Morocco is not as tolerant of minorities as it likes to think. There continue to be antisemitic incidents in Morocco and the government needs to do more to combat antisemitism and Holocaust denial, argues Freddy King in Morocco World News.
When applied to Morocco, it becomes
increasingly obvious that this country is performing poorly in
protecting the human rights of religious minorities and that any
Moroccan activist angry over Islamophobia abroad should be just as
equally stirred to action by Non-Islamophobia here in his homeland.
The violations to Article 16 (of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights) were covered in detail in my last article
and so I will refer readers to that for my opinions on Moroccan
marriage law and its violation of human rights by prohibiting
interreligious marriage between non-Muslim men and Muslim women.
Focusing more on violations of Articles 18 and 19, we see that there are
many. Available information
on Moroccan citizens shows an immeasurably low number of Bahá’í and
Shia Muslims, approximately 3,000 to 4,000 Jews and between 4,000 to
8,000 Christians.
In violation of Article 18, the latter
group has their freedom of worship severally restricted to house
churches as Moroccan Christians were discouraged from worshipping in
Catholic, Orthodox or Protestant denominations with international ties
because their presence in such institutions raises concerns that these
foreign religious groups are violating the law by proselytizing to
Moroccan nationals. Moroccan Christian residents have also reported
harassment and acts of intimidation from state authorities.
There are current violations of Article
19 as well that need to be made note of. The sale of Bibles in Arabic is
restricted to only a small number of booksellers and many were actually
seized by authorities under the auspices of anti-proselytizing laws.
Non-Sunni Muslim religious materials were also prohibited from being
distributed for free.
Although an important center of Jewish
history and culture, there have continued to be incidents of
anti-Semitism and the government has much progress to make on King
Mohamed VI’s commitment towards education of the holocaust and the combating of anti-Semitism.
Now, returning to our main question, why
should young Moroccan social justice activists take up the cause of
defending the human rights of non-Muslim Moroccans? First, Muslim
Americans and their organizations support many of the freedoms not
present in this country. However, the lack of protection of religious
minorities in Morocco, a close friend of the U.S., actually helps
perpetuate American fear of Muslims.
No comments:
Post a Comment