Dear reader, happy Blasphemy Day! Each year on the 30th of September we support human rights by refusing to accept the special privilege that religious authorities, all too often, seek to retain for themselves alone. This date is the anniversary of the publication of the cartoons in Danish newspapers that depicted Muhammad. Cartoons for which many Muslims around the world protested and rioted, among the more extreme though violence was on the agenda. Worldwide those extremists, who hold a bully's power over most other Muslims, murdered 137 innocent people who had no connection whatsoever to those cartoons. They justify their despicable barbarism in the same way that a rapist justifies his crime. “They were asking for it”.
This attitude is only further encouraged by the cowardly and shameful “Defamation of Religion”resolutions, in recent years, by the United Nations. Resolutions that have been used to give more credence to those primitive brutal regimes, particularly in the middle east. Those resolutions are contradictory though to the UN's 1948 “Universal Declaration of Human Rights”. Among those inalienable human rights that were enumerated in that declaration were freedom of religion and freedom of speech. The very rights that all anti-blasphemy laws subvert and destroy. By definition, laws against blasphemy criminalize the people's freedoms of expression and of religion.
So we use Blasphemy Day to raise awareness to the dangers of anti-blasphemy laws.
Copyright © 2010 Joshua Michail
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