“What happened here was that a 62 year old in Leeds, Dick Warrington, put one of these ‘Islam out of Britain’ posters in the window of his house. The police came one day and asked him to remove it and took it away. The next day, of course, he put another one in the window. The police come and they arrest him under incitement to racial hatred. Of course, what happened was that once they got to the police station they found out that there is no legislation to cover his arrest, because Muslims are excluded from existing racial hatred laws. The BNP are fully aware of this. I will just read a quote from them. They say ‘The snag for the police, however, is that Islam is not covered by the anti-free speech race law… it’s legal to say anything you want about Islam, even far more extreme things than the very moderate message on the poster’. I think that is the first point I would like to make, that the BNP and the National Front and other far right groups are fully aware of the legislation and they do work entirely within those constraints.”

Chris Allen of FAIR explains to the House of Lords Select Committee on Religious Offences how fascists are able to circumvent the law against inciting racial hatred.

Select Committee on Religious Offences, 17 October 2002

“There is currently an iniquitous anomaly in the law producing a hierarchy of protected faith communities. Mono-ethnic faith communities, like the Sikh and Jewish communities, are protected from discrimination, benefit from a positive duty on public authorities to promote equality, and protected from the aggravated offences of harassment, violence and criminal damage motivated by racial hatred, as well as the incitement of such hatred. Non-ethnic or multi-ethnic minority religious groups, like Muslims, do not on the whole benefit from such protection or provisions, unless it could be shown that the treatment, behaviour or circumstance was indirectly racial. And finally, non-ethnic or multi-ethnic majority religious groups, like Christians, are not covered at all.”

FAIR briefing on incitement to religious hatred, October 2002. Fascist anti-Muslim posters and leaflets are appended.

The Religious Offences Bill 2002: A Response