We Need a UN Resolution on "Insult Violence"

Clashes between demonstrators in troops outside US Embassy in Cairo back in March 2012. Photo by Gigi Ibrahim.

I wrote of the concept of "incitement of imminent violence" and the UN Resolution 16/18 co-sponsored at the Human Rights Council that explicitly makes the distinction between "incitement of imminent violence" and insulting hate speech, and urges tolerance without accepting the Islamic notion of "defamation of religions", which has formed the basis for a number of resolutions passed at the UN resisted by the West as antithetical to free speech and tantamount to a "global blasphemy law".

Now some of the Arabic states are calling for a return of the concept of "defamation of religions" because of the wave of violence sparked by a crude anti-Muslim film made in the US, which has already been used to justify the assassination of our ambassador and Embassy staff in Libya and now has led to the deaths of four protesters in Yemen.

This anger and the calls by Egyptian President Morsi to take legal action against the film-makers are stampeding nervous liberals into abandoning First Amendment values, like Anthea Butler, assistant professor of anthropology, who really thinks that the hate video producer should be arrested . And we'll see more of it, and in fact we already saw a lot of it, first in the ill-advised statement from the US Embassy in Cairo which was indeed apologetic in over-empathizing with the notion of "hurt feelings".

There's confusion about what "incitement to imminent violence" means, because many hearing this unfamiliar term that actually comes from US Supreme Court decisions think that it means that if you insult somebody in your hate video, they get to beat or kill you - and therefore your incendiary video is the problem if it "incited" that sort of violence

That's not the legal meaning or jurisprudence, however, as it is not "imminent"; "imminent incitement" means that the video producer would have to incite others to hurt or kill the targets of his hate, not that the insulted are inflamed enough to kill people. The anti-Muslim video in fact doesn't call for any harm or murder or even discrimination -- instead, it seeks to discredit the faith by ridiculing the Prophet Mohammed and trying to portray this religious figure and the precepts of the religion as not practicing the pure ideals they claim by implying they are pedophiles and womanizers.

As atrocious as this movie is, it would never qualify in a US court as speech not protected by the First Amendment, and even if lodged as a case with the UN Human Rights Committee, which would look at it in terms of Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, would it be characterized as meeting those existing tests -- unless the case became hopelessly politicized. And indeed, it might. But even in Europe, which has lower standards for free speech and will prosecute hate speech, the film would not likely meet the test. Google, Inc.  -- which is our new world court on adjudication of free speech issues, unfortunately, by dint of its sheer power of platform -- has removed the video in Muslim countries such as Egypt and Libya, where there are blasphemy laws, either pre-emptively for fear of association with violence or at the request of governments, but it hasn't removed it here in the US or in Europe, even with angry Muslim populations.

Even so, there is going to be a tidal wave of political correctness around this issue, given the dramatic consequences said to come from this movie. So I think we need to fight back if we care about human rights.

Accordingly, I think the West has to immediately start calling for an "insult violence" resolution at the UN to counter the "defamation of religions" resolution sure to come. The compromise and careful calibrations didn't work -- or at least didn't work fast enough -- from 16/8. The earnest NGO types and State Department liberals who pushed this resolution with Egypt hoped that they could substitute some authoritarian states' yen for legal prosecution with softer educational and political actions that are not operative or binding.

Yet as multicultural as the California school system no doubt is; as oppressive of hate speech as the average college campus is; as coercive as the average work place speech code is in many places in America, this hate film still managed to get started by a Coptic emigre (who, by the way, tried to displace blame for the film on the Jews, accomplishing a double whammy with his hatred.) The hate film occurred in the interstices of all the real-life constraints against hate speech in the home school, campus, and workplace, and thrived in the global commons of Youtube.

And really, leading by example, pious statements by leaders, education, promotion of alternatives, peace-making -- these are all good, but are not really the issue.

The problem is that for a hardcore subset of male Muslims, insult to their revered religious leader and precepts is intimately linked to their concept of not only noble manhood, but aggressive machismo -- it's even worse than insulting the mother of a Latin American or Russian with crude swear words. They allow themselves to be insulted to the maximum -- and are willing to kill for it. That's why I don't think we can let their hurt feelings be our guide -- if their capacity for reaction to insult goes as far as murder. When the US Cairo Embassy invoked "hurt feelings" and the need to accommodate them, without even a "nothing justifies violence" at the time of the statement or later (that had to come from Washington), it opened up the Pandora's box to endless justification of violence.

To be sure, there is another Supreme Court notion, "fighting words," and by some lights, the video might be construed as "fighting words" meant to invoke rage, even if not constituting "incitement to imminent violence." But "fighting words" has a long and complicated history of adjudication, and it's worth thinking about whether insult to religion, which isn't made face to face or in a real life setting, but is only made on social media, really can be acceptable. After all, you don't have to watch the film? And our government and mainstream networks obviously aren't showing it. Although the incitement, hatred and "fighting words" may all be authentic, they are not in a real-life direct social context -- they are mediated on the Internet. Can't we concede that the virtual is less than the real, or at least, reaffirm that virtual insult shouldn't justify real murder?

We should focus rather on disassociation from hate speech, condemnation of it as intolerant as a moral rather than legal matter, and emphasize that freedom of speech and freedom of religion are the two pillars of a civil society that will ensure that intolerance doesn't reach the level of discrimination, harm or even murder.

But we're going to have to go further if we're going to take an erosion of the past consensus now and a return to "defamation of religions" or a global blasphemy regime maintained even by Google. The reality is 16/18 will never work, and the exchange between Obama and the Egyptian president lets us know it. Fearful of US withdrawal of aid, the Egyptian leadership improved their posture 180 degrees after the murder of our diplomats and began to make more pronounced statements of condemnation of violence. But their hearts aren't in it, as we can see by their call for legal means to stop the hate video.

That's why we need  a resolution that very squarely calls for condemnation of "insult violence" -- just exactly as we have had attempts at resolutions, and at least language of questioning during treaty body examinations about "honour killings" and crimes of bias -- racist and homophobic violence. Some years ago, the Netherlands and other Western countries attempted a resolution to condemn "honour killings," the murder of women believed to have become impure from adultery, or even simply going about with bare heads or without proper male escorts. This resolution was a tough sell, especially with the OIC but given how widespread this practice is in South Asia, i.e. with the bride burnings in India, but it had some support. International human rights groups and women's rights groups adopted this cause heartily, no religious belief about women's purity could trump the precept against injury and murder that are in the commandments of all religions.

Recently, the US has made gay rights a center of US international human rights policy and promoted it at the UN, particularly in light of crimes of violence against LGBTIQ people.

In the same way, we have to apply the same human rights logic to the problem of "insult violence" and not shirk our duty to universality by fears of political correctness due to the nature of the insulting media content.

Nothing justifies violence. Nothing! And it needs a resolution to spell it out: even very great sentiments of insult, caused by hate media, cannot justify it.

We need to call the bluff of these easily-insulted male extremists. Their aggravated and often artificially contrived rage reactions cannot drive foreign policy or international human rights definitions.

We already sense that there is something contrived about this, when we see the attacks on the Libyan US Embassy seem coordinated and organized, not spontaneous from an irate mob. How is it that countries without a lot of Internet penetration, with a fair amount of Internet control, can suddenly invoke viral videos as a reason for killing people? The calls of imams at Friday prayers were the kind of "incitement of imminent violence" that in fact should be prosecuted and recognized as just that sort of incitement intended by Resolution 16/18 -- they incited believers directly to go attack foreign properties and foreigners themselves over this indignity against their religion. So if we see a submission of the American hate video to the UN Human Rights Committee for a determination, then a counter-case against the imams who sicced mosque-goers on the American Embassy has to go in the next day. Let's all be lawyers.

The resolution on "insult violence" has to begin by acknowledging the goals of 16/18, acknowledge that *if* there is "incitement to imminent violence" then authorities have a duty to act, i.e. by removing a video from Youtube. But in cases where the offensive media does not meet that test in a democratic state under the rule of law, then extrajudicial means -- murder and mayhem -- CANNOT be sanctioned.

Any effort to keep meeting the injured but not innocent half way with any kind of speech curbs MUST be seen in exactly this light: sanctioning extrajudicial means of abuse and killing to address sentiments roused by hate.

And that can't be in an international human rights regimen. That cannot be. Human rights advocates need to keep their heads on straight about this.

The "insult violence" resolution has to lay out very clearly that injury and killing as a response to feelings of insult is not acceptable and is sanctioned under the same principles that underpin all human rights treaties. The state has a positive obligation to ensure that non-state actors do not subject others to extrajudicial harm and killing over insult. The state itself cannot aid and abet in the injury or killing of people over the issue of insult as a "negative right".

I'm well aware that the Obama Administration will be likely to take up a resolution on "insult violence".  The political correctness and allergy to hardcore human rights advocacy there runs too deep. It might take the Romney Administration coming in to get such a defensive and pre-emptive operation going to foil the "defamation of religions" revival surely coming. But other countries like Canada or Australia might pick this notion up, or even the states where this violence is occuring like Bangladesh.

Shy of a resolution, there are other things states can do -- they can ask the Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial killings or the Special Rapporteur on racism or the Special Rapporteur on freedom of expression -- or all three, jointly -- to report on "insult violence" around the world and see if they can justifiably tie it to actual products of freedom of expression, and see if other existing remedies like removal of content or opportunities for alternative content or statements by political leaders might not be deployed shy of angry, murderous mobs.

The social base for this "insult violence" resolution is actually larger than some might think.

The reality is, most Muslims don't riot and scale Embassy walls and burn buildings and kill people. In Libya, people stood with signs saying they were sorry about the attack on the US Embassy. No, there is only a tiny minority of extremists who don't represent their religion or people, by and large. They have help getting insulted and riled up, and are usually involved in other terror activities and aren't just indignant townspeople.

After all, last week, before 9/11 and this evidently planned attack in Libya and the other spontaneous mob outburts that had a lot of help, anyone could have said 16/18 was working. A disabled young Christian girl in Pakistan who had inadvertently insulted the Koran -- or been set up by a corrupt cleric to seem to be insulting the Koran, it's not clear -- was first jailed and mistreated, but then released as judges, lawyers, human rights groups, ordinary people began to object. There are a lot of "blasphemy" cases in Pakistan, and this case, which was such an abuse of the concept even in its own terms, was getting people to question the notion, which is often used merely to settle scores. Everybody was making progress on rolling back some of the awful prosecutorial zeal around blasphemy in Pakistan -- and now this.

But we can keep fighting back and keep pointing out that when extremists and opportunists riot, often demonstrators themselves are the victims, as they have been in Afghanistan where they have been beaten or shot dead by police when rioting against the burning of the Koran.

"Insult Violence" has to stop. It has led to the harm of children such as this disabled Christian girl; it has led to the killing of our ambassador and staff in Libya; it has led to the killing of frou demonstrators in Yemen -- and many, many more, notably in Afghanistan. States much get together and sanction it, and work toward stopping it, just as they work toward stopping honour killings, hate crimes against gays, or extrajudicial killings by any persons.