Religion and the Marketplace

by Amil Imani (November 2009)

Islam is on its march of death on many fronts. A very dangerous front has been recently re-opened at the United Nations (UN) by the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), the largest group of nations within the UN, by introducing a new resolution.

The resolution under consideration—Defamation of Religions—aims to enlist the power and prestige of the UN in defense of religion by declaring religions to be immune from the general discourse practiced in non-theocratic domains.

The aim of the resolution is to impose a gag order on people against breathing a word that religionists may find defaming or offensive. Isn’t that a great idea, folks? Now, any crackpot, more than ever, can start a scheme and call it a religion. And by so doing, he can be under the protective umbrella of the UN, immune from any criticism and litigation. By contrast, any religious order can take any offender to court for offensive statements.

I can just see the legions of lawsuits that will be launched and financed by the petrodollar rich Islamists in an unrelenting effort to muzzle any and all people who might dare to point out the truth about Islam. The very expenses of litigation, even without convictions, can ruin any individual or organization.  

And what happens to the First Amendment, freedom of speech, of inquiry and expression? Freedoms we have come to cherish and celebrate as priceless treasures for free people and societies?

The answer: well, limits are also needed, particularly when the limits serve the interests of those who want to set them: In this case, the recently-empowered incorrigible, un-repenting dark-ages Islamists and their follow travelers.

My response is that gag orders, no matter where they are applied, exact an unacceptably high price for the possible good that they may do. In my ideal world, I would like to see a world where all ideas and beliefs, religious or otherwise, are expressed, even clash, and fend for themselves in a battlefield of ideas.

Ideas and beliefs should thrive or fail on merit only and not because someone says that they are the best and everyone must accept them without questioning. Let the meritorious and the fittest survive and let the phony and the unfit die. It is this form of freedom that has been the engine of progress in all fields of human endeavors. And it is the exact opposite practice of stifling free inquiry in many organized religions that is the main cause of much superstition, stagnation, and even untold suffering.

What needs to sink into the Western peoples’ mind is the realization that, to the Muslims, the idea of freedom and free thinking is largely an alien concept.

From birth onward, a Muslim’s brain is packed with the notion that everything in life is predicated on the will of Allah. Allah is in charge of all things and at all times. Allah is very much of a hands-on God. He does the thinking, he does the ordaining, and he decides the outcome for everything large and small. And since Allah is the all-knowing as well as the all-everything, the duty of the faithful is unquestioned obedience in all matters, irrespective of any and all contradictory evidence. All disproving and contradictory evidences about the Islamic precepts are labeled as deceptive machinations of the accursed Satan. Hence, it is the sacred duty of the believer to put his Islamic blinders on and submit wholeheartedly and unhesitatingly to what is preached to him. It is within this deeply engrained mindset of the Muslim that he or she rarely says anything or commits to anything without the preamble of enshallah—if it is the will of Allah. In a way, this is a great out for the Muslim. If he wants to do it and does it, Allah willed it. If he doesn’t want to do it and doesn’t do it, Allah didn’t see it fit.

It is this type of mentality that is, in large, part responsible for Muslim governments—the beneficiaries of their fatalistic pathological system—to audaciously propose this dangerous resolution to the UN. The Islamic powers that be want to protect their valued stranglehold on the masses by keeping them in the darkness of ignorance and preventing them from being exposed to the light of truth.

Question: Why is it that the Muslims are so hellbent on passing laws and resolutions of the sort they are pushing?

Answer: Because Islam is loaded with faulty and bizarre beliefs as well as many primitive, discriminatory and shameful practices. So, they need to build a steel fence around their corral of absurdity to protect it from crumbling under the assaults of truth. They have much to hide and fear exposure the most.

Question: Why is it that these followers of Allah don’t mention any other religion besides Islam for the privilege they are seeking?

Answer: Because to Muslims, Islam is the super-religion and final religion of Allah. Judaism and Christianity are the only other two religions that are granted a grudging minimal recognition by Islam. All other religions and those without religion are blasphemy and blasphemous.

If we exempt religion from criticism (some call it defamation), many problems arise. For one, what qualifies as religion and what does not qualify? Or, who or what body makes such a decision?

For instance a Paris court convicted the Church of Scientology of fraud and fined it more than euro 600,000 ($900,000) on Tuesday but stopped short of banning the group as prosecutors had demanded. Will courts be given the authority to pass judgments on religious matters? France apparently considers the Church of Scientology as less than a bonefide religion, but views Islam as a religion. On what basis is France making this call? Is it because there are five million people in France who call themselves Muslims? Is it the numbers’ game, then? Why is it then that Muslims do not recognize billions of Buddhists and Hindus as followers of legitimate religions? Oddly enough, various sects of Islam consider other sects as heretics worthy of the harshest treatments. They bomb each others’ mosques, funeral processions and even marketplaces crowded with other Muslims.

Would the UN decide the issue of what constitutes religion or will the matter be left to the discretion of each country? Would Saudi Arabia allow Christians to build a church in that country, or even the Bible be sold in bookstores? Would the Islamic Republic of Iran stop its genocidal agenda against the Baha’is? Would the mullahs desist from imprisoning the Baha’is for months and years, without any formal charges and even without a sham trial for which they are infamous?

Leonard A. Leo, chair of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, last week testified to Members of Congress that the only religion and religious adherents that are specifically mentioned in the
“Aside from Islam, the resolutions do not specify which religions are deserving of protection, or explain how or by whom this would be determined,” Leo stated.

U.S. Secretary of State
It is time for Islam to shed its “Borqa.” The cat is out of the bag, so to speak. In the age of instantaneous communication and with the rising literacy, the task of keeping this stone-age belief called Islam under cover is an impossibility.

No belief system or set of ideas, be they religious, scientific, philosophical, political or otherwise, should be protected from open honest criticism. It is up to the individual consumer to decide for himself, to the best of his ability and the compelling nature of the information, the value and veracity of any offering in a marketplace of free ideas.

The General Assembly of the UN must soundly defeat this dangerous resolution and send a clear message to the Islamists that this is the 21^st century and Muslims would do well to cast off their obsolete primitive bigoted belief.

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