Following the uproar over the threatened burning of the Quran by a small Florida church, a leading international Islamic body said Thursday that the United Nations should outlaw “all forms of offense against religions.”
“The Florida Dove World Outreach Center Church’s plan to burn copies of the Holy Quran on September 11 … requires immediate action to outlaw all acts of defamation of religions and religious sanctities,” the Morocco-based Islamic Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (ISESCO) said in a communique.
“It is a blot on humanity that such discriminatory attack against Islam and Islamic holy sites is continuing in the absence of deterrent legal measures, local and international.”
ISESCO, an arm of the 56-nation Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), called on the U.N. “to issue an international law criminalizing all forms of offense against religions under any circumstances.”
Dove World pastor Terry Jones on Thursday afternoon said he was canceling the planned burning of Qurans, an announcement that topped news bulletins around the world and made front page headlines in newspapers from Jakarta to Karachi to Riyadh on Friday.
Jones linked the decision to back down to an alleged agreement that the controversial planned Islamic center and mosque near Ground Zero would be relocated.
“The American people do not want the mosque there and of course Muslims do not want us to burn the Quran,” he said. “The imam [Feisal Abdul Rauf] has agreed to move the mosque, we have agreed to cancel our event on Saturday, and on Saturday I will be flying up there to meet with him.”
Organizers of the so-called Park51 project quickly denied that any agreement had been made, however: “It is untrue that Park51 is being moved,” they said in a statement posted online. “The project is moving ahead as planned. What is being reported in the media is false.”
The Florida Muslim cleric who mediated with Jones said later that the agreement was merely for a meeting between Jones and Rauf. In turn, Jones said he had been “lied” to and was rethinking his decision to cancel.
ISESCO’s call was an expected opening salvo in a fresh push by the OIC to use both the Quran-burning threat and the Manhattan mosque dispute to move forward its decade-old campaign to get the U.N. to outlaw what it calls “religious defamation” worldwide. . . . . . .
Leave a Reply