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It’s a story that one might expect to come out of Tehran or Lahore. Instead, it comes from Lyon, France. The French-language CNews reported that “a man was sentenced this Wednesday by the Lyon Criminal Court to one year in prison for burning a Quran in front of a mosque in Villeurbanne (Rhône) last June.”

This had been a long time in the offing, and now it’s happening with increasing frequency. For years, Western governments refrained from crossing the line and levying criminal charges against someone for violating Islamic blasphemy laws. Then in Britain in June, a Turkish dissident, Hamit Coskun, was fined for burning a Qur’an. And now this.

CNews explained that the sentence also included “a two-year ban on appearing in the same city,” that is, Villeurbanne, where the unnamed perpetrator carried out his heinous crime of registering his disapproval of the violence, exploitation, subjugation, hatred and more that the Qur’an sanctions. He was put on trial for “degradation committed on the grounds of race, ethnicity, nation, or religion,” but he insisted that he was not, despite appearances to the contrary, “an Islamophobe.” He said instead that he was simply, and tragically, a “victim of his illness,” as he has been receiving treatment as a paranoid schizophrenic for nine years.

It seems that the poor fellow admitted that he had burned a Qur’an, but he “attempted to defend himself by dismissing any connection between his actions and Islam.” The accused explained: “I understand that my actions were very serious. For me, it was just a book, it wasn’t against Muslims themselves.” Nevertheless, prosecutor Hannah Tellier asserted that he was “a major risk” for repeating his awesome crime, and so requested that he be locked safely away in prison, where, presumably, no Qur’ans are kept anywhere near any matches.

Burning a book, any book, is an act that many regard with distaste and associate with National Socialism. Yet this is a matter of the freedom of expression: if one group can restrict speech on the basis of a perceived “insult” or “offense” to it, it has become a protected class, above criticism. That’s the road to tyranny. And some European countries are farther down that road than most people realize.

Last January, an Iraqi immigrant in Sweden, Salwan Momika, was scheduled to appear in a Stockholm court, but he didn’t show up. This was because, as was soon discovered, he had been murdered. Momika had become notorious worldwide for daring on several occasions to set fire to the Qur’an, and had received death threats on a more or less daily basis. In fact, that was why he was on trial. He was charged with “agitation against an ethnic or national group” for burning the Qur’an, which was ridiculous on its face: Momika was Iraqi, after all, and was setting fire to the Islamic book not because he wanted to agitate against Muslims, but because he wanted to call attention to the violence and oppression that the Qur’an inspires those who believe in it to commit.

The Swedish government should have hailed Momika as a hero of the freedom of expression; instead it vilified and persecuted him. Reuters reported in Aug. 2024 that Swedish authorities were planning to try Momika and another Iraqi who had burned the Qur’an, Salwan Najem, “for setting fire to the Quran in a series of incidents last year that prompted outrage in the Muslim world and raised fears of attacks by jihadists.” It was because the Qur’an burnings “raised fears of attacks by jihadists” that Momika and Najem went on trial. Sweden surrendered to violent intimidation and discarded the freedom of speech out of cowardice and fear rather than committing itself to doing what it takes to defend its own way of life.

And now it’s France’s turn. Has anyone in France been charged with “degradation committed on the grounds of race, ethnicity, nation, or religion” for committing this act of “degradation” against the cherished artifacts of any religion other than Islam? Will such charges ever be brought in a land where jihad preachers? Come on, man!

This case is another exercise in introducing Islamic blasphemy laws by the back door, and killing the freedom of speech. If France somehow manages to survive, or revive, as a free society and a true history of our absurd age is ever written there, the legal persecution of this unnamed man who burned the Qur’an will be seen as one of the milestones of the nation’s descent into totalitarian madness.