Secretary of State John Kerry should have extended his Nantucket vacation. That would have spared him and the nation from his embarrassing remarks praising Islam as a “peaceful religion based on the dignity of all human beings,” which he delivered just a day after ISIS released a video showing American journalist Steven Sotloff being beheaded.
Kerry was speaking at a ceremony honoring the State Department’s new special representative to Muslim communities, Shaarik Zafar. Rather than call on Muslim leaders around the world to publicly condemn ISIS in the strongest possible terms and do everything possible to counter ISIS’s recruitment campaign, ideology and financing, Kerry coddled them.
“I want to take advantage of this podium and of this moment to underscore as powerfully as I know how, that the face of Islam is not the butchers who killed Steven Sotloff. That’s ISIL,” Kerry said. He added that the real face of Islam is “one where Muslim communities are advocating for universal human rights and fundamental freedoms, including the most basic freedom to practice one’s faith openly and freely.”
Where exactly in Muslim-majority countries today is a non-Muslim free to practice his or her faith “openly and freely”? Ten out of the sixteen countries deemed of particular concern regarding their abuses of religious freedom are Muslim nations, according to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom’s 2014 Annual Report. The governments of these countries engage in or tolerate particularly severe violations of religious freedom, the report states.
The Commission makes policy recommendations to the President, the Secretary of State, and Congress. Evidently, Kerry has not read the Commission report’s findings regarding the state of religious freedom in Muslim-majority countries or did not take them seriously. It also appears that Kerry has not read or understood the implications of the Cairo Declaration of Human Rights, based on Sharia law, which is diametrically opposed to the principles underlying the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
The Universal Declaration’s organizing principle is that “[A]ll human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.”