Below is an intervention given by Henrik Clausen for Bürgerbewegung Pax Europa Austria at last week’s OSCE/HDIM conference in Warsaw, on September 27, during Working Session 12 “Fundamental freedoms I (continued), including freedom of thought, conscience, religion or belief”.
Many thanks to Vlad Tepes for uploading this video:
Below is the prepared text for Mr. Clausen’s intervention:
Henrik Clausen, BPE Austria
Freedom of belief, and the freedom not to have one, is vital to our freedom, and must be defended against all threats to it, in order to guarantee our security.
Then, we need to differentiate between religious and political systems. A political system is not a religion, nor is it a body of law. Seeking to impose certain political or legal systems are not religious activities, they are political, and opposing this does not violate the freedom of religion.
Now, it happens that there exists an Apartheid-style legal system that discriminates people according to their religion, opposes equal rights for women, and even dictates capital punishment for apostasy. This legal system is Sharia, and is at odds with democracy and human rights (ECHR 2003).
The Islam-related security problems we are currently witnessing relate directly to attempts to introduce Sharia law in our free societies, by peaceful or violent means. This can be dealt with under the law. A best-practice example of this is how the US tried and convicted many organisations related to the Holy Land Foundation.
It is the view of BPE Austria that we can resolve our Islam-related security problems by refusing any attempts to introduce Sharia into our societies. This will protect freedom, women and human rights, including the right of Muslims to practice a purely religious Islam.
BPE Austria thus recommends:
- That the OSCE guidelines on freedom of religion be amended to clarify the distinction between religious and political activities.
- That OSCE pS actively identify Islamic organisations that promote Sharia.
- That organisations promoting Sharia should be considered political, and therefore be denied religious status.
For links to previous articles about the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, see the OSCE Archives.
The difficulty of course being that there is no such thing as a purely religious Islam. Sharia and all its murderous practices are woven into Islam. Divorcing one from the other is as impossible as extracting all the warp threads from a fabric and expecting the weft threads to resemble a cloth.
Islam isn’t really a religion in the way that the rest of the world thinks of “religion”. It’s a dogmatic belief system akin to Marxism, with a godhead stuck on as an afterthought.
Islam is a truly devious invention, created to forge a consensus among warring Bedouin tribes who made their living robbing caravans. That’s what Islam continues to do: it sucks the value out of other cultures’ inventions and throws away the people who invented them. It has never evolved past the barbarian<->slave culture.
To this day, Arabs consider work dishonorable; they have to hire outsiders to do their work for them. Because of all the cousin marriage, the Arab IQ in general has fallen, though not so much among those who manage to bring in new DNA.
Dymphna-
I like to describe Islam as a total system for life with a religious component.
It is truly devious how it spreads via poverty, misery, and ignorance, then continues to perpetuate all three trends.
The Gulf states would be nothing without Western expats. However, we would be even farther along if the West had colonized Saudi and the other oilfields during 1945-48. Wahabbism would currently be an afterthought, rather than a global plague.
I’ve been advocating this approach for quite a while.
Provided there is sufficient political and legal resolve, this will allow the closure of mosques that teach Sharia, and the conviction, revocation of citizenship for sedition and treason, and swift deportation of immigrants who advocate and practice it. All natural born citizens who convert to Islam AND advocate and practice Sharia will also be charged for sedition and treason, and severe criminal and civil penalties applied.
The result will be a form of Islam that is basically moralistic and powerless to prescribe violence against what it deems as offenses; in other words, a religion as ought to be properly understood. In the long term, the survivability of this neutralized Islam is in doubt, but law-abiding citizens who love live will not miss it one bit.
It is impossible to remove the political parts from Islam. It is essential part of it.
I’d say the burden of proof for a purely religious Islam lies on Islamic scholars and leaders. If they cannot bring forth a non-political Islam, everyone else can reasonably assume that it does not exist, and act accordingly.
You nailed it! The Gordian Knot must be cut, that’s all.
I could be wrong but I think Sharia is man-made law–I once heard a Muslim say this in an interview.
According to Mr. Khan of DNC fame (who teaches the orthodox Islamic position), Sharia is of divine origin and is above all other legal systems.
That’s why Sharia must be outlawed.
Islam is all about exploiting and profiting from us infidels.
Their extreme poverty or extreme wealth, depending on how one see it, are irrelevant.
What is relevant is the fact that they are extremely intolerant of any of us infidels
(who have to live among them out of no choice) who may have no more money or no longer have much money to give it to them.
Even though their ideology is mainly about accumulating more money for their ummah, one wonder why so many of their ummah are still living or appear to be living in poverty.
Their ideology fails in so many ways and tend to infect anyone that have to live under their inferior Islamic system.