Hamit Coskun has been found guilty of a ‘religiously-motivated public order offence’, after he burnt a Quran in front of the Turkish embassy in London. This is Britain’s first formal capitulation to Islamic blasphemy laws. Not only does it suggest that Islam deserves special protection against sacrilege, and shielding from the freedom to offend, but it also rewards the radical Muslims for exercising violence against expressions of irreverence.
In accordance with the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 and the Public Order Act 1986, Coskun was found guilty of disorderly behaviour ‘within the hearing or sight of a person likely to be caused harassment, alarm or distress,’ motivated by ‘hostility towards members of a religious group, namely followers of Islam.’
Here is what happened, as described in the court’s judgement. Coskun burnt a Quran, ‘held the burning book aloft’ and shouted ‘Islam is the religion of terrorists’ and ‘the Quran is burning’. A man then came out from an adjacent property, called Coskun a ‘fucking idiot’ and said he was going to kill him. The man ‘launched a savage attack on [Coskun]… and kicked and spat at [him].’
The judgement continues: ‘What made his conduct disorderly was the timing and location of the conduct and that all this was accompanied by abuse language… That the conduct was disorderly is not better illustrated than by the fact that it led to serious public disorder involving him being assaulted by two different people.’
The court’s verdict, like the blasphemy laws in the Muslim world, seems to uphold the idea that the ‘disorder’ caused by any expression against Islam – here the burning of the holy book of the religion – is the fault of the person exercising that expression, and not the individual or group responding aggressively.
Islamist leaders have long championed a global blasphemy law. I remember a few years ago when Imran Khan said he wanted Muslim countries to enforce trade boycotts on countries where blasphemous ‘incidents’ occurred. Finally, in a different form, the Islamists may be getting what they want.
Britain, of course, isn’t the only European country to have suppressed its commitment to freedom of speech in recent times. In 2023, Denmark took a relatively more straightforward route by passing a law banning ‘inappropriate treatment’ of religious texts to counter violence emanating from the believers of only one particular religious text.
Coskun has been sentenced to a life fearing death
While Sweden didn’t carry out a legislative abandonment of its commitment to free speech, it effectively carried out the same last year by charging Quran-burners with ‘hate crimes’ against Muslims, treating Muslims as an ‘ethnic group’. One of those charged, Salwan Momika, was found murdered in his Stockholm apartment in January. Unfortunately, it was only after the sharia penalty for blasphemy against Islam had been extrajudicially meted out to Momika that the charges against him were dropped by the Swedish court.
More than the £240 fine he is officially charged with, Coskun has been sentenced to a life fearing death at the hands of those Muslims who feel vindicated by another European court deeming the burning of paper as an assault on human beings. The fact that he is of Armenian and Kurdish heritage, two communities that have faced scores of brutalities at the hands of the Turkish Islamist regimes, will make his life harder still.
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