By Gerri Peev
Last updated at 10:35 AM on 19th July 2010
Over-the-top ‘religious hate’ laws have fuelled a worrying trend of prosecutions for even mildly critical remarks, a think tank has warned.
Draconian hate laws have dragged disputes that would normally be settled in a healthy argument between people into the courts, it suggests.
The majority of those prosecuted are white men, it claims.
Prosecuted: Christian hoteliers Ben and Sharon Vogelenzang were charged and then cleared of religiously aggravated hate crimes
A new report from the think tank Civitas ‘A New Inquisition: religious persecution in Britain today’, warns that people are being charged with serious offences for discussing religion.
It cites examples of over the top prosecutions including:
- Christian hoteliers Ben and Sharon Vogelenzang were charged with religiously aggravated hate crimes after describing the prophet Mohammed as a ‘warlord’ to guest Ericka Tazi. The couple pleaded their innocence and the charges were thrown out.
- Atheist Harry Taylor put leaflets mocking Christianity and Islam in a prayer room at Liverpool’s John Lennon Airport. He was charged with causing religiously aggravated intentional harassment, alarm or distress under the Public Order Act.
- Tauriq Khalid was taken to court for a racially motivated ‘hate’ offence after he gave a two fingered gesture to BNP leader Nick Griffin. Mr Khalid was cleared. Although the blasphemy law – which only applied to Christians – was repealed in 2008, it has been overtaken with a much more virulent ‘anti hatred’ legislation.
People are being charged through the back door for causing ‘religiously aggravated intentional harassment, alarm or distress’ under the Public Order Act.
This could destroy open and critical decision of religion, warns academic and author, Jon Gower Davies, formerly head of religious studies at Newcastle University.
He said: ‘The British people might be forgiven for thinking that their basic religious-cultural inheritance, the culture under which we have grown up, is not just out of control but under some insidious attack.’
While the number of racial and religious hate crimes fell from 13,201 in 2006-7 to 11,845 in 2008-9, the volume of hate legislation has rapidly expanded.
Mr Davies said: ‘The law has been invited to insert its punitive, plodding and primitive self into areas of life from which we have long been accustomed to assume not simply its absence, but the positive existence of a freely-negotiated civic culture. In this culture and civil society we accept an obligation to sort things out for ourselves—as reasonable men and reasonable women.’
Hate laws, he warned, would actually fuel more abuse and hate as assorted ‘miscreants’ would be paraded before the courts.
Mr Davies said that there seemed to be a bias in applying the law.
He said: ‘The new laws do not simply remove blasphemy but extend it: and (again, in effect) extend it to provide a special de facto protection to Islam.’
The majority of defendants in race or religious hate crimes were white British males, he said. When a Muslim man defaced a war memorial in Burton upon Trent after spraying the words ‘Islam will dominate the world—Osama is on his way’ and ‘Kill Gordon Brown’ across the plinth, he was prosecuted for criminal damage but not for religious or race offences.
The Crown Prosecution Service had argued that defacing the memorial was not an attack on any particular racial or religious group.
Its the usual suspects in this case who are to blame: Muslims.
Muslims come from cultures where any slight, any criticism, any words directed at someone can be considered libel or slander, even if the words describe the truth. They only have to say that the words offended them to get their way.
In the west, you cannot libel the truth (so the law states, but lets see that in practice) and open discussion of personal beliefs are generally not subject to legal action.
So when you take millions of Muslims out of the culture where the truth can be shouted down and where you cannot call bad people out for their actions, and place them in the free world, what happens?
Freedom of speech goes out the door, to be replaced by the all-too-sensitive Muslim way of thinking, which is effectively: “All that we do is superior to what you do, and if you tell us otherwise, we will take you to court, destroy your lives and conquer you for the sake of Islam”.
The Britainistan government has been playing further into the hands of Islam ever since the day that Harrod’s was bought by Arabs in the 1970s. And for what, I ask?
Votes and a steady supply of OPEC oil and gas from the Middle East.
Such a waste of a once proud nation.
That’s the way it always will be when it involves the practitioners of “The Religion Of Peace” it’s ALWAYS their way or no way. We’ve all been sold out by our collective Western governments, and been handed a lot of PC crap.
The more dangerous enemy is the Western Left.
Atleast Christians are getting a wiff of there own medicine.
Where is the IRA when you need them?