Human rights activists in the West should focus their energies on putting US president George W Bush and British prime minister Tony Blair behind bars for "mass murder", a US-based political scientist told the "Reframing Islam" conference at NUI Galway yesterday.
In the four years since the September 11th attacks on the US, the West had killed 50 times as many Muslims as had been killed on 9/11, Prof Muqtedar Khan, assistant professor of political science and international relations at the University of Delaware, said.
Speaking in a round-table discussion hosted by the Irish Centre for Human Rights, Prof Khan said he had to challenge the "smug comfort" of some of the conference participants which had unleashed the "raw Muslim" in him.
It was "disgraceful" to hear talk of Muslims and human rights when Muslim human rights were being violated daily and there was an "appalling" fragility of democracy. Most of the victims of western attacks were women and children, and the US military did not even keep statistics in Iraq, he said.
Earlier, Prof William Schabas, director of the Irish Centre for Human Rights, said that human rights had been described as the value system for the 21st century in societies which had become very secularised. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as a codification, had drawn from different religions, yet religions themselves were also the repository for very archaic ideas.
Several speakers in the round-table discussion questioned the title of the conference and pointed out that the translation in Arabic referred to "another look" at Islam rather than a "reframing".
Dr Mehrangiz Kar, an Iranian lawyer who was imprisoned for four years as a result of her criticism of the Iranian legal system, said that a central issue in any such examination was the lack of freedom of expression, with even Islamic scholars being subject to serious constraints.