A court ruling on Monday in Britain, if it is allowed to stand, could do nothing less than change the course of that country’s history, and that of the entire world. The U.K. has taken a decisive step away from the principles of free speech that it played a dominant role in formulating and giving to the world. There is serious cause for doubt now about whether the Sceptered Isle will even survive as a free society.
Officially, Hamit Coskun was found guilty of a “religiously aggravated public order offence.” His specific crime, however, was that he publicly burned a copy of the Qur’an, the Islamic holy book. It is not a crime to burn the Qur’an or any book in Britain; Coskun wasn’t convicted of burning the book as such, but of disturbing the public order by doing so. That means that he poses a problem for British law not insofar as he burned a book, which is permitted, but because in doing so he opened the door to public disturbances, which is not permitted. In other words, Hamit Coskun was convicted of a crime because Muslims might have rioted or committed jihad terror attacks over his actions.
In convicting Coskun, the U.K. has thus enshrined the heckler’s veto as part of British law. If he had burned a Bible, no one would have cared, and there would have been no possible disturbance to the “public order.” The threat of jihad violence is now guiding the course of British law and infringing upon the freedom of speech. The British government has now compounded the prospect of some Muslims reacting violently to the burning of the Qur’an by making it clear that whether they do or not, the culprit will have to face the wrath of the British state.
For his part, Coskun charged, quite correctly, that his conviction would "deter others from exercising their democratic rights to peaceful protest and freedom of expression." Reading that, British authorities likely nodded their heads in agreement, as that’s exactly what the conviction is designed to do. Nevertheless, Coskun, who has made it clear that he intended his burning of the Qur’an to call attention to the crimes done in the name of Islam and in accord with its teachings, vowed that he would "continue to campaign against the threat of Islam.”
Coskun pointed out that "Christian blasphemy laws were repealed in this country more than 15 years ago and it cannot be right to prosecute someone for blaspheming against Islam.” He asked a question that British authorities would do well to ponder, but won’t: "Would I have been prosecuted if I'd set fire to a copy of the bible outside Westminster Abbey? I doubt it."
And so what now for Britain? The conviction of Hamit Coskun sets an extremely dangerous precedent, for even though he wasn’t actually convicted of blasphemy against Islam, everyone in the U.K. knows that was the point of putting him on trial in the first place, as he himself noted. Now that British authorities have made it clear that desecration of the Qur’an is a criminal offense, the door is open to the adoption of other provisions of Islamic law (Sharia).
In fact, the door to this was already opened wide by the widespread determination, which spanned decades and still lingers, to ignore the massive phenomenon of Muslim rape gangs praying on tens of thousands, and possibly even hundreds of thousands, of British girls. The Qur’an allows Muslim men to take infidel women as sex slaves (4:3, 4:24, 23:1-6, 33:50, 70:30), and British authorities let it happen on a grand scale for fear that stopping the perpetrators would be “racist” and “Islamophobic.”
Related: Is the West Suffering From an Absence of Islam?
So now in Britain, we have the authorities’ tacit acceptance of the Qur’anic seizure and sexual use of non-Muslim women and of Sharia blasphemy laws. As Islamic law continues to advance in Britain, non-Muslims will find themselves increasingly subjugated. Many will convert to Islam simply to escape discrimination and social opprobrium, as many have already done.
If this acquiescence to Islamic law continues, eventually the non-Muslims of Britain will be like the Christians of Egypt and Pakistan: a tiny, embattled minority, eking out a precarious existence in a hostile culture. Remember: “Copt” means “Egyptian.” The Egyptians have been colonized in their own land, reduced to a despised minority within it. The same process is now well underway in Britain.
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