Intro
This entire entry was taken from here: https://www.jihadwatch.org/2019/10/the-ahmadis-the-jihad-against-free-speech.
The data
“The Western leaders make me laugh by maintaining that they cannot put restrictions on newspapers and freedom of expression,” stated the Ahmadi “caliph,” Hadrat Mirza Masroor Ahmad, in London on February 10, 2006. This crackpot demonstrated how the small, caliphate-dreaming Ahmadi cult has joined other Muslims in demanding Islamic censorship — another fact that belies the Ahmadis’ fraudulently cultivated “moderate” reputation.
Ahmad spoke during a series of February-March 2006 London addresses following global Muslim outrage after the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten in December 2005 published “foul caricatures” of Islam’s prophet Muhammad. Later compiled in an online book, the speeches documented how he found bewildering the defenses of the cartoons in Denmark and beyond as free speech, given Holocaust-denial prohibitions in Western countries like Denmark. The “vulgar expression about any sacred person of any religion does not constitute freedom in any way at all,” he stated.
In a March 29, 2008 London address contained in another online compendium of Ahmad’s statements, he reproached Western societies for “immoral acts” such as the Jyllands-Posten cartoons. These cartoons “ridicule founders of religions and prophets and make mockery of their teachings and scriptures.” Earlier in February, he had condemned the West for “swiftly abandoning religion” and said it was “demolishing moral values in every field in the name of freedom.” This “mischief is let loose that makes the filth of their minds and remoteness from God evident, and demonstrates their prejudice and malice against Islam.”
“Everything has a limit and some code of conduct,” including journalism, Ahmad concluded, as he called for suppressing such criticism of Islam, in line with similar calls from the Organization of the Islamic Conference, now known as the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC). He approved the fact that the 57-member state (including “Palestine”) OIC, pursuant to a decades-long international censorship campaign, “has said that the Western countries will be pressured to apologize as well as to legislate against offending Prophets of God.” Given Muslim rioting worldwide in response to Denmark’s free speech, he presented himself as a protector of law and order, warning that if Islam’s critics “do not abstain, then world peace could not be guaranteed.” Similarly, a Danish Ahmadi wrote in a February 2006 edition of a local newspaper that the cartoons were “simply a dirty and childish act,” such that “to stem disorder it is required to apply” Denmark’s anti-defamation law.
Ahmad returned to his Islamic inquisition in 2012, following more international Muslim anger in response to the online American video Innocence of Muslims, as well as cartoons mocking Muhammad in France’s Charlie Hebdo satire magazine. Another online book collection of his speeches contained an introduction that condemned an “international conspiracy against Islam and its Holy Founder.” This involved “vulgar language, obscene descriptions, distortion of the teachings of Islam and the noble character of the Holy Prophet Muhammad” and “negative propaganda, blasphemous criticism.”
In a September 21, 2012 sermon in a Surrey, England, Ahmadi mosque, Ahmad once again subordinated critical discussion to Islamic law’s (sharia) blasphemy prohibitions. “Laws made by God are flawless. Do not consider, therefore, your man-made laws to be perfect,” he stated with unquestioning fidelity to Islamic orthodoxy. By contrast, the “law regarding freedom of speech is not a Divine scripture.”
Correspondingly, Ahmad called for legal action. “While a law for freedom of speech exists, neither in any country nor in the UN Charter do we find a law that states that no person will be allowed the freedom to hurt the religious sentiments of others or insult the holy personages of other religions.” “It is necessary for world peace that this is made a part of the UN peace charter,” otherwise there would result a “lava of hatred to erupt and the gulf between countries and religions to increasingly widen.”
During his first visit to the European Parliament in Brussels, Belgium, on December 3-4, 2012, he likewise advocated “policies that establish and protect mutual respect.” Thus “hurting the sentiments of others or causing them any type of harm should be outlawed.” This reflected that “Islam teaches that only those who use their tongues [emphasis added] and hands to spread injustice and hatred deserve to be punished.”
Ahmad in his Surrey address appealed to Muslims worldwide to support this legal campaign, as Muslims “could bring about a revolution in the world” with “laws pertaining to respecting religious sentiments within countries.” Governments in Muslim-majority countries should tell the “world that according to the teachings of the Holy Qur’an, playing with the religious sentiments of others or to try to dishonor the prophets of God is a major crime and major sin.” In tandem, “all of the Muslim lawyers of the world should join together and form a petition” advocating blasphemy punishments.
Global Muslim solidarity, while appealing to Ahmad in his Surrey remarks, had ominous implications for non-Muslims:
Muslims are the second greatest power of the world in terms of population and religion. Were they to abide by the commandments of Allah the Almighty they could become the greatest force in every sense. In such an instance, the anti-Islamic forces would never even dare contemplating or perpetrating such heart-rending acts.
Ahmad stressed that opposition to criticism of Islam should remain nonviolent, for “[i]t is completely contrary to the teachings of Islam to attack innocent people.” Earlier during his October 22, 2008 House of Commons address he had argued that “hatred spurs certain extremist Muslims into committing ‘un-Islamic’ deeds,” violence which serves as precisely his justification for censorship. “If our Muslim leaders had made robust efforts then the public would not react inappropriately, as is currently occurring in Pakistan and in other countries,” he stated in Surrey.
Yet contradictorily, Ahmad presented blasphemy’s effect upon Muslims in decidedly zealous, militant tones. A Muslim “is prepared to give up his or her life and be slain for the respect and honor of the Prophet.” Accordingly, Muslims “prostrate before God the Exalted and pray that may He take revenge from these wrongdoers. May they become a sign of admonishment that will remain a lesson until the end of time.”
Following their caliph, American Ahmadi leaders have promoted various stratagems to repress verbal attacks upon Islam, even in a land whose free speech protections are among the most robust in the world. Qasim Rashid has presented to this author and others the absurd legal analysis that long-overturned United States Supreme Court decisions (e.g. Schenk v. United States) could prohibit expression such as Terry Jones’ 2011 Quran burning. Like former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Harris Zafar, meanwhile, has attempted to shame Islam-critical “enemies of peace.” Zafar laments the fact that some people “claim that an individual’s privilege to say whatever they want is more important than the higher principle of uniting people.”
University of California-Los Angeles law professor Amjad Mahmood Khan also appeared to follow Clinton’s playbook during a 2015 address, while questionably asserting that Islamic doctrine favored free speech. “Differences of opinion are a blessing among my people,” the Ahmadi spokesman Khan cited Muhammad saying. When facing verbal attacks in seventh-century Arabia, he “bore this vile speech with patience and forbearance and he never sanctioned violence or prosecution for objectionable speech,” a claim that might surprise various dead poets in Islamic canons.
Nonetheless, the “Quran repeatedly discourages unseemly speech intended to sow discord,” Khan warned. Therefore
speech that is solely intended to ridicule the prophet and hurt the sentiments of over 1.5 billion Muslims must be exercised with caution and restraint. Of course the speech is unrestricted, not in the same way as it is in the Islamic world, here with our First Amendment, and as a lawyer I swear to protect those vital constitutional safeguards. But there still is a moral duty to condemn speech designed to hurt religious personages.
Past statements by Khan and other Ahmadi leaders undercut the liberal message of the February 26, 2016 launch at Washington, DC’s Rayburn House Office Building of the Ahmadi True Islam online public relations campaign. While addressing the audience, he lamented survey data showing American Muslim support for blasphemy restrictions. Contrasting with Rashid’s quoted online support for True Islam, Ahmadi representatives Amjad Chaudhry and Bashir Shams rejected before this author Rashid’s censorship views, with the latter saying “we believe in writing.”
Nevertheless, Ahmadi speech has often been merely another means of silencing critics such as the late (d. 2010) German scholar of Islam Hiltrud Schröter, author of a 2002 book on the Ahmadis. She discussed how the German Ahmadi community “attempted in various ways to silence me, for example through defamation and false assertions” online. According to these representations, she “worked unscientifically, is crazy, and has delusions.”
American anti-sharia activist Pamela Geller likewise condemned Ahmadi advocates in 2014. “These ‘moderate’ Muslims smear, defame and attack counter jihadists like Robert Spencer and me” and “provide essential cover for the global jihad,” she wrote, “so color me skeptical.” Ironically, “US leaders of the Ahmadi community carry water for the same Islamic supremacists who would cheerfully slit their throats if they were back in Pakistan.”
Yet the strained Ahmadi relationship with free speech makes sense given the Ahmadi faith’s hollowness. Strange and not-so-true Ahmadi beliefs previously examined in this series concerning matters including caliphates, Islamic history, Israel, Jesus, marriage, sex, and the West can no more withstand open debate than can the views of the late Lyndon LaRouche. While Ahmadis deserve the same sympathy as other victims of oppression in Muslim-majority societies worldwide, Ahmadis’ own antagonism towards liberty is just one more reason not to take the Ahmadis seriously.
