As I show in detail in my book The Complete Infidel’s Guide to Free Speech (and Its Enemies), for years now the Organization of Islamic Cooperation and the Pakistani government have been trying to intimidate the United Nations into adopting Sharia blasphemy laws under the guise of proscribing “hate speech” or “incitement to religious hatred.” They’ve actually had remarkable success, although they haven’t fully attained their goal yet.

In October 2009, the Obama administration joined Egypt in supporting a resolution in the UN’s Human Rights Council to recognize exceptions to the freedom of speech for “any negative racial and religious stereotyping” (a highly subjective category). Approved by the U.N. Human Rights Council, the resolution called on states to condemn and criminalize “any advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence.” Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton affirmed the Obama administration’s support for this on July 15, 2011, when she gave an address on the freedom of speech at an Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) conference on Combating Religious Intolerance. “Together, she said, “we have begun to overcome the false divide that pits religious sensitivities against freedom of expression and we are pursuing a new approach. These are fundamental freedoms that belong to all people in all places and they are certainly essential to democracy.”

But how could both religious sensitivities and freedom of expression be protected?

Clinton had a First Amendment to deal with, and so in place of legal restrictions on criminalization of Islam, she suggested “old-fashioned techniques of peer pressure and shaming, so that people don’t feel that they have the support to do what we abhor.” She held a lengthy closed-door meeting with OIC Secretary-General Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu in December 2011 to facilitate the adoption of measures that would advance the OIC’s anti-free speech campaign. But what agreements she and Ihsanoglu made, if any, have never been disclosed. Still, the specter of an American secretary of State conferring with a foreign official about how to restrict the freedom of speech in order to stifle communications deemed offensive to Muslims was, at the very least, chilling.

The idea of labeling those who are critical of Islam as terrorists is new. It’s a canny move, as it coalesces well with the Western political and media elites’ obsession with “right-wing extremism.” The forces pushing for authoritarian control over the freedom of speech are many and powerful, and those who understand the importance of the freedom of speech and dare to defend it are vanishingly few.

“UN: Pakistan suggests labeling of anti-Islam, anti-Muslim organisations as terrorists,” Ary News, March 27, 2020 (thanks to The Religion of Peace):