The ongoing threat of anti-religious hatred laws

The Incitement to Racial Hated Bill in Britain, pushed by, among others, Tony Blair’s knighted Muslim, Iqbal Sacranie, has been substantially re-written to make its scope much narrower. In its original form, as Joshua Rozenberg of The Telegraph tells it, the bill made it a crime punishable by up to seven years in prison for a person

to use threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour if this was likely to stir up religious hatred.

Note that there was no need to prove that a defendant intended to stir up hatred: it was sufficient if this was merely likely. And note that there was no need to prove that the defendant used threatening words: all you needed to do to risk seven years’ imprisonment was to use abusive or insulting words that were likely to stir up religious hatred.

That bill was crushed in the House of Lords (that’s nice to hear, I thought the Lords had been stripped of any power), and an amended version was introduced. Under the amended bill:

First, prosecutors would have to prove that the defendant intended to stir up religious hatred; mere likelihood would not be enough. Second, the words or behaviour would have to be threatening rather than merely abusive or insulting. And, crucially, there would be protection for freedom of expression.

If Lord Lester’s amendment is allowed to stand, it will not be possible for the law to be used in a way that “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.”

Nor would there be any risk of prosecution for evangelists or proselytisers who urge “adherents of a different religion or belief system to cease practising their religion or belief system.”

However, Rozenberg fears that the amended law, even if no one were prosecuted under it, could still be used to chill critical speech about religions. Though it’s not clear that the example is apposite to the British bill, he tells about a case in Australia where a Christian Pakistani evangelist who had fled from Pakistan to Australia was found guilty (the case is now on appeal) of failing to give a sufficiently balanced account (!) of various Koran passages. As the judge in the case put it, “It was a process of taking literal translations from the Koran and making no allowance for their applicability to modern-day society.” I’ll translate. The defendant took Allah’s commandments in the Koran, such as “strike off the heads of the infidels, wherever you find them,” as though the Koran actually meant them (which, of course, is also the way Muslims themselves have actually taken them for the last 1,400 years), instead of giving equal weight to modern rationalizations intended to soften and conceal the Koran’s real meaning. If such a standard became law in the U.S., serious criticism of Islam in this country would come to a halt.

Let us further understand this. As long as there is a significant Muslim population in the West, efforts to outlaw criticism of Islam will never cease. The effort will be driven both by the Muslims, for reasons we don’t need to explain, and by Western liberals, because of Auster’s First Law of Majority-Minority Relations in a Liberal Society: the more objectionable a minority group is, and thus the worse the truth about it is, the more the truth must be silenced and replaced by extravagant praise.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 02, 2005 10:10 AM | Send