James Zogby assesses the official US delegation to the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s (OSCE) “Conference on Anti-Semitism and Other Forms of Intolerance” convened last week in Cordoba, Spain:
“For the most part, the participants appeared to have been selected for reasons having more to do with domestic political patronage and ideological purity than with the purposes of the conference itself. Most were political conservatives, including the group’s lone Catholic clergyman. One of the delegation’s Jewish representatives has been known to argue vigorously against Israel becoming a ‘nation of all its citizens’ or a ‘democracy’ since that would ‘dilute’ the state. Another appeared to have been selected mainly because he switched his support from Gore in 2000 to Bush in 2004. And the delegation’s only Muslim representative was an individual who has recently aligned himself with the far-right against all of the US’s Muslim organizations arguing that he alone stands against terrorism, which, presumably, he believes, the others support.”
“Sacranie has been one of the most important advocates of radical Islam in the United Kingdom…. Among Sacranie’s actions: calling for censorship of religious speech, trying to change the plot of the action series 24, boycotting Holocaust Remembrance ceremonies, denying the existence of Islamic terrorists, interpreting the Bush administration’s true agenda as the ‘recolonization and the re-mapping of the Middle East’, and accusing Israel of genocide.”
Controversial plans to make incitement to religious hatred illegal are being unveiled by the government. The government says the legislation is a response to the concerns of faith groups, particularly Muslims.
“Is Turkey going Islamist?” Daniel Pipes want to know. “Is it on the road to implementing Islamic law, known as the Shari’a?”