05 Apr 11 | Uncategorized
President Karzai of Afghanistan has called for the Obama administration to condemn the recent Koran-burning in Florida by Pastor Wayne Sapp. The symbolic immolation of the book led to riots that left 22 dead. Obama has obliged by describing it as an act of “extreme intolerance and bigotry”. But Karzai wants Obama to go further and “bring those responsible to justice”.
It is not clear what that would mean in the US. First Amendment free speech protection doesn’t discriminate on the basis of the content of speech short of its posing a direct threat to others. Offensive expression, including symbolic flag- or Koran-burning, is just as protected as liberal political speech-making.
To take the most famous example, the neo-Nazis who wanted to march through Skokie in Illinois in 1977, where many Holocaust survivors lived, had as much right to express their views as anyone else. Controversially, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) sprang to the their defence.
In that case the marchers, having secured their free speech rights in court, were persuaded to protest elsewhere. Only last year Pastor Terry Jones also backed down from this threat to burn Korans on the 9/11 anniversary, though most experts agreed that if he had gone ahead with the burning on private property he would have been unlikely to have committed any crime.
But sometimes offensive protestors follow through and make their point as threatened in a way that triggers strong reactions. In the case of Pastor Wayne Sapp, that’s what happened, and with fatal consequences thousands of miles away in Afghanistan, where another group of intolerant people took violent and utterly inexcusable “revenge” on 22 people.
Free speech issues are rarely straightforward. Some people would like to think they are, but they aren’t. The key question is always where a society wants to draw the line, not whether there should be a line at all. But I believe strongly that explosive reactions on the part of the offended shouldn’t determine where that line is drawn.
Such a reaction would give the power to circumscribe the limits of everyone’s freedom to those who have the angriest voices, and are swiftest to resort to violence. Instead we need to protect the freedom to criticise religion and religions, both in words and symbolic actions, as a fundamental right.
Put simply, no idea or object should be sacrosanct from criticism or ridicule, and we should be clear that we condemn violence far more than we condemn the expression of offensive views. We do not want to go back to the Dark Ages of blasphemy laws, or modern equivalents of them.
20 Jan 11 | Index Index, minipost
Pastor Terry Jones has been banned from entering the UK. Terry Jones is the controversial pastor who attempted to burn the Koran on the anniversary of 9/11.
23 Sep 10 | Index Index, minipost, News and features
Police have arrested six men on suspicion of inciting racial hatred after they posted a video on the Internet in which they appear to burn two copies of the Koran on 11 September.
The men have been released on bail, but will face court hearings in Gateshead, police said in a statement earlier today. Two of the men were arrested on 15th September and a another four on 22 September. The arrests follow controversy over plans by US preacher Terry Jones to hold an “International Burn a Koran Day” to commemorate the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
23 Sep 10 | Uncategorized
News has emerged that six young men in Gateshead in the north-east of England have been arrested for burning a Koran and posting the video on YouTube.
A couple of weeks ago, a Times reporter asked me if Pastor Terry Jones, who at the time was creating a stir with threats he would burn a Koran, would be arrested if he did so in the UK. I told them it was unlikely, unless he had gone out of his way to do so in front of a mosque on Friday, or in a location with a lot of Muslims around, in which case the Public Order Act could be brought into play, and/or the Incitement to Racial and Religious Hatred Act.
I was half right. The Gateshead men, apparently English Defence League supporters, were arrested on suspicion of inciting racial hatred. Not religious hatred.
Legally speaking, it is at least technically possible to arrest someone of incitement to religious hatred. So why did the police not use this power in a case where the target was a religious text?
Back in 2005, when the Incitement to Racial and Religious Hatred Bill was being debated, secularists campaigning against the bill (of whom I was one — I was working at New Humanist magazine at the time) worked to make the bill pretty much unworkable in practice. Consequently, Section 29j of the Act states:
Nothing in this Part shall be read or given effect in a way which prohibits or restricts discussion, criticism or expressions of antipathy, dislike, ridicule, insult or abuse of particular religions or the beliefs or practices of their adherents, or of any other belief system or the beliefs or practices of its adherents, or proselytising or urging adherents of a different religion or belief system to cease practising their religion or belief system.
We were quite pleased with this. And possibly right to be, as there have been very few actions under this legislation since it was introduced in 2006.
So are the police not even using this legislation? Were the Gateshead arrests made under the guise of racial hatred because they felt more likely to secure a conviction?
A source tells me the police are claiming that the burning of the Koran itself is the crux of the arrest: not the posting on YouTube. But I cannot imagine how the burning of a book, no matter how precious that book is to some people, is a crime in and of itself. And I certainly don’t understand how it’s a race crime.
