"Speechcrime" goes in one direction

I had not seen "speechcrime" (one word) in print before reading the post below, but "speech crime" (two words) is something that shares a commonality with "hate crime" legislation. Initially, speech crime was intended to restrict the incitement of genocide, or other horrors, but now we see speech crime being applied to other forms of expression.  

We are all aware that to burn a Bible in public will not land you in jail or cause you to go into hiding for fear of your life, but to burn a Koran...

From Spiked Online,

A man was arrested at the weekend after allegedly burning a copy of the Koran – no, not in Iran or in Saudi Arabia, but in Manchester, in the UK. Apparently, it can now be a criminal offence in 21st-century Britain to express your distaste for a seventh-century religion.

The arrest followed a livestream on social media that appeared to show a 47-year-old man setting light to the Koran, page by page, on Saturday. This was just two days after Salwan Momika, an Iraqi atheist, was assassinated in Sweden, seemingly as punishment for burning copies of the Muslim holy book in public.

You might have imagined that in a modern, liberal democracy such as Britain that blaspheming against a religious text would be none of the police’s business. After all, laws criminalising blasphemy against Christianity were officially repealed in England and Wales in 2008, with the last successful blasphemy conviction obtained in 1977. But the old crime of blasphemy has been slowly replaced with a new raft of criminal offences against so-called hate speech.

According to Greater Manchester Police, the alleged Koran burner was arrested under suspicion of a ‘racially aggravated public-order offence’. Assistant chief constable Stephanie Parker told GB News that police felt compelled to make a ‘swift arrest’, fearing the livestream could cause ‘deep concern… within some of our diverse communities’. The modern language of diversity and multiculturalism disguises the medievalism of the decree that’s being enforced.

The injunction to police so-called hate speech, especially when it comes to ‘Islamophobia’, has led British police forces to routinely do the bidding of Islamic reactionaries. In 2023, when four boys in Wakefield brought a Koran to school, and one ended up lightly scuffing it, police recorded it as a ‘non-crime hate incident’. Ten miles down the road, at Batley Grammar School, a teacher was forced into hiding in 2021 after showing a cartoon of Muhammad in his religious-studies class. He remains in hiding to this day, but no action has ever been taken against those who maliciously circulated his name or sent him credible death threats. If anything, in the eyes of the authorities, his hardline Islamist aggressors, whose religious sensitivities were offended, were the actual victims here.

The Europe-wide expansion of hate-speech laws to cover blasphemy against Islam means there is now an alarming affinity between the authorities and hardline Islamic conservatives and even violent Islamist extremists. It is striking that when Salwan Momika was assassinated last week in Sweden after burning the Koran, he was due to face trial for exactly the same alleged ‘crime’. Of course, the modern European state insists it is punishing hate speech, not blasphemy, and it does so with arrests, fines and prison sentences, not with violence or executions. But both our secular authorities and Islamist radicals agree that ridiculing Islam must be punished as a speechcrime.

Alarmingly, in Britain at least, restrictions on what we can say about Islam are only likely to get tighter. The Labour government is considering whether to impose a broad and controversial definition of Islamophobia on all public bodies, which would chill discussion on just about any issue that might touch on Islam or Muslims. Home secretary Yvette Cooper and security minister Dan Jarvis have both vowed to expand the recording of non-crime hate incidents to tackle Islamophobia. This would further entrench the role of the police as enforcers of Islamic blasphemy law.

In a modern, free society, the right to mock, scorn and reject all gods, prophets and religious texts ought to be sacrosanct. This new regime of speech policing, however ‘progressive’ and ‘inclusive’ it purports to be, represents a catastrophic step backwards.

Fraser Myers is deputy editor at spiked and host of the spiked podcast. Follow him on X: @FraserMyers.

As Christians, we are saddened when someone burns a Bible. They may be rejecting God, but they are in need of our love, and they cannot harm God or us by burning a book or by drawing a cartoon. The Word will live on.

C'mon Muslims, it is just ink on paper that is burning. Don't worship a book. Worship God.