This comes from the Working Class Patriot channel on YouTube. This channel is solidly anti-immigrant and anti-immigration, and posts messages from Tory MP Robert Jenrick and former Reform MP Rupert Lowe. Apart from demanding the mass deportation of illegal immigrants, Lowe also wants the privatisation of the NHS, but doesn’t want it replaced by the American system. Whatever way he wants it privatised, it’s still going to leave people paying for their medical care with the consequent increase in costs and poverty, as well as being denied it if they are unable to pay.
But this time the two have a point. They have been alarmed by the attempt by the Crown Prosecution Service to prosecute a man for burning a Quran outside the Turkish embassy. The man was arrested by two South Asian looking officers, and the CPS then charged him with ‘harassing… the institution of Islam’. A day ago Lowe posted on the Patriot’s channel that he had ‘tabled a motion in Parliament defending freedom of speech – including the right to reject, mock, or criticise religious ideas, Islam included.’ And yesterday Jenrick also posted that he had written this letter to the CPS criticising their decision.
According to a later post by Jenrick, the CPS have dropped the charge, but unfortunately are seeking to prosecute the man under a more suitable one.
Patrick West, one of the inmates at the Speccie, posted this piece on the Spectator website giving a few more details of the affair and stating very clearly that blasphemy laws have no place in modern Britain and are leading to fears that Britain is becoming an Islamic theocracy.
‘It shouldn’t be illegal to burn a Quran
✍️ Patrick West https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/i…
We now live in a country where, once more, it appears to be a crime to commit blasphemy. This is the inevitable and justifiable conclusion many have made following the news yesterday that a man who burnt a copy of the Koran was charged with ‘harassment, alarm or distress’ against ‘the religious institution of Islam’. The charge made against Hamit Coskun, who allegedly performed the act outside the Turkish Consulate in London in February, is thought to be the first time anybody has been prosecuted for harassing an ‘institution’, in the form of Islam, under the Public Order Act. Following a backlash to the news, the Crown Prosecution Service has since sought to clarify that the wording of the charge was ‘incorrectly applied’. It has now ‘substituted a new charge.’ The National Secular Society has been volubly alarmed at the case, suggesting it could presage ‘the reinstatement of an offence of blasphemy in English law by the back door’. Others have raised concerns to the same effect. Akua Reindorf KC said that the original charge was ‘tantamount’ to blasphemy, an act abolished as a common law offence in England and Wales in 2008. Comedian and GB News presenter Leo Kearse articulated a vein of popular disquiet more tersely: ‘Is Britain now an Islamic theocracy?’’
There have been a series of attempts by Muslims to introduce laws against blasphemy against Islam, beginning with the demonstrations against Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses in the 1980s. The last one was by the Birmingham MP Tahir Ali, who wanted to introduce a law against the desecration of the sacred texts of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. These attempts follow the blasphemy laws of Muslim countries such as Pakistan, which are used to persecute non-Muslims and Muslims belonging to heretical sects, such as the Shia and Ahmadis.
The framing of the charge against Hamit for ‘harassment, alarm or distress’ also follows the rhetoric of Muslim firebrands that secularism and the criticism of Islam constitute ‘terrorism to Muslims’. A few years ago there were placards held by demonstrators at a Muslim protest denouncing ‘man-made law’ in such terms. And way back in 1990 Kalim Saddiqui, one of the imams organising the protests against Rushdie in Bradford, was filmed by the Beeb in his mosque preaching that ‘Britain is a monstrous killing machine and killing Muslims comes very easily to them.’ When Saddiqui was challenged over this bigoted, sectarian and racist statement, he whined about the publication of the Verses being some kind of preparation for ‘a holocaust of Muslims’.
Well, it’s 35 years later, Saddiqui boy, and no such genocide has occurred. But there has been mass rioting in places such as Pakistan over people in the West burning the Quran, such as when a bloke in Sweden did it outside the Turkish embassy in protest at the Turks voting against admitting Sweden to the EU. It looks very much to me that a Muslim organisation was involved in the drafting of the charge against Hamit, and attempts to bring that and similar charges against people who have supposedly desecrated the Quran, like the 15 year old autistic schoolboy in Keithley, are motivated by the authorities’ fears that similar rioting could break out against the UK.
Such blasphemy laws should not be tolerated. Jenrick and Lowe are right in that no religious or ideology should be exempt from criticism or mockery, and that attempts to make them so are attacks on free speech.
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