A development in oppression is highlighted by Miklós Haraszti in Eurozine, in a reprint of an article from Index on Censorship.

The trick: the more I read the article, the less I could tell who was the oppressor and who was being oppressed.

In Haraszti’s perspective, several (primarily Muslim) regimes around the world are using the language of multi-culturalism (specifically, laws prohibiting the defamation of others’ religions) to quash dissent. So for instance the Danish Cartoon controversy.

On 26 March, the UN Human Rights Council passed a resolution condemning 'defamation of religions' as a human rights violation, despite wide concerns that it could be used to justify curbs on free speech. The Council adopted the non-binding text, proposed by Pakistan on behalf of the Islamic states, with a vote of 23 states in favour and 11 against, with 13 abstentions. The resolution "Combating Defamation of Religions" has been passed, revised and passed again every year since 1999, except in 2006, in the UN Human Rights Council (HRC) and its predecessor, the UN Human Rights Commission. It is promoted by the persistent sponsorship of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference with the acknowledged objective of getting it codified as a crime in as many countries as possible, or at least promoting it into a universal anathema.

As with the Danish Cartoons, this is a European secularist rant with no room for controversy: Islam is wrong a priori, because Islam believes in judgment. Thus the proponents of the resolution are presented as sneaky; certainly not as people with a coherent logic.

There is nothing backward looking or historicising in the declaration. It adopts the language of human rights so that the proposal sounds compatible with the advanced multiculturalism of liberal democracies. All the signatories have acquiesced: the late-communist and the post- communist governments among them, along with the post-colonial or predominantly Muslim nations. Yet only very few of the 23, amongst them South Africa and Indonesia, are democracies equipped with a truly pluralistic media. The consistently high number of abstentions, including by nations with free speech guarantees, helps ensure the proposition is officially accepted every year.

Now: I don’t know where I stand here. I believe in freedom of conscience, and in particular the freedom to change religions, but I’ve also always felt that the unlimited-free-speech crowd has a knack for framing arguments in impossible armor, so that offensiveness is not merely permitted, but crucially important for the survival of civilization itself. Lurking in the background is usually a caricature of the Vatican, with a half-baked narrative of enlightenment = secularism (actually, the French word laïcité, which is much more nuanced).

What Haraszti fails to do is explain exactly why the Muslim nations are being sneaky in using human rights language. This is important: it suggests an unwillingness to listen to the argument. This in turn is fascist; it’s a fascism of speech, in which to be part of a liberal democracy is to swallow mockery. I don’t know what the answer is. It’s tempting to throw up the hands and say that debate is futile.