Category Archives: Religious hatred law

‘Ha, ha! This bill has incited luvvies to hate Labour’, Torygraph writer sneers

Posted on by Bob Pitt

stephenfryAnother jaw-droppingly ignorant attack on the religious hatred bill, by Jasper Gerard in the Sunday Times.

Still, we’re helpfully provided with Stephen Fry’s penetrating insights into the issue: “It’s now common to hear people say, ‘I’m rather offended by that,’ as if that gives them certain rights. It’s no more than a whine. ‘I’m offended by that.’ Well, so fucking what?”

Ah, the wonders of an Oxbridge education.

Sunday Times, 26 June 2005

Also worth noting that Fry’s description of the bill as “a sop to Muslims” has been approvingly quoted by the BNP. See here.

Why watered down religious hatred legislation won’t work

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Why watered down religious hatred legislation won’t work

By Ken Livingstone

Morning Star, 25 June 2005

The government’s new Bill proposing a ban on incitement to religious hatred, which last week passed its second reading in the Commons by 303 votes to 247, has been the subject of much controversy.

As mayor of the most diverse city in the world, I strongly support this Bill, and welcome the fact that the overwhelming majority of Londoners do so too.

Our polls show that 72 per cent of Londoners support a ban on inciting hatred against people on grounds of their religion, while only 15 per cent oppose it.

Unfortunately, this mass public support for the Bill has been ignored by the media, who have concentrated on publicising the vocal objections of the Tory party and a few well-known celebrities, who have tended to portray the Bill as a form of blasphemy law.

The position under existing race relations laws is discriminatory and clearly unacceptable.

Some faith groups such as Jews and Sikhs are currently protected from incitement to hatred, whereas members of other faiths such as Hindus and Muslims are not.

This has left a dangerous loophole in the law which is being exploited by the extreme right.

The British National Party has been energetically propagating its racist filth by whipping up Islamophobia, playing on post-9/11 stereotypes of Muslims as terrorists.

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In defence of the religious hatred bill

Posted on by Bob Pitt

George Carty emails us to ask: “How can you brand opponents of the [religious hatred] bill in general as Islamophobes, given that Amir Butler (very sympathetic to the Islamist cause) opposed similar laws in Australia?” (For Butler’s views see here.)

I suppose there are several answers to this.

First, there are also Muslims who oppose the religious hatred bill in Britain – Dr Siddiqui of the Muslim Parliament is one, and I believe the Islamic Human Rights Commission takes a similar position.

But these are hardly mass organisations. The Muslim Council of Britain is the umbrella body for the majority of Muslim organisations in the UK, with over 300 affiliates, and it is solidly behind the bill. I suspect that you will find that Amir Butler’s views are those of only a minority of Australian Muslims.

Also, the arguments used by the likes of Amir Butler, Dr Siddiqui and the IHRC are essentially pragmatic – that the legislation will act to the detriment of Muslims – which is rather different from the arguments put forward by non-Muslim opponents of the bill.

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Douglas Wood and Danny Nalliah – the parallels are obvious

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Douglas Wood and Danny Nalliah

“Douglas Wood lost his freedom at gunpoint; Danny Nalliah and Daniel Scot lost theirs by court-ordered political correctness. We know who rescued Mr. Wood; who will save the pastors?”

Diana West draws a parallel between the repression suffered by Australian hostage Wood at the hands of terrorists in Iraq and that suffered by two right-wing Christian fundamentalist pastors who have been convicted of vilifying Islam in the state of Victoria.

Washington Times, 24 June 2004

Over at Jihad Watch, Robert Spencer applauds this as an example of “clear thinking”!

Dhimmi Watch, 25 June 2005

Labour left fails to stand up for right to incite anti-Muslim hatred, AWL complains

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Outlawing incitement to hatred on the basis of religious belief, as opposed to ethnicity, is a major attack on freedom of speech. It means extending the blasphemy laws which still, at least in theory, protect Anglican Christianity from rational public debate, to shield all religions with authoritarian impartiality.

“The bill is partly a cynical pitch to win back Muslim voters outraged by Blair’s warmongering and erosion of civil liberties (like the expansion of state funding for faith schools, and defence of the hijab) and partly the brainchild of a Prime Minister with a lot of respect for religious superstition and very little for human rights.

“So why did the left of the Parliamentary Labour Party, whose leaders have boasted that they will be ‘setting the agenda’ for this Parliament, fail to rebel?

“Unfortunately, on this issue as on many others, these MPs are highly representative of a left which is increasingly losing its political bearings. The ‘religious hatred’ law has elicited not a squeak of protest from the trade union movement; meanwhile the National Union of Students, on the initiative of the SWP and their Stalinist friends Socialist Action, has positively endorsed new Labour’s assault on respect for rational thinking and free speech.”

Sacha Ismael of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty and Houzan Mahmoud of the Worker Communist Party of Iraq provide us with a good illustration of which section of the left has really lost its bearings. The section of the left that supports the right to incite hatred against Muslims and sneers at the defence of the right to wear the hijab.

Solidarity, 23 June 2005

The force of racism

Posted on by Bob Pitt

forza“Europe is no longer Europe, it is ‘Eurabia,’ a colony of Islam, where the Islamic invasion does not proceed only in a physical sense, but also in a mental and cultural sense. Servility to the invaders has poisoned democracy, with obvious consequences for the freedom of thought, and for the concept itself of liberty.”

The Wall Street Journal, 23 June 2005 gives Oriana Fallaci a sympathetic hearing.

This is the woman whose right to free speech is defended by the likes of Nick Cohen and Melanie Phillips. Ms Fallaci is typical of the sort of poor innocent who could be imprisoned for up to seven years in Britain if the new religious hatred bill becomes law, we are warned.

Another excellent reason to support the bill, if you ask me.

Opposition to anti-incitement bill defeated

Posted on by Bob Pitt

So the predicted backbench rebellion failed to materialise, and yesterday the new bill outlawing incitement to religious hatred passed its second reading in the Commons by 303 votes to 247. Interesting that the Lib Dems found themselves in a bloc with the Tories in opposing the bill.

It’s not every day that this member of the Islamophobia Watch collective applauds the politics of Gerald Kaufman MP, but I can’t help approving of the attack he launched on the Tories in the course of the debate:

“The problem with interventions by Conservative Members is they are totally unrepresentative of the population as a whole in that hardly any of them are open to the kind of humiliation that many members of our communities are open to. If they were, they would not be criticising this legislation.”

He went on to refer to “the case of Mrs Shahzada, a constituent of mine who went to a shop in central Manchester soon after 9/11. She wears a veil over her face, and the shopkeeper refused to serve her because she was, to his perception, a Muslim. That was hatred against an individual, not a criticism of Islam. It is about time that we had an Opposition who understood the kind of country that we live in today.”

Hansard, 21 June 2005

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Pastor prefers jail over apology

Posted on by Bob Pitt

NalliahA Christian pastor who has been ordered to apologise for vilifying Muslims says he will go to jail rather than say sorry for his comments.

Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal (VCAT) deputy president Michael Higgins ordered two pastors of an evangelical order, Catch the Fire Ministry, to apologise for comments they made in a speech, on a website and in a newsletter. In a landmark ruling, the tribunal found Muslims were vilified by claims that Muslims were training to take over Australia, encouraging domestic violence and that Islam was an inherently violent religion.

Outside the tribunal, Danny Nalliah – one of the pastors taken to VCAT by the Islamic Council – described himself as a martyr and said he would go to jail before apologising.

Herald Sun, 22 June 2005

Throw away the key, I say.

We need this law to fight hatred

Posted on by Bob Pitt

We need this law to fight hatred

By Sadiq Khan, MP for Tooting

Evening Standard, 21 June 2005

It is, if its critics are to believed, a grievous threat both to our freedom of speech and to the nation’s cherished sense of humour. As such, the Racial and Religious Hatred Bill, which has its second reading in Parliament today, has been derided as dangerous, politically cynical, and most of all, as unnecessary. So why do so few of my fellow Muslims see it that way?

Debating the Bill, Muslims tend to think not of vicar jokes but of incidents like one in a charity shop in Shepherd’s Bush recently, where a white, British Muslim woman was told by another customer: “You may be English, but you married a f***ing Muslim.”

We think not about alleged political calculations, but about the dangers faced, for example, by one woman recently attacked in the street in north-west London while wearing Muslim dress. She was warned sympathetically by the nurse who treated her injuries: “You have to take off this scarf. Every month we get several cases like you who come for treatment.”

Indeed Muslims might tend to question the extent of freedom of speech when simply going out dressed recognisably as a Muslim can invite assault. Many reported cases involve Muslim women having their headscarves forcibly pulled off and or having alcohol thrown at them. In one incident, a schoolgirl had her headscarf pulled off by a parent of another child at the school gates, to the sound of laughter from those watching.

All these incidents happened because these Londoners were Muslims. It was not about the colour of their skin but the religion they follow.

The Racial and Religious Hatred Bill is not about gagging comedians or curbing criticism of any religion. It is about giving Muslims and other followers of religions the same protection from hate crimes as, for example, black people.

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‘We’ oppose an anti-incitement law, says Will Hutton

Posted on by Bob Pitt

willhutton“Being a Muslim, especially a Muslim woman, in Britain is for many a dispiriting and occasionally terrifying experience. The society that prides itself on tolerance has lost its bearings over Islam. On the streets, the prejudice that Islam is irrationally and murderously violent and menacingly foreign has spawned a subculture of hatred and abuse. If you are a woman in a hijab, being jeered at, even spat at, is routine. Many never venture from their houses.

“This is fertile ground for widespread racism and where the law is currently uncertain. Harassment and abuse are certainly illegal, but the threshold that incurs legal action is very high; equally illegal is the expression of hatred, or views that might incite hatred, towards a group or individual for their race.

“But the woman in a hijab could be African, Asian or Middle Eastern. It is not her race that makes her the object of hatred; it is her religious belief and culture that require her to dress in such a conspicuously different way and make her part of the hated group. The law, as currently framed, offers her no systematic protection, and no explicit penalty for a political party, say the BNP, that chooses to make such hatred a central plank of its electoral pitch.”

Thus Will Hutton in the Observer, 19 June 2005

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