veto to prevent international reprimand of Israeli abuses of Palestinian human rights. The U.S., moreover, funds an array of foreign dictatorships, including right-wing governments and military juntas, that heavily suppress freedom of expression in their countries.
“The U.S. had the option, at the very least, to abstain from the religious hatred resolution vote rather than seek to block it,” said Jammal in the statement.
“The idea that such literally incendiary acts as Quran burning do not foreshadow violence to vulnerable human beings – and particularly marked religious communities like, in this case, Muslims, and especially in Europe with its terrible persecutive legacy precisely in this regard – is dangerously disingenuous.”
“The specter of genocide remains very real, especially in Europe. Only two days ago, July 11, Bosnian Muslims marked the 28th anniversary of the 1995 planned and premeditated Serbian genocide of Srebrenica with the reinterment of the remains of 30 victims recently discovered in hidden mass graves.”
The Council statement noted that “no country treats freedom of expression as an unlimited right even if it leads to harming people” and that this should expressly include “incitement of violence against vulnerable religious communities right outside their houses of worship.”
Pakistan’s permanent representative to the UN in Geneva, Khalil Hashmi, who called the U.S. and EU nations commitment to preventing religious hatred nothing more than “lip service,” was more pointed about the Quran burning in his remarks after the UNHRC vote.
“They lack the political, legal, and moral courage to condemn this act, and it was the minimum that the Council could have expected from them.”
The Statement of Other Religious Communities
In the face of considerable opposition from world religious communities, Biden appointee Rashad Hussain, US ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom, still sought to defend the U.S.’s rejection by arguing that the anti-religious hatred resolution would somehow abet expressions of religious hate.
“We know from experience that attempting to ban such expression actually usually amplifies it further by bringing even more attention to it and often serves as a catalyst for further hatred,” said Hussain.
“Such laws also fail to address the underlying causes of bigotry,” he said, when what we need is to “reinvigorate education and interfaith intercultural dialogue to confront hate speech.”
“A lack of interfaith dialogue is not the problem,” said Jammal, pointing out that the perpetrator of the Stockholm Quran burning is an atheist who reportedly joined the Swedish secular far right almost immediately after his immigration from Iraq.
Robust interfaith dialogue, in fact, led religious communities across the spectrum and world to denounce the Quran burning, while Swedish Muslim leaders stepped in to prevent similar acts of incitement and desecration from taking place against the Jewish community.
In the wake of the Quran burning, Swedish authorities received several formal requests to publicly burn Torah Scrolls, one set for July 15th, which “did not take place because the [Swedish] Muslim leadership prevented it,” according to Swedish Rabbi Moshe David HaCohen, an interfaith leader.
“If there is no limit to freedom of expression, then what prevents us from allowing Nazi propaganda and Holocaust denial to exist?” said Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt, president of the Conference of European Rabbis. In a sobering statement decrying the Quran burning, he cited 19th-Century German-Jewish poet Heinrich Heine: “Where holy books are burned, people will also be burned.”
“The burning of the Quran is a deliberate violation of the Muslim faith and identity, but we see it also as an attack on all of us people of faith. Therefore, we want to express our solidarity with Muslim believers in our country,” the Presidium of the Swedish Christian Council (SKR) said in a statement.
“What happened in Sweden was an unwholesome use of the concept of personal freedom,” said Ara Badalian, senior pastor of the Baptist Church in Baghdad.
“We call upon the governments of all countries, particularly the Swedish government, not to allow these actions perpetrated in the name of ‘personal freedom,’” said Mar Awa Royel, patriarch of the Assyrian Church of the East.
Peter Calvin, a Pakistani Christian leader, noted that Pakistan had nationwide protests over the Quran burning, but there was not a single attack reported on the Christian minority.
Summary of USCMO Positions and US Islamophobia Response
- USCMO leaders and American Muslims applaud the UN Human Rights Council’s passage of its anti-religious hate speech resolution yesterday and eagerly await its chief’s report on the state of religious hatred, along with his review of anti-religious hate laws in the world.
- The Council once again calls on the Biden Administration to create a direly needed State Department Office of the Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Islamophobia on par with its Office of the Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism.
- USCMO leaders further call upon the Biden Administration and community leaders to bring U.S. policies, domestic and foreign, to a moral consistency and just balance that treats American Muslims and Islam with the same level of respect and protection afforded other groups and their ways of life.
- The Council reminds U.S. leaders and our fellow Americans that the U.S. must accord political freedom of expression and religious freedom from hate and persecution equally among us all.
We ask God to guide us, all together, to His equanimous path of peace.
