Does Britain need an "anti-blasphemy" law?

The Labour Government thinks so. Islamophobia is dangerous, after all, since Muslims who are angry are dangerous. 

Indeed. https://t.co/kDP1CcR7ZW

— Raja Miah (@recusant_raja) February 4, 2025

A man who burned a Koran was just arrested in Manchester for intentionally causing distress, so this is not a hypothetical debate that is taking place in Parliament. Hate speech laws are already running rampant in the UK, and it could soon officially be illegal to grossly offend Muslims. 

The question now isn't whether Labour will press ahead - they will. The question also isn't whether they can craft a definition that satisfies both religious communities and free speech advocates. Given the track record, they might find that an impossible circle to square. Maybe,… pic.twitter.com/3Cq894FUiB

— Raja Miah (@recusant_raja) February 4, 2025

There is a lot of discussion of defending people of any faith from offense--a bad idea in itself and surely not to be evenly applied. If so a lot of Muslims who shout anti-Christian and anti-Jewish slogans in the streets would be going to jail. This is without question intended to apply almost exclusively to critics of Islam. 

Britain has de facto blasphemy laws because it's the easiest way to suppress "community tensions". Having imported groups that don't sign up to liberal tenets, it finds it easier to police everyone else's behaviour than to assimilate them. This is why the rules only go one way. https://t.co/0M1L16EcTb pic.twitter.com/zd3wJYPuP5

— Sam Ashworth-Hayes (@SAshworthHayes) February 2, 2025

The original paper on which the anti-blasphemy laws are likely to be based specifically calls out people discussing the Muslim rape gangs as bigots. Having rapists roam the streets is an unfortunate fact of life, but calling them and their culture out is beyond the pale. 

I can't figure out whether Labour's obsession with placating Muslim extremists in Britain is due to fear, a desire to pander to an important constituent group that keeps them in power or some combination of the two. 

It doesn't matter. The further they go down this path, the bigger the backlash. 

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 UK government will arrest Christians for silently praying on the street or preaching at the Speakers' Corner in London, but when tens of thousands of Muslims block the streets during their evening prayers, it is seen as a wonderful cultural expression that everybody should cherish. 

Or else. 

The arrest of a man in Britain for allegedly burning the Koran is chilling. The police are doing the bidding of Islamist hardliners. This is medieval intolerance disguised as progressive multiculturalism, says Fraser Myers https://t.co/psp24gJFNN

— spiked (@spikedonline) February 3, 2025

It's all part of a Europe-wide bowing down to Islamist extremists. Rather than demanding that immigrants adapt to European culture, the authorities are instead demanding that native Britons and Europeans bow down to them. 

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.

The war on "hate speech" is just a subset of the war on all speech. "Misinformation," "disinformation," "malinformation" (which is true but inconvenient speech) are all just descriptions of speech that the people in power find uncomfortable. 

The tide has turned in the United States. Let's hope the same happens elsewhere.