OIC complains about terrorists media giving Islam a bad name
The following is not a parody, so you must not laugh. It is quoted in full from the website of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference:
Islam, the religion of peace, tolerance and compassion
Date: 02/12/2008
With the multiplicity of terrorist attacks perpetrated recently by deviant and fanatic individuals, the General Secretariat of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC) has noticed a tendency of a section of the media, to interpose the word “Islam†in reporting these incidences.
Islam, the religion of peace, tolerance and compassion, that sanctifies the human soul, and whose universal message is one of mutual peaceful coexistence among all the peoples of the world, regardless of their ethnicities, race, religions or languages, and which calls for kind reasoning and dialogue with all their fellow human beings, abhors and despises all such criminal acts and had enacted the utmost severe punishment for their perpetrators.
It is frustrating to see some circles, still, maliciously trying to establish conceptual link between such evil and wicked practices and Islam, the religion that condemns, scorns and outlaws them.
It is on the premise of this irrefutable fact that we, in the OIC, call upon all well-intentioned peoples of the world, not to give to these criminals any right to present Islam, a right that Islam itself denies them. Those who refer to the perpetrators, as acting on behalf of Islam, help them by offering them justification, anchor and premise that they don’t have or deserve. On the other hand, the generalization of the guilt of a few aberrant misguided individuals, to engulf the adherents of a religion of 1.5 billion followers is an outrageous judgment and amounts to an illegal collective punishment on a global scale. Moreover, any attempt to implicate all Muslims in such a wicked and wanton acts goes contrary to the well established principles of international law.
It is therefore hoped that media will avoid resorting to any reference to Islam when narrating such events in order not to disseminate erroneous information that might jeopardize the basic human rights of Muslims, the world over.
Damn, so does that mean no more free virgins when they get to paradise?
Bastards. You could have warned me about that.
I’m coughed up half a lung laughing at that.
“Basic human rights of Muslims,” my hairy white arse. I sympathise, I really do, but if you sleep with the wolves…
So writing about Islamic terrorism is bad….at least according to those who seem to be underwriting Islamic terrorism?
The point I always make is that when our idiot leaders proposed invading Iraq (arguably a terrorist act), I and two million other people went to London to protest. However I see very few muslims out on the streets protesting about the terrorism perpetrated by other muslims.
The OIC aren’t too keen on freedom of expression when it doesn’t agree with their message about Islam; but then again they’re not too keen on human rights in general when they don’t agree with Sharia – according to this. Then again the member states of the OIC are not all exactly paragons of universal human rights so I guess they have to take a lowest common denominator approach.
I don’t think people are being terribly fair here:
1) It makes a point of saying that the terrorists are not representative of Islam, thus denouncing the terrorism as unIslamic.
If Christians said something was unChristian we would recognise that they were denouncing it, so can we treat the groups equally, yeah? Presumably I’m dealing with educated people here so you will all know about the protests outside the Saudi Arabian embassy by Muslims carrying a huge sign telling the Saudi government to stop funding “terrorism in the name of Islam”.
2) It decries the media for describing terrorists of representing Islam, not for referring to them as Islamic. This is awkward for us because we come from a historically Christianity-dominated country where Islam has not really needed to be mentioned as much more than a far off ideology.
Within our language we have a fairly clear understanding of the difference between Christians, Christian, Christendom and Christianity. There are good and bad Christians and the good Christians will do Christian things. Christian groups are groups which claim to be Christian. Christendom was the historically Christian area of Europe. So far so ambiguous, but the term ‘Christianity’ has always been set aside to refer to the Christian ideal. Within Islam, the term for the Islamic idea is ‘Islam’. There’s no word we can use like ‘Islamity’ to separate the principles of Muslims from the authorities who claim to represent them.
If a Christian claimed that the media should not describe Stephen Green as a valid representative of what ‘Christianity’ is, I would not be hearing the same derogatory remarks.
Fatpie42, the OIC includes countries such as Iran which sponsors terrorism, executes gays and rape victims and persecutes religious minorities and political opponents of the regime. It is not a nice fluffy religious body spouting platitudes.
Fatpie42, if the terrorists say that they do what they do in the name of islam, and other muslims do nothing or very little to argue with this, what are we supposed to think? What are the media supposed to report?
Fatpie – the main difference between the OIC and Bird Shit is that Bird Shit only represents Bird Shit… the OIC represents LOADS of Muslims the world over.
Fatpie has a fair point, I think, and nobody would deny that it’s only a tiny proportion of muslims who are islamists (by which I mean politically as well as religiously muslim and seeking to impose islam over the world) and only a minority of those who are terrorists. However, they do use the koran to justify their actions, so to not make this point would be to do the receivers of the media’s message a disservice.
That said, I thought that of the ridiculous OIC statement, the following sentence was a fair one
“Those who refer to the perpetrators, as acting on behalf of Islam, help them by offering them justification, anchor and premise that they don’t have or deserve.”
The coverage could be more nuanced and explain just where the terrorists are coming from without seeming to present a false equivalence (in terms of numbers or position in the informal muslim hierarchy) between them and the senior clerics. One of the key problems with that, though, is that islam is a decentralised religion, without the command structure of christianity, so it’s harder to tell who’s the official mouthpiece of their sky-fairy.
Yes, Islam, like all religions, is a festering pile of shit based on lies and intolerance, however the degree of intolerance of different parties should not be lightly dismissed when discussing such issues.
Of course, they then go off on a ludicrous whining rant and make it hilarious.
jr, sorry dude. My bad.
I was treating it as either a comment from an individual Muslim or from an ineffectual organisation like the Muslim Council of Britain. I had no idea that the OIC was an organisation with any real power and certainly would not have said anything in their favour had I known that they supported such horrible activities.
Neil Hoskins, I think you missed my point. If a Christian group like ‘Christian Voice’ does something wrong we are quite right to refer to them as a Christian group. However, if someone claimed that they did not represent Christianity we would be praising them for saying this.
When referring to Christians our language fully recognises that something is referred to as Christian because it is claiming to represent ‘Christianity’. So we have this clear distinction between a ‘claim’ to Christian status and the ‘ideal’ of Christianity (love, forgiveness, hope, etc.). Muslims see Islam as carrying similar ideals (such as ‘zakat’ which means charity), but the constraints of our language mean that the media has a tougher time distinguishing between Islam as an ‘ideal’ and Islam as a ‘claim’ to represent a certain ideology. The writer of the letter seemed to be demanding that these terrorist groups be referred to as ‘claiming’ to represent Islam, not as ‘actually’ representing Islam (and let’s face it, the latter gives them more status than they deserve).
Tom p – thanks for standing up for me. Just one small issue though:
“However, they do use the koran to justify their actions, so to not make this point would be to do the receivers of the media’s message a disservice.”
I don’t think this point should be ignored. Christian Voice justifies its activities using the Bible and Islamic terrorists justify theirs by using the Qu’ran. However, in both cases it should be made clear that there are many others who disagree with their interpretation. I think we are on the same page here… 🙂
Fatpie42, I agree there is a distinction between the use of religious texts by a minority to justify crimes and the normative practice of religion by most law-abiding adherents. Certainly the former is not limited to islam. Criticism of islam on the other hand needs to be defended where for instance it draws attention to the conflict between islamic law and human rights. For instance some of the laws instituted by member states of the OIC which conflict with human rights. There continue to be efforts by the OIC and its member states to silence criticism of islamic sharia law practices, for instance at the UN, under the guise of ‘respect for religion’ and ‘combatting islamophobia’. Unfortunately this campaign has gained some purchase at the highest levels of the UN.
Good points, all, but the single word that caught my immediate attention was ‘multiplicity’. (I’ll have to try and work that into a sentence soon)
The simple fact is that there have been, and still are, an awful lot of violent attacks motivated by some particular or generic demand of islam. An incredible, mind-numbing and brutalising flood of bombings, assasinations, acid-in-the-face attacks, school burnings, individual murders, honour killings assaults, and so on, all with a single root cause. Mostly one islamist harming another, but that doesn’t make it okay either.
So. I may have my own suspicions about the efficacy (or lack thereof) of profiling by race, ethnicity, sex, etc., but when the term ‘multiplicity’ becomes such an UNDER-statement regarding an entire multi-national, multi-ethnic group, then the poisoned apple in this barrel isn’t hard to find.