A man was murdered in Sweden last week by Islamists. What was the response of the authorities? To make it harder for people such as him to get on the wrong side of the extremists in the first place.
Salwan Momika, an Iraqi Christian asylum-seeker, was shot in an apartment in Stockholm after he burned a copy of the Koran. According to the BBC report, “The government later pledged to explore legal means of abolishing protests that involve burning texts in certain circumstances.”
Read that statement again. Jihadi thugs killed someone because they disliked his opinions, and the response was to make sure that such a situation does not arise again. Don’t hurt these crybullies’ feelings, and then they won’t have to murder you!
Ever since President Donald Trump’s inauguration, I have been reading articles about how wokery has peaked and free speech is all the rage again. All I can say is the news has been slow to reach Europe.
Not long after the murder in Stockholm, a man was convicted of a public order offense for burning a Koran in Manchester, England. Martin Frost was filmed waving an Israeli flag before ripping up and setting fire to the book next to the memorial for the 22 people, many of them young girls, who were killed when an Islamist radical bombed an Ariana Grande concert in 2017.
What law did Frost break? Britain once had a blasphemy law that banned “contemptuous, reviling, scurrilous or ludicrous” speech. The last time anyone was jailed under it was in 1921, and it was later removed from the books.
I happen to find Frost’s behavior oafish and obnoxious. Setting out to provoke people who have done you no wrong is, by any measure, an unpleasant way to act. However, free speech means that we tolerate offensiveness right up to the point where it becomes incitement or harassment. So, on what basis was Frost sentenced?
“The Koran is a sacred book to Muslims, and treating it as you did is going to cause extreme distress,” said the presiding judge, Margaret McCormack. “This is a tolerant country, but we just do not tolerate this behavior.”
War is peace, freedom is slavery, prison is tolerance. We managed to beat the Nazis and the USSR without losing our commitment to free speech. However, we are dropping it in a panic now.
Why? Largely because of how we came to elevate anti-racism as the supreme test of every public policy. Because most Muslims happen not to be white, liberals who, in other circumstances, are strongly secularist threw their usual convictions out of the window.
I first became aware of the double standard as a schoolboy in the late 1980s. A satirical TV show of that era called Spitting Image specialized in “contemptuous, reviling, scurrilous or ludicrous” sketches. One of its targets was Jesus, which prompted complaints from Christian viewers. The makers of the program swatted such complaints aside, rightly telling the grumblers that if the show bothered them, they didn’t have to watch it. Then, a Muslim objected to the depiction of his religion’s second prophet, and immediately, the program pulled the sketch, putting out a statement to the effect that minorities had a hard enough time of it already.
That was just before the fatwa was proclaimed against Salman Rushdie. All of a sudden, the matter of upsetting certain religions was no longer just about patronizing minorities. It was also about self-preservation. Cowardice and self-righteousness turned out to be a powerful combination.
Britain is now drawing up a code on Islamophobia. However, why, in a free society, should you need any such codes for subgroups? Incitement and intimidation are already illegal. The idea that certain forms of behavior ought to be banned only with reference to protected groups has The idea that certain forms of behavior ought to be banned only with reference to protected groups has wormed its way into our discourse over the past 30 years and is no longer seen as the outrage that it should be.
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Let us put this bluntly. Since the 1950s, Britain, such as the United States, has admitted millions of immigrants from every corner of the world. Most, including most Muslims, came precisely because they admired British values and wanted to adopt them. Some did not.
Instead of obliging that minority to accept the laws and norms of their new country, the authorities have forced everyone else to adapt to them, criminalizing what would otherwise be perfectly legal behavior and retreating from the values that elevated our civilization in the first place. It is hard to think of a more egregious example of state failure.