There’s nothing like a good old-fashioned blasphemy debate to get the blood pumping and temperature rising.
After all, you got the incendiary mix of religion, politics, and free speech all rolled into one messy debate. In Great Britain, the debate revolves around whether the nation can be made safe for “Mohammedans,” as Winston Churchill charmingly referred to Muslims. (Referring to Muslims as “Mohammedans” is not a slur. It’s an adjective. And if I can’t use an adjective as a “charming” descriptor for Muslims, I will turn myself in for violating America’s blasphemy laws. Just as soon as Congress passes one.)
As always with the Mohammedans, safety for them usually means ball-gags in the mouths of Christians and Jews. I’d add atheists, Hindus, Zoroastrians, Buddhists, Voodoo practitioners, and agnostics as well because walking on eggshells around Muslims to avoid blaspheming The Prophet, or Allah, is a fraught exercise.
Mohammedans are a very, very sensitive bunch; snowflakes with machetes.
And they like nothing better than to remind everyone that, because they are more devout than anyone else (being adherents to the “true faith”), more pure of heart, just more gooder than the rest of us, their ears need to be protected from others making fun of, or insulting, or looking sideways at anything to do with their religion.
Let’s face it. The Mohammedans haven’t quite got the hang of this whole “Western Civilization” thing. They accept the concept of “free speech.” That’s what they tell us, anyway. But they have a decidedly offbeat definition of it.
For Mohammedans, it’s “free speech for me, but not for thee.”
In Merry Old England, the Mohammedans are celebrating the most restrictive speech code in the Western world. What the rest of Great Britain thinks won’t matter. Steve Reed, the secretary of state for communities, has issued a diktat that will salve the bruised feelings of all Mohammedans going forward.
“The definition itself is a masterpiece of legal incoherence,” writes Toby Toung.
Reed has officially adopted a definition of “anti-Muslim hostility”—“Islamophobia” by another name—and announced that a government-appointed “special representative,” a so-called “czar,” will record complaints and ensure that anyone who falls foul of the definition is “appropriately” dealt with. The definition is to be rolled out across the police, the NHS, schools, universities, local authorities, museums, libraries, and—in Reed’s own words—“public and private organizations more widely.” So everywhere, basically. Diversity officers, safeguarding leads, and HR consultants will be rubbing their hands with glee.
Now, you might think: What’s wrong with that? Nobody wants Muslims to face hatred or discrimination. But here’s the problem. Discrimination against Muslims—indeed, against people of any religion—is already illegal under Britain’s Equality Act of 2010. Stirring up religious hatred is also a criminal offense under the Public Order Act of 1986. The law, in other words, already protects Muslims from genuine discrimination and incitement. What this new definition adds is something very different: a mechanism for policing criticism of Muslims and the religion of Islam that comes nowhere near the threshold of criminality.
“On one hand, it says that to be guilty of anti-Muslim hostility a person must be involved in ‘engaging in, assisting or encouraging criminal acts’ or ‘unlawful discrimination’—seemingly an attempt to ensure the definition isn’t applied too broadly,” Young observes.
“But the accompanying guidance goes far beyond what the law prohibits and uses a thicket of vague, legally undefined terms: ‘prejudicial stereotyping,’ ‘negative, beyond the bounds of protected free speech,’ ‘public interest,’ ‘reprehensible’ to proscribe words, actions, and even attitudes that are deemed ‘anti-Muslim.’”
The government wants to appoint a “Czar” to police speech to make sure that the sensitive ears of Britain’s Mohammedans are protected at all times from jokes and inadvertent utterances that will be deliberately misconstrued.
This is an old left-wing trick: make the law sound reasonable to most ears while slipping in landmines and bear traps to capture the unwary.
To get a sense of how this definition is likely to be used, consider what happened immediately after Reed announced he’d be adopting it in the House of Commons. Iqbal Mohamed, an independent MP and pro-Gaza activist, rose to ask whether the definition could be incorporated into the Nolan Principles—the ethical framework governing public life—and applied to what he asserted was the “escalating hostility” of MPs and peers towards Muslims, with appropriate “sanctions” applied. One might have hoped Reed would point out that everything said in Parliament is protected by parliamentary privilege, one of the oldest constitutional safeguards in the English-speaking world. Instead, he said Mohamed was “right to point to the huge concern we should all share”—namely, the concern about parliamentarians being guilty of Islamophobia.
Lord Young’s Free Speech Union is bringing a “judicial review” action against Reed’s decision. The review will determine if Reed has overstepped his authority. If this were 30 years ago, I don’t think there would be any doubt that the review board would slap Reed down hard.
But this is 21st-century England. It’s a different country now, and there are a lot more Mohammedans who vote in British elections.
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