Will Florida pastor be put on trial in Pakistan for insulting Islam in America?

It begins today with a story on Bare Naked Islam that comes out of Pakistan, a country where Christians have been imprisoned for life for committing blasphemy against Islam for merely touching the Qur’an with unwashed hands. It rides on the heels of other stories where enraged Muslims in the Middle East have gone on a rampage and burned down Christian churches and killed numerous Christian worshipers solely because they were insulted because a pastor named Terry Jones in Florida burned a copy of the Qur’an.

PAKISTAN wants INTERPOL to arrest qur’an-burning Florida pastor
DAWN –ISLAMABAD: The government told the Senate on Monday it would write to the Pope and Interpol for action against an American pastor over the burning of the holy Quran before the upper house unanimously passed a resolution calling upon the United States to bring the controversial preacher to justice.

Interior Minister Rehman Malik (photo below) informed the house after a fiery debate at the start of a new session that he was addressing the letters to Pope Benedict XVI and Interpol Secretary-General Ronald Nobel on the directive of President Asif Ali Zardari, who had himself called for UN action over the March 21 incident in his address to a joint sitting of parliament on March 22.

The letter to the Interpol chief, he said, would demand that international police treat the matter as case of “criminal violence” and take measures to guard against any future desecration or blasphemy.

The Senate resolution, which Leader of the House Nayyar Hussain Bokhari said was agreed to by all parliamentary groups, strongly condemned the incident and called upon the United States to take legal action against pastor Terry Jones, who oversaw the burning of the Quran at a church in Florida.

It also urged all Muslim countries to convey their outrage to the United States and asked the United Nations to take notice of what it called “heinous act”. Some two dozen senators from all parties spoke on the issue, some of them calling for a proactive role by Pakistan like proposing a special summit of the Organisation of Islamic Conference, and some others, particularly those from religious parties, holding the US government responsible for allowing this act to take place.

The fact that the government of Pakistan has called upon INTERPOL, the International Criminal Police Organization, to arrest Pastor Terry Jones on United States soil and bring him up on charges in Pakistan is a most important issue. It is important because the one-time Muslim occupant in the White House, Barack Hussein Obama, has issued an executive order granting INTERPOL total diplomatic immunity from our U.S. Constitution. See my blog post from Wednesday, December 23, 2009:

Obama has given Interpol unlimited authority over Americans on U.S. soil.

On December 16, 2009, Barack Hussein Obama issued Executive Order 13524 (full text below from the Federal Register) that has removed all restrictions previously in force and now gives Interpol complete immunity against U.S. citizens on U.S. soil. What this means is that Interpol now has greater authority over Americans within our own country than our own police agencies. The loss of U.S. Sovereignty means that with the removal of previous restrictions enacted by President Reagan with his Executive Order 12425 issued in 1983, Interpol now has diplomatic immunity and is not restrained by the power of the Bill of Rights or the United States Constitution.

[Federal Register: December 21, 2009 (Volume 74, Number 243)]
[Presidential Documents]
[Page 67803]
From the Federal Register Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]
[DOCID:fr21de09-119]
Presidential Documents
[[Page 67803]]
Executive Order 13524 of December 16, 2009
Amending Executive Order 12425 Designating
Interpol as a Public International Organization Entitled To Enjoy Certain Privileges, Exemptions, and Immunities

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, including section 1 of the International Organizations Immunities Act (22 U.S.C. 288), and in order to extend the appropriate privileges, exemptions, and immunities to the International Criminal Police Organization (INTERPOL), it is hereby ordered that Executive Order 12425 of June 16, 1983, as amended, is further amended by deleting from the first sentence the words ``except those provided by Section 2(c), Section3, Section 4, Section 5, and Section 6 of that Act''and the semicolon that immediately precedes them.

(Presidential Sig.)

THE WHITE HOUSE,

December 16, 2009.

[FR Doc. E9-30413
Filed 12-18-09; 8:45 am]

Billing code 3195-W0-P

It is important because the one-time Muslim Barack Hussein Obama signed into law his own version of a Hate Crime bill, a controversial bill that initially passed in the House on April 29, 2009 as H.R.1913 The Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009. By the time the bill was introduced in the Senate as S.909 now called The Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Prevention Act, introduced on April 28, 2009, a firestorm of protest had erupted and it faced certain defeat until some leftist Democrat tacked the entire bill on to  another bill, S. 1390: National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2010 which passed in the Senate on July 23, 2009. The controversy was primarily over the bill’s language that gave protection to every conceivable sexual deviancy that earned it the name 'The Pedophile Protection Act.' But the Democrat controlled Congress in 2009 was not concerned with Islamic extremism at the time so little discussion was given to the “religious” aspect of the hate crime bill. But laws against religious crimes of hate have already been passed in many European countries and in Austria, last year, an Austrian woman Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff was charged with a “hate crime”, specifically “incitement to hatred” after quoting passages from the Qur’an and as The International Free Press Society reported recently:

Law in Austria: Guilty for Questioning Islam
By A. Millar • on March 9, 2011

The European “elite” has increasingly asserted that any questioning of Islam is criminal.

A few weeks ago Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff was fined 480 Euros for the “denigration of religious teachings of a legally recognized religion in Austria.” In a three-part seminar Mrs. Sabaditsch-Wolff had referred to Islam’s prophet Mohammed’s marriage to Aisha. According to generally-accepted Islamic textual tradition, Aisha was six at the time of the marriage, which was consummated when she was nine. Mrs. Sabaditsch-Wolff asked rhetorically “if this does not constitute pedophilia, what does?”

Further down in this story comes this admission:

The case has aroused little publicity in Austria, and almost none in other EU member states. I have also not seen any articles on the subject in the British media.

Mrs. Sabaditsch-Wolff says that the Austrian press “gleefully reported that I have finally been convicted. Apart from one journalist, no one even questioned what this was about” – nor, apparently, how such a conviction might affect freedom of speech and freedom of the press inside Europe.

It was the Left-wing News magazine that had first approached the authorities to press for a prosecution. Mrs. Sabaditsch-Wolff believes the real target was the Austrian Freedom Party, as she had delivered the seminar to the party’s Freedom Education Institute. “The Muslim community in Austria has, apart from a very few comments, ignored me,” she says. “They were not the ones who reported me to the police. They could not have cared less about me.”

And concluding with this dire warning for American citizens, as well, since our own leftist news media seldom has anything to say about it:

Mrs. Sabaditsch-Wolff will appeal the verdict to Austria’s high court, and, if necessary, take her fight to the European Court of Human Rights. However, with her case having garnering so little attention, she is, she says, “desperately in need of donations.” The case has already cost 7,000 Euros, and it will take more to fight the decision. “If there are no funds that means I will have to stop [the appeal],” she says.

If this happens, a court in Austria will have set a precedent for the EU, and perhaps eventually even for the US: Question Islam, and you will be hauled into court, tried, and convicted.

But it appears that Obama’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement watchdogs are already keened into the subject. Read this story about what happened to Austrian citizen Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff when she traveled to the United States to give a lecture on Andrew Breitbart’s BIG PEACE.

Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff Hassled by U.S. Immigration Service
Posted by Clare M. Lopez Mar 7th 2011 at 2:32 pm
Andrew Breitbart Presents
BIG PEACE

Recently acquitted in Austria on charges of “incitement to hatred” stemming from comments made in a seminar series about Islam, Austrian citizen Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff now also has been subjected to lengthy questioning by the U.S. Immigration and Customs (ICE) service upon arrival in Miami, FL on 4 March 2011. Wolff, who lived in the U.S. as a child, now lives with her family in Vienna, Austria but returns regularly to the U.S. for visits. Although acquitted of “incitement to hatred,” Wolff was convicted in February 2011 of the lesser charge of “denigration of the teachings of a legally recognized religion” and assessed a fine. She is appealing.

When she arrived in Miami on 4 March 2011 en route to a West Palm Beach conference on shariah Islam at which she was to deliver a presentation, Wolff was pulled out of the line by ICE officers and subjected to lengthy pointed questioning. Her belongings also were thoroughly searched by hand. The questions focused on her purpose in visiting the U.S. but after the ICE officers had a look at the text of Wolff’s speech, which she showed them to substantiate her reasons for this trip, the questions from ICE officers became even more pointed and frankly inappropriate.

In addition to querying Wolff about her speech and the conference, the ICE officers wanted to know why she was traveling alone, where her husband was, how she earned a living, and most inappropriate of all, whether she were a “practicing Christian.” A Dutch colleague of Wolff’s, also to speak at the conference, was similarly subjected to lengthy and hostile questioning by ICE officials, both in Amsterdam and at JFK Airport upon arrival in the U.S. After looking at the text of his speech, one of the ICE officials in Amsterdam flatly told the Dutch citizen that his activism against shariah Islam “is discrimination.”

Both Wolff and her colleague ultimately were released and permitted to continue their travel in the U.S., but were sent off with the explicit warning to Wolff that she should “tone down the rhetoric.”

While ICE and other Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials have the legal duty to scrutinize would-be visitors to the U.S. at points of entry, what appears to be gratuitous harassment on grounds apparently related to issues of free speech is inappropriate. Wolff was convicted in Austria under laws that are incompatible with the right to free speech enshrined in the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment. No American could ever be convicted in the U.S. for “denigration of the teachings of a legally recognized religion.” Belief systems, Ideology, and religious teachings are not off-limits from criticism in this country. Not yet anyway.

Yeah, not yet anyway. So maybe Pastor Terry Jones has something to worry about. With INTERPOL granted diplomatic immunity on U.S. soil by one-time Muslim Barack Hussein Obama, who also signed into law our own hate crimes bill, as writer Clare M. Lopez says in her closing comments:

The United States is the last true bastion of protected free speech in the world. We cannot allow the precious freedoms we hold dear to be eroded under the assault of an alien legal system that would replace them with a totalitarian world order. The ICE treatment of Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolf and her Dutch colleague should sound a warning to all of us that shariah can happen here, too, if we let it.

Hopefully, the recent ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court that held that the radical hate group in the Kansas-based Westboro Baptist Church had a constitutional right to free speech when they protested military funerals, carrying signs filled with hate that read "Thank God For Dead Soldiers", will somehow protect the free speech of Pastor Terry Jones. But what is to stop INTERPOL from kidnapping Pastor Jones and secretly transporting him to Pakistan to stand trial?