A fatwa was issued against all those involved in the publication of The Satanic Verses. Photo: Adam Butler/PA Archive/PA Images
Norwegian freedom of speech foundation Fritt Ord has called for a state commission to investigate police handling of the attempted murder of a publisher three decades ago.
In 1993 William Nygaard – a former head of NRK and long-time director of the Aschehoug publishing house – was shot outside of his home in the Oslo suburb of Slemdal. Nygaard was left for dead on the street after being hit three times from behind as he opened his car door.
The call to look at the case again comes after one of the prime suspects in the case was tracked down by a team of journalists working for Norwegian public broadcaster NRK.
Although nobody claimed responsibility for the attack at the time, the shooting was widely believed to be linked to Nygaard’s support for Salman Rushdie and Aschehoug’s publication in Norwegian of Rushdie’s book The Satanic Verses. At the time Rushdie was the subject of a fatwa by the then Supreme Leader of Iran Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini for heresy. Aschehoug is Norway’s second largest publisher and has a track record of publishing controversial titles.
Fritt Ord director Knut Olav Åmås has suggested that an independent investigation into the handling of the case is warranted due to the longstanding failure of the Oslo police to make progress despite ample evidence. Åmås has singled out what he sees as strange police behaviour and a failure to follow up on key leads.
“[The handling of the case] should be investigated by an independent commission due to the considerable and surprising number of strange things that have happened, not least in the Oslo Metropolitan Police ever since the murder attempt took place in 1993,” Åmås told Index on Censorship. Åmås has specifically been critical of the Oslo’ police’s failure to focus on the fatwa in the crucial period following the shooting, and the decision to let local police investigate a case of national and international significance.
Witnesses to the shooting used photofits to produce an image of the attacker at the time, but until recently nobody was ever publicly identified or charged for the crime. Last month however the name of one of the suspects was revealed by the NRK team after he was tracked down in Beirut. Lebanese national Khaled Moussawi, who was resident in Norway when the attack happened, has been accused, though he denies all claims. As part of the accusations, he is alleged to have been assisted by a still-unnamed employee of the Iranian embassy in Oslo.
“It is a very important case, both as an integrated part of the whole Rushdie affair, and also as an important precursor to the [Danish] cartoon controversy, where Islamic regimes´ pressure on freedom of expression became a dramatic global event.” says Åmås, who is a former culture editor at Norway’s leading broadsheet Aftenposten.
Moussawi lived in Norway until 1996 and regularly attended events at the Iranian embassy. Despite having a son born in Oslo his family were never granted citizenship and he was eventually deported from the country and returned to Lebanon, inadvertently complicating the investigation into the Nygaard shooting.
In 2008 the Norwegian Prosecuting Authority determined that the case should be reopened and responsibility was shifted from the Oslo Metropolitan Police to Kripos, Norway’s National Criminal Investigation Service .
Åmås says that the latest revelations mean it may finally be possible to bring Nygaard’s attackers to justice.
“It shows that Norwegian police has evidence that they should act upon, by issuing a so-called Red notice through Interpol for example – and also working with Lebanese authorities to make it possible to bring him [Moussawi] to Norway for interrogation. The same should happen to the Iranian who has been charged.” Åmås believes.
If the unnamed Iranian embassy staff member is convicted and a link is proven between Iran’s embassy and the shooting, it would also retrospectively establish the crime as an act of state-sponsored terrorism rather than attempted murder.
The Iranian Embassy in Oslo has denied the claims. “This type of allegation…is completely without basis, and we strongly reject this allegation,” it told NRK.
Moussawi also gave an extensive interview to NRK in Beirut when his identity was revealed, claiming to have been unaware of his status as one of the prime suspects. He also repeatedly denied any involvement with Hezbollah, the Lebanese religious and political movement with close ties to Iran that endorsed the fatwa against Rushdie.
“I have never been active in Hezbollah, either politically, religiously or socially,” Moussawi told NRK. “There was no political activity in the embassy. We drank tea, ate and read from the Koran,” he said.
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”107971″ img_size=”full” add_caption=”yes”][vc_column_text]Andrew Graham-Yooll served as editor for the Index on Censorship magazine from 1989-1993. He was then, and remained until his death in 2019, committed to free expression and the free press around the world. In honour of his memory, Index is featuring some of the highlights of his writing for the magazine about his home country Argentina. The pieces featured cover a broad range of topics and events primarily related Argentinian art and journalism, and showcase Graham-Yooll’s fierce integrity and characteristic humor. [/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/4″][vc_single_image image=”94869″ img_size=”full” add_caption=”yes” onclick=”custom_link” link=”https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/03064227308532221″][/vc_column][vc_column width=”3/4″][vc_column_text]Letter from Argentina
June 1973, vol. 2 issue: 2
“Censorship in Argentina is not a sin of the State, but a sickness of society”. Thus closes Andrew Graham-Yooll’s scathing indictment of censorship and self-censorship in the Argentinian press, in an environment where press controls are loosely organised but vicious.Graham-Yooll describes the routine torture and corruption in the criminal-justice system that the Argentinian press seems uninterested in, and expresses his opinion that, however damaging state censorship is, it is the fear and self-censorship it engenders in the press that is truly destorying Argentina’s soul.
Read the full article[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/4″][vc_single_image image=”94773″ img_size=”full” add_caption=”yes” onclick=”custom_link” link=”https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/03064227508532398″][/vc_column][vc_column width=”3/4″][vc_column_text]The Argentinian press under Peron
March 1975, vol. 4 issue: 1
Andrew Graham-Yooll reflects on the record he kept of all the obstacles to press freedom and independence in Argentina during the early 1970s. He outlines, in broad strokes, the conflict between right- and left-wing branches of Peronism, and what the escalating conflict between the two–and the right wing’s eventual victory–meant for the operation of the Argentinian press. The press had faced restrictions and instability under Alejandro Augustin Lanusse and Hector Jose Campora that exploded into violence and direct government interference with print, radio, and television media under Raul Alberto Lastiri, Juan Peron himself, and his widow, Isabel Martinez de Peron.
Read the full article[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/4″][vc_single_image image=”94399″ img_size=”full” add_caption=”yes” onclick=”custom_link” link=”https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/03064227908532905″][/vc_column][vc_column width=”3/4″][vc_column_text]Arrests in Argentina
March 1979, vol. 8 issue: 2
Graham-Yooll takes a look into the fate of the nine workers at El Independiente, a left-of-center, nationalist local paper in the poor Argentinian province of La Rioja that “established itself on the wrong side of every provincial administration”. After Juan Peron was restored to power in 1973, the paper faced increasing harassment and frequent suspensions, until by 1976, El Independiente was permanently and forcibly closed, with seven of the nine workers arrested under dubious charges, some of their families in exile or tortured, and the remaining two workers missing. The Argentinian Newspaper Publishers’ Association demanded their release, but at the time of the article’s writing they were all still imprisoned.
Read the full article[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/4″][vc_single_image image=”90901″ img_size=”full” add_caption=”yes” onclick=”custom_link” link=”https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/03064229508535825″][/vc_column][vc_column width=”3/4″][vc_column_text]Coming Home
January 1995, vol. 7 issue: 2
This article is not an obituary, but it deals with the death of a gay Argentianian novelist, Manuel Puig. Puig died of AIDS in Mexico, a fact that Graham-Yooll was surprised to see mentioned in coverage of the artist and his work. Argentina’s social climate tolerates homosexuality to a degree, Graham-Yooll says, but only unobstrusive or plausibly deniable homosexuality. The brutal targeted repression under the military junta of “putos, guerrilleros, y faloperos” (queers, guerillas and drug addicts) is still in living memory for many gay Argentinians, and though the coverage of Puig could be a positive sign, discussion of homosexuality and gay rights was still not part of mainstream news coverage or culture in Argentina at the time of the article’s writing.
Read the full article[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/4″][vc_single_image image=”90587″ img_size=”full” add_caption=”yes” onclick=”custom_link” link=”https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/03064220408537324″][/vc_column][vc_column width=”3/4″][vc_column_text]News From Patagonia
April 2004, vol. 33 issue: 2
In 2003, shortly before the article was written, Argentina’s Supreme Court struck down a law passed some twenty years earlier under the junta, which had made it illegal to provide broadcasting licences to community radio. The nominal grounds for that practice had been that it was easier to prevent the infiltration by the regime’s ideological enemies of commercial radio. However, before the law was struck down, its true raison d’etre had become the preservation of cronyism and political nepotism. Graham-Yooll uses the Supreme Court’s ruling as a chance to take stock of Argentina’s broadcasting landscape, with particular focus on the florshing of extra-legal, shoestring FM radio stations.
Read the full article[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/4″][vc_single_image image=”89187″ img_size=”full” add_caption=”yes” onclick=”custom_link” link=”https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/03064220512331339490″][/vc_column][vc_column width=”3/4″][vc_column_text]The Pain and the Memory: The Legacy of Nunca Mas
February 2005, vol. 34 issue: 1
In 1984, Argentina’s National Commission on the Disappearance of Person released a report, Nunca Mas (Never Again), on the human rights abuses under the National Reorganisation Process between 1976 and 1983 that devastated many in the country. In this piece, written in 2012 Graham-Yooll discusses the abuses of the military and the many ways Argentina has attempted to grapple with the report, from the junta trials to a more recent photo exhibition of the atrocities. He shares a few of his own experiences from that time and describes how both dictatorship and report live on in Argentinian memory.
Read the full article[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/4″][vc_single_image image=”89185″ img_size=”full” add_caption=”yes” onclick=”custom_link” link=”https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/03064220500125985″][/vc_column][vc_column width=”3/4″][vc_column_text]Our Father, Who Art in Art
May 2005, vol. 34 issue: 2
In 2004, right after the Argentinian branch of the Catholic Church received praise for opening up politically, Leon Ferrari opened up an exhibition in Buenos Aires reviewing the collusion between the church and some of Latin America’s worst regimes over the centuries. Graham-Yooll describes some of the most important exhibit pieces and the extreme backlash the exhibit received from the church and laymenry–sometimes simultaneously, as in the entertaining story of a Christian vandal whose destruction of a piece was turned into an exhibit piece itself.
Read the full article[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/4″][vc_single_image image=”89186″ img_size=”full” add_caption=”yes” onclick=”custom_link” link=”https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/03064220500125985″][/vc_column][vc_column width=”3/4″][vc_column_text]Cumbia Villera: the Sound of the Slums
August 2005, vol. 34 issue: 3
A new genre of music is becoming popular in Latin America: the “politically incorrect” cumbia villera, a high-energy, hard-hitting new street music with a Carribbean beat. The lyrics to these songs, according to Graham-Yooll, are “vile and often violent”: they are filled with misogynistic abuse, incitement to prison breaks and riots, and enthusiastic encouragement of alcohol and hard drug use. For this reason, the Argentinain government at the time of the article was considering censoring cumbia villera, but in what Graham-Yooll asserts is a reflection of Argentina’s growing class divide, the music is gaining a mass following in the slums that seems unstoppable.
Read the full article[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/4″][vc_single_image image=”89110″ img_size=”full” add_caption=”yes” onclick=”custom_link” link=”https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0306422012456134″][/vc_column][vc_column width=”3/4″][vc_column_text]The Past in Hiding
September 2012, vol. 41 issue: 3
Nearly 40 years after the dirty war, Graham-Yooll examines two new books whose dialogue he believes represent hope that the record of atrocities committed by the junta can be known and Argentina can thus “come to terms” with its past. The first book, Final Disposal, is a set of nine interviews journalist Ceferino Reato conducted with members of the erstwhile regime in prison, in which those members display, according to Graham-Yooll, both generosity with information and a cold and brutal view of their own crimes. The second book, From Guilt to Forgiveness, is a personal account written by Norma Morandini, a former journalist and politician, about her personal journey from denial of what happened under the regime to a reckoning.
After Argentina emerged from under the rule of the military junta in 1983, press freedom improved considerably. Now, journalists are not murdered by the regime, but silenced through systemic harassment and the entangled web of cronyism. Graham-Yooll explains how the leader of Argentina at the time of the article, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, has developed a distinct and effect new “means of controlling the message”: not reactive censorship, but preemptive control of content through control of the ownership and cash flows of the media.
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On 14 February 1989 Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa ordering Muslims to execute author Salman Rushdie over the publication of The Satanic Verses, along with anyone else involved with the novel.
Published in the UK in 1988 by Viking Penguin, the book was met with widespread protest by those who accused Rushdie of blasphemy and unbelief. Death threats and a $6 million bounty on the author’s head saw him take on a 24-hour armed guard under the British government’s protection programme.
The book was soon banned in a number of countries, from Bangladesh to Venezuela, and many died in protests against its publication, including on 24 February when 12 people lost their lives in a riot in Bombay, India. Explosions went off across the UK, including at Liberty’s department store, which had a Penguin bookshop inside, and the Penguin store in York.
Book store chains including Barnes and Noble stopped selling the book, and copies were burned across the UK, first in Bolton where 7,000 Muslims gathered on 2 December 1988, then in Bradford in January 1989. In May 1989 between 15,000 to 20,000 people gathered in Parliament Square in London to burn Rushdie in effigy.
In October 1993, William Nygaard, the novel’s Norwegian publisher, was shot three times outside his home in Oslo and seriously injured.
Rushdie came out of hiding after nine years, but as recently as February 2016, money has been raised to add to the fatwa, reminding the author that for many the Ayatollah’s ruling still stands.
Here, 30 years on, Index on Censorship magazine highlights key articles from its archives from before, during and after the issue of the fatwa, including two from Rushdie himself.
Cuba today, the March 1989 issue of Index on Censorship magazine.
On 14 February the Ayatollah Khomeini called on all Muslims to seek out and execute Salman Rushdie, the author of The Satanic Verses, and all those involved in its publication. We, the undersigned, insofar as we defend the right to freedom of opinion and expression as embodied in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, declare that we also are involved in the publication. We are involved whether we approve the contents of the book or not. Nonetheless, we appreciate the distress the book has aroused and deeply regret the loss of life associated with the ensuing conflict.
‘What Rushdie has done, as far as Muslim intellectuals are concerned, is to put their backs to the wall and force them to make the choice they have tried to avoid for so long’. Last year, when poor old Mr Manavi filled in his Penguin order form for 10 copies of Salman Rushdie’s third novel, The Satanic Verses, he could not have imagined that the book, described by its publishers as a reflection on the agonies of exile, would provoke one of the most bizarre diplomatic incidents in recent times. Mr Manavi had been selling Penguin books in Tehran for years. He had learned which authors to regard as safe and which ones to avoid at all costs.
This statement is not, of course, addressed to the Ayatollah Khomeini who, except for a handful of fanatics, is easily diagnosed as a sick and dangerous man who has long forgotten the fundamental tenets of Islam. It is useful to address oneself, at this point, only to the real Islamic faithful who, in their hearts, recognise the awful truth about their erratic Imam and the threat he poses not only to the continuing acceptance of Islam among people of all religions and faiths but to the universal brotherhood of man, no matter the differing colorations of their piety. Will Salman Rushdie die? He shall not. But if he does, let the fanatic defenders of Khomeini’s brand of Islam understand this: The work for which he is now threatened will become a household icon within even the remnant lifetime of the Ayatollah. Writers, cineastes, dramatists will disseminate its contents in every known medium and in some new ones as yet unthought of.
Broadly speaking, three predictions were made. The first was that Khomeini’s attempt at exporting terror might goad world public opinion into a keener understanding of Iran’s tragedy since the Islamic Revolution of 1979. The fact that the Ayatollah had executed thousands of people, including many writers and poets since his seizure of power in Tehran had provoked only mild rebuke from Western governments and public opinion. With the fatwa against Rushdie, we thought the whole world would mobilise against the ayatollah, turning his regime into an international pariah. Nothing of the kind happened, of course, and only one country, Britain, closed its embassy in Tehran – and that because the mullahs decided to sever.diplomatic ties. In the past twelve months Federal Germany and France have increased their trade with the Islamic Republic to the tune of II and 19 per cent respectively. The EEC countries and Japan have, in the meantime, provided the Islamic Republic with loans exceeding £2,000 million. The stream of European and Japanese businessmen and diplomats visiting Tehran turned into a mini-flood after Khomeini’s death last June.
When I reviewed Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses in September 1988, it never crossed my mind to make any reference to possible offence to Muslim readers, let alone to anticipate the unprecedented international crisis generated in the months that followed. I do not think I was naive – as an LBC radio reporter suggested when she interviewed me at the first public reading from The Satanic Verses in June 1989. On the contrary, I can claim more than many that I am able to understand what Mr Rushdie was trying to say in his book, and the way the crisis has developed. Like Mr Rushdie, I am a British writer, born to a Muslim family. Born in Egypt, I was educated and am employed in Britain, and have been preoccupied and engaged, mainly in the 1960s and 1970s, with the issues that Mr Rushdie has fought for and with which he seemed to be very much concerned in his book.
A man’s spiritual choices are a matter of conscience, arrived at after deep. reflection and in the privacy of his heart. They are not easy matters to speak of publicly. I should like, however, to say something about my decision to affirm the two central tenets of Islam — the oneness of God and the genuineness of the prophecy of the Prophet Muhammad —and thus to enter into the body of Islam after a lifetime spent outside it. Although I come from a Muslim family background, I was never brought up as a believer, and was raised in an atmosphere of what is broadly known as secular humanism. I still have the deepest respect for these principles. However, as I think anyone who studies my work will accept, I have been engaging more and more with religious belief, its importance and power, ever since my first novel used the Sufi poem Conference of the Birds by Farid ud-din Attar as a model. The Satanic Verses itself, with its portrait of the conflicts between the material and spiritual worlds, is a mirror of the conflict within myself.
When George Orwell returned from Spain in 1937, he brought with him the manuscript of Homage to Catalonia. It reflected the experiences he had gathered during the Civil War. At first, he was unable to find a publisher because a multitude of influential, left-wing intellectuals had no wish to acknowledge its shocking observations. They did not want to accept the Stalinist terror, the systematic liquidation of anarchists, Trotskyists and left-wing socialists. Orwell himself only narrowly escaped this terror. His stark accusations contradicted a world image of a flawless Soviet Union fighting against Fascism. Orwell’s report, this onslaught of terrible reality, tarnished the picture-book dream of Good and Evil. A year later, a bourgeois Western publisher brought out Homage to Catalonia; in the areas of Communist rule, Orwell’s works – among them the bitter Spanish truth – were banned for half a century. The minister responsible for state security= in the German Democratic Republic, right to its end, was Erich Mielke. During the Spanish Civil War, he was a member of the Communist cadre to whom purge through liquidation became commonplace. A fighter for Spain with an extraordinary capacity for survival.
The terrorist state of Iran must face the consequences of refusing to lift the fatwa that condemns Salman Rushdie, and those associated with his work, to death. When someone, in accordance with the express order of the fatwa, attempts to murder one of the damned, the obvious consequence is that Iran must be held responsible for the crime it has called for, at least until there is conclusive proof that no connection exists. The shooting of William Nygaard has reminded the Norwegian public of what the Rushdie affair is really about: life and death; the abuse of religion; the fiction of a free mind. This war of terror against freedom of speech is not one we can afford to lose. Since the nightmare clearly will not disappear of its own accord, it must be engaged head-on.
This statement is not, of course, addressed to the Ayatollah Khomeini who, except for a handful of fanatics, is easily diagnosed as a sick and dangerous man who has long forgotten the fundamental tenets of Islam. It is useful to address oneself, at this point, only to the real Islamic faithful who, in their hearts, recognise the awful truth about their erratic Imam and the threat he poses not only to the continuing acceptance of Islam among people of all religions and faiths but to the universal brotherhood of man, no matter the differing colorations of their piety. Will Salman Rushdie die? He shall not. But if he does, let the fanatic defenders of Khomeini’s brand of Islam understand this: The work for which he is now threatened will become a household icon within even the remnant lifetime of the Ayatollah. Writers, cineastes, dramatists will disseminate its contents in every known medium and in some new ones as yet unthought of.
The Satanic Verses was, Salman Rushdie said in an interview before publication, a novel about ‘migration, metamorphosis, divided selves, love, death’. It was also a satire on Islam, ‘a serious attempt’, in his words, ‘to write about religion and revelation from the point of view of a secular person’. For some that was unacceptable, turning the novel into ‘an inferior piece of hate literature’ as the British-Muslim philosopher Shabbir Akhtar put it. Within a month, The Satanic Verses had been banned in Rushdie’s native India, after protests from Islamic radicals. By the end of the year, protesters had burnt a copy of the novel on the streets of Bolton, in northern England. And then, on 14 February 1989, came the event that transformed the Rushdie affair – Ayatollah Khomeini issued his fatwa.’I inform all zealous Muslims of the world,’ proclaimed Iran’s spiritual leader, ‘that the author of the book entitled The Satanic Verses – which has been compiled, printed and published in opposition to Islam, the prophet and the Quran – and all those involved in its publication who were aware of its contents are sentenced to death.’
As publisher of The Satanic Verses, Peter Mayer was on the front line. He writes here for the first time about an unprecedented crisis:
Penguin published Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses six months before Ayatollah Khomeini issues his fatwa. When we decided to continue publishing the novel in the aftermath, extraordinary pressures were focused on our company, based on fears for the author’s life and for the lives of everyone at Penguin around the world. This extended from Penguin’s management to editorial, warehouse, transport, administrative staff, the personnel in our bookshops and many others. The long-term political implications of that early signal regarding free speech in culturally diverse societies were not yet apparent to many when the Ayatollah, speaking not only for Iran but, seemingly, for all of Islam, issued his religious proclaimation.
As publisher of The Satanic Verses, Peter Mayer was on the front line. He writes here for the first time about an unprecedented crisis:
Salman Rushdie was not yet the great man of letters that he has since become. He and I are, though, pretty much the same age. We share a passion for India and Pakistan, as well as the uncommon privilege of having known and written about Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (Rushdie in Shame; I in Les Indes Rouges), the father of Benazir, former prime minister of Pakistan, executed ten years earlier in 1979 by General Zia. I had been watching from a distance, with infinite curiosity, the trajectory of this almost exact contemporary. One day, in February 1989, at the end of the afternoon, as I sat in a cafe in the South of France, in Saint Paul de Vence, with the French actor Yves Montand, sipping an orangeade, I heard the news: Ayatollah Khomeini, himself with only a few months to live, had just issued a fatwa, in which he condemned as an apostate the author of The Satanic Verses and invited all Muslims the world over to carry out the sentence, without delay.
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Personally, I don’t believe Satan, or God, exist, so it’s not a question I give a great deal of time to.
Salman Rushdie gave it some thought. The title of The Satanic Verses comes from an old idea that there may have been parts of the Sura that were false. Specifically, a concession to the polytheism of the pre-Islamic Meccans to whom Muhammad preached: “And see ye not Lat and Ozza, And Manat the third besides? These are exalted Females, And verily their intercession is to be hoped for.”
Muhammad was, the story goes, tricked into saying these lines by Satan. The Angel Gabriel later told Muhammad he had been deceived, and he recanted.
For Thought-For-The-Day types, it’s a nice little “don’t believe everything you read” lesson. For literary types, it may even be seen as an interesting early example of an unreliable narrator. Muhammad trusted the angel to tell him the truth: but at that moment, the angel was not who he seemed.
I sincerely doubt Northern Ireland’s Pastor James McConnell has much truck with the idea of unreliable narration. Or even fiction, for that matter. McConnell is the type of person who believes that if someone is going to go to the trouble of writing a thing down in a book, then that thing should be true.
A book? No. The Book. There is one book for the pastor. It’s called the Bible, and it’s got everything you need. You might read other books, but they’ll be books about the Book. Books explaining in great detail just how great the Book is. What there are not, cannot be, are other the Books.
So the Bible can be true, or the Quran can be true: but they can’t both be true. And if the Quran is false, but Islam claims it is true, then Islam must be wicked. Satanic, even.
In May last year, Pastor McConnell, like many of his ilk, was very exercised by the story of Meriam Yehya Ibrahim, who had reputedly been sentenced to death in Sudan after converting from Islam to Christianity. Here was further proof, septuagenarian McConnell preached to the congregation at Whitewell Metropolitan Tabernacle, that “Islam is heathen, Islam is satanic, Islam is a doctrine spawned in hell.” There may be good Muslims in the UK, he said, but he didn’t trust them. Enoch Powell was right, McConnell said, to predict “rivers of blood”.
McConnell seemed to know this was going to get him in trouble. “The time will come in this land and in this nation,” he preambled, “to say such things will be an offence to the law.”
Turns out, the pastor was half-right at least in this much. Last week, Northern Irish prosecutors announced that McConnell would face prosecution for his sermon. For inciting religious hatred? No, too obvious. McConnell, now retired and said to be in declining health, will be prosecuted under Section 127 of the Communications Act.
Section 127 is, free-speech nerds may recall, the piece of legislation that pertains to the sending “by means of a public electronic communications network a message or other matter that is grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character”.
It’s the one that led to the Paul Chambers “Twitter Joke Trial” case, one of the great rallying points of online free speech in recent years. In January 2010 Chambers joked online that he would blow up Doncaster Robin Hood airport if his flight to Belfast (always Belfast!) to meet his girlfriend was cancelled. He was convicted, even though every single person involved in the case acknowledged that he had been joking, including the airport security, who did not for one second treat the tweet seriously, even as a hoax.
Chambers was convicted. Eventually, in June 2012, the conviction was quashed. Questions were raised about why then-Director of Public Prosecutions Keir Starmer had persisted in pursuing the case. For his part, Starmer launched a consultation to draft guidelines on when the Communications Act provisions should and should not be used (this writer took part in the meetings and submitted written evidence).
During that process, Starmer was fond of pointing out (correctly) that the Communications Act had been designed to protect telephone operators from heavy breathers. It had nothing to do with stupid jokes on the internet.
And it certainly had nothing at all to do with the online streaming of sermons by fundamentalist preachers.
Let there be no doubt: the prosecution of James McConnell under the Communications Act is a disgrace and a travesty. It is the action of a prosecution service more interested in appearing to be liberal than upholding justice and rights. If McConnell is suspected of being guilty of incitement, then prosecute him under that law. But the deployment of the catch-all Communications Act, in a situation it was very obviously not designed for, suggests prosecutors were not confident of that case and have instead reached for the vaguest charge possible.
When one combines this latest prosecution with the recent “gay cake” case, in which a Christian bakery in County Antrim was fined for refusing to decorate a cake with a pro-equal marriage message, it’s hard not to think the people of Protestant Ulster may, on this occasion, have some real fuel for the siege mentality that’s kept them going for so very long. It feels as if an attempt is being made to force liberalisation on Christians through the courts. It’s hard to imagine any outcome besides resentment, and Lord knows the “wee province” has enough of that already.
