03-06-2025
Blasphemy laws against Islam are here, but nobody in Westminster will admit it
Last November, the social justice activist Titania McGrath tweeted that 'the assassination attempt against Donald Trump proves irrefutably that he is guilty of inciting violence'. Most people would have instantly understood this remark to be satirical, yet the judge in a much-publicised court case this week appears to have adopted Titania's logic with chilling precision.
On Monday, Hamit Coskun was convicted of a public order offence for burning his own copy of the Quran in a peaceful protest outside the Turkish consulate. He was interrupted when an angry member of the public slashed at him with a knife and a passing delivery man kicked him while he lay on the floor. Channelling Titania in his ruling, District Judge John McGarva claimed that Coskun's conduct was proven to be disorderly 'by the fact that it led to serious public disorder involving him being assaulted by two different people'.
While reading the judgment in this case, those of us who still care about free speech will hear multiple alarm bells clanging all at once. Leaving aside the sinister suggestion that a victim of violence is to blame for being attacked, the judge also stated that 'the defendant positioned himself outside the Turkish embassy, a place where he must have known there would be Muslims'. Given that Coskun had said that his protest was against 'the Islamist Government of Erdogan who has made Turkey a base for radical Islamists and is trying to establish a Sharia regime', it is difficult to imagine a more suitable location.
Coskun's alleged crime is 'disorderly behaviour within the hearing or sight of a person likely to be caused harassment, alarm or distress', motivated by 'hostility towards members of a religious group, namely followers of Islam'. That his style of protest had the potential to cause offence is beyond doubt, with his cries of 'Quran is burning' and 'f--- Islam'. But if provocative language is now illega l, then one wonders how the major protests we've seen on the streets of London this year haven't all culminated in mass arrests.
We need to be honest about what this conviction represents: blasphemy law by the back door. The creed of multiculturalism is a keystone of the intersectional ideology that has infected so many of our major institutions. The police and the judiciary are far from immune, which is presumably why, in the absence of authentic blasphemy codes, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) had attempted to invent one of its own. The CPS had originally charged Coskun with intent to cause 'harassment, alarm or distress' against 'the religious institution of Islam'. It was eventually forced to change the wording to comply with the law.
This is a standard symptom of ideological capture. The trans charity Stonewall, for instance, has been found to have misrepresented the Equality Act as it 'would prefer it to be, rather than the law as it is'. The College of Policing – the body responsible for the training of officers in England and Wales – has ignored demands from successive home secretaries to stop the recording of 'non-crime hate incidents', and has even shirked a ruling from the High Court that found the practice to be a clear infringement on free speech.
The problems of two-tier justice and the ongoing state encroachment on free speech will not disappear until we tackle the two major sources of the problem. The first is the ideological bias that has become embedded in the police and the CPS. The second is the various 'hate speech' laws on the statue books that no government has yet had the courage to repeal. Why are people still being prosecuted for 'grossly offensive' comments, when such a notion is hopelessly subjective and impossible to define? Why are there proscriptions against the causing of 'alarm' or 'distress', when these are inevitable aspects of life? Why, for that matter, is 'hate' considered illegal at all? The state is seemingly under the delusion that it can legislate away our hardwired human emotions.
Ultimately, no citizen should be arrested for a peaceful protest in which they burn their own book. That it was a copy of the Quran should be beside the point. In a free society, no belief-system should be exempt from criticism, ridicule and, yes, hatred. The spread of ideology through our public institutions, and the ongoing failure of our politicians to acknowledge that it is happening at all, has meant that the principle of equality under the law is now subordinated to group identity and the risk of causing offence. For those of us who still believe in freedom, this situation is no longer tolerable.
