New Age Islam

Do Not Entertain Any Defamation of Islam Resolution Until Islam Is Protected From Defamation by Jihadi Literature in the Islamic World First, Sultan Shahin Asks UN Human Rights Council

By Sultan Shahin, Editor, New Age Islam

United Nations Human Rights Council
Twenty-fourth session (From 9 to 27 September 2013)
Agenda item 3: Promotion and protection of all human rights, civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights, including the right to development

Oral Statement by Sultan Shahin, Editor, New Age Islam

On behalf of World Environment and Resources Council (WERC)

13 September 2013

Mr. President,

We Muslims of the world, at least our governments, have been bludgeoning the United Nations since 1999 in our bid to protect Islam from defamation. But aren’t the states that claim to speak for Muslims the worst defamers of Islam themselves?

Linking Islam with terrorism is considered defaming Islam. One would assume that Muslim countries would first prohibit defamation of Islam by ideologies of terror in their own countries. However, the case is quite the opposite. It is media outlets refuting the Islamist terrorist ideologies that are banned, as was a website called New Age Islam a couple of months ago in Pakistan.

The terrorist mouthpiece Nawa-e-Afghan Jihad whose extremist ideas New Age Islam refuted continues to flourish. The Taliban fatwa that New Age Islam refuted was titled: ‘Circumstances in which the killing of innocent people among infidels is justified.’ Anyone would consider such an essay defamatory to Islam. But not the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. It was the web-magazine that sought to refute this that was blocked.

 It's time we Muslims made up our minds, Mr. President. What is Islam: a totalitarian, fascist, supremacist and exclusivist political ideology out to conquer the world or a spiritual path to salvation?

The international community is supposed to protect Islam from Islamophobes. But the Islamophobes portray Islam exactly in the way the Jihadists do. Jihadists do it approvingly and Islamophobes disapprove and condemn. If Islamophobes’ narratives of Islam are defamatory, as they indeed are, then so are the narratives of Jihadi groups whose ideology thrives in the Muslim world. Both are violent, patriarchal, regressive, misogynist and based on sexual fantasies of sick men. It is this narrative that is taught in most of our madrasas, in schools and colleges. 

http://newageislam.com/radical-islamism-and-jihad/sultan-shahin,-editor,-new-age-islam/do-not-entertain-any-defamation-of-islam-resolution-until-islam-is-protected-from-defamation-by-jihadi-literature-in-the-islamic-world-first,-sultan-shahin-asks-un-human-rights-council/d/13507