Category Archives: Religious hatred law

House of Lords asked to reject amendments to Religious Hatred Bill

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The Muslim Council of Britain calls on the House of Lords to reject the amendments proposed today by those opposed to the Racial and Religious Hatred Bill.

“These proposed amendments will allow the current unfair situation whereby we have a hierarchy of rights for members of different faith groups to continue. The amendments – if accepted – will mean that British Muslims will continue to remain second-class citizens and denied the same level of legal protection that is given to some racial and religious groups including Jews and Sikhs under existing racial incitement laws,” said Sir Iqbal Sacranie, Secretary-General of the Muslim Council of Britain.

The MCB believes that some opponents of the Racial and Religious Hatred Bill have been engaged in a campaign to misrepresent its purpose and have misleadingly claimed that it will prevent criticism or ridicule of religion. This is demonstrably untrue as will be clear to anyone who has read the actual wording of the Bill.

“The opponents of the Racial and Religious Hatred Bill have yet to provide a credible answer as to why we can trust our judicial system to be able to make a distinction between criticism of the Jewish and Sikh religions and incitement to hatred against Jews and Sikhs, while not being able to do the same in the case of other faith groups, including Muslims,” added Sir Iqbal.

Without the proposed extension of the existing incitement law, Muslims and other faith groups remain unprotected, since they do not fall into a single racial group. The purpose of the proposed law is to protect people belonging to a particular faith identity and not the faith itself. Existing incitement laws in England and Wales and Northern Ireland have proved that it is possible to give protection to people without infringing on the right to free speech and the right to criticize religious beliefs.

MCB press release, 25 October 2005

CRE on Racial and Religious Hatred Bill

Posted on by Bob Pitt

bnp-islam-poster“… in May 2004, following the receipt of complaints from members of the public, the CRE wrote to the West Yorkshire Police Constabulary to ask that it investigate the distribution of a BNP leaflet, ‘The Truth About Islam: Intolerance, Slaughter, Looting, Arson, Molestation of Women’, in Dewsbury where there is a sizeable Pakistani community, locally referred to as ‘the Muslims’.

“We received the following reply from the West Yorkshire branch of the CPS: ‘[T]he leaflet is quite clearly insulting and abusive and arguably, in its talk of war and crusades, threatening too. The stirring up of fear and hatred against Muslims is … a likely result of its publication given the strength of the language used. Muslims are not, however, a racial group … and the hatred stirred up could not therefore be defined as racial hatred … [I]t might be that evidence could be gathered to establish whether or not the term “Muslim” is generally understood to mean “Pakistani” or “Indian”. The difficulty in relation to this particular leaflet … is that [it states] “This problem is not a matter of race. Those Muslims oppressing and murdering infidels and women have included Arabs, Pakistanis, Black Nigerian and White Bosnians”. Given this specific statement it would not be possible to infer incitement to racial hatred’.”

The Commission for Racial Equality explains why it is necessary to extend the present laws against incitement to racial hatred to cover religious hatred.

CRE briefing, 11 October 2005

Perhaps someone might explain this to James Jones and Joan Smith.

Times attacks Racial and Religious Hatred Bill (again)

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The level of argument by opponents of the Racial and Religious Hatred Bill is quite unbelievably low. A case in point is the editorial in today’s Times.

The Bill has nothing to do with the blasphemy laws, as the Times implies. And Salman Rushdie would be no more likely find himself prosecuted for publishing The Satanic Verses than the Birmingham Rep was for staging Behzti (Sikhs as a mono-ethnic faith are already protected against incitement to hatred under Part 3 of the 1986 Public Order Act). The idea that people choose their religion but not their race ignores the obvious fact that culture (which includes religious belief) is an integral part of a minority community’s ethnic identity.

Nor is the government “proposing a law that would allow people to ridicule ideas as long as they were not religious ideas”, as the Times quotes Rowan Atkinson as saying. The new law wouldn’t ban ridicule of people on the basis of their religion any more than earlier race relations legislation criminalised ridicule of people on the basis of their ethnicity (if it did, Bernard Manning would have been locked up long ago). In both cases what is made illegal is the incitement of hatred.

The Times is, however, correct to point out that the amendment to the Bill proposed by Lords Lester, Hunt, Carey and Plant would make an “important distinction between laws against racism and those that seek to protect the religious from persecution”. Their lordships aim to introduce a new Part 3A to the Public Order Act, the result of which would be to make it much more difficult to succcessfully prosecute someone for inciting hatred against Muslims or Hindus than it is to prosecute them for inciting hatred against Jews or Sikhs. In other words, it would preserve the injustice, inequality and discrimination embodied in current race relations law which the Bill seeks to rectify.

Postscript:  For another example of the ignorance demonstrated by opponents of the Bill, see Harry’s Place where we are referred to the Times editorial for “a succinct and persuasive argument against the proposed Racial and Religious Hatred legislation”!

Hatred Bill panders to minorities for votes, says comic

Posted on by Bob Pitt

PratRowan Atkinson made the least funny speech of his career yesterday when he went to warn the House of Lords of the threat to free speech from a law banning religious hatred.

The star of Blackadder and Mr Bean spoke of the dangers of politicians pandering to minority religions for votes. An all-party group of peers is joining religious figures to oppose the Government’s Racial and Religious Hatred Bill.

“The prime motivating energy for the Bill seemed to come not from communities seeking protection from bullying by the British National Party but from individuals with a more aggressive, fundamentalist agenda,” he said.

Times, 21 October 2005

Carey opposes religious hatred bill

Posted on by Bob Pitt

CareyMuslims and members of other religions should get used to being mocked, the former Archbishop of Canterbury said yesterday. Lord Carey of Clifton said he passionately believed it was good for members of a religion to have their faith criticised on certain occasions.

Speaking as a member of an all-party group of peers opposing the Racial and Religious Hatred Bill, Lord Carey said he wanted to live in a society where people were sensitive to the feelings of others. “But in being sensitive, what we mustn’t do is create a society in which certain stories are not told,” Lord Carey told a news conference.

Daily Telegraph, 21 October 2005

Of course, as anyone who’s read the Racial and Religious Hatred Bill will know, it proposes to illegalise actions that incite hatred, not ridicule or criticism. It would extend to Muslims, Hindus and other “multi-ethnic” faith groups the protection presently enjoyed by Jews and Sikhs as adherents of “mono-ethnic” religions. In all consistency, Carey should be calling for the abolition of existing racial hatred laws on the basis that “Jews should get use to being mocked”.

Yesterday Carey and his fellow lords Lester and Hunt, together with Lisa Appignanesi of PEN, issued a statement in support of a wrecking amendment to the bill in the Lords. They observed blandly that “there are no pressing practical problems that require such a broad sweeping measure”. Readers of this website, not to mention the victims of the hatred and bigotry we record, might think otherwise.

Double standards on free speech

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“In times of war on terror, the risk is that free speech will be the first casualty. The tension between free speech and the safety of the population is a genuine one. Charles Clarke, the home secretary, has just modified part of the Terrorism Bill which dealt with ‘glorifying’ terrorism. Imams and others will now be prosecuted only if their remarks are seen as as inducements to further terrorist acts. Most people will have little problem with such a law. The fact that certain people, mainly radical Muslims, have abused our tolerance to incite acts of terror has rightly provoked anger.

“Where there is a problem, however, is with another government assault on free speech that has no direct connection with terrorism – the Racial and Religious Hatred Bill. If it becomes law, anybody who publishes or says anything ‘likely to be heard or seen by any person in whom it is likely to stir up racial or religious hatred’ will be committing an offence that could make them liable to a seven-year prison term.

“This bill has so far attracted most attention because of the efforts of comedians such as Rowan Atkinson. They have argued that it would prevent them poking even gentle fun at any religion. It also featured during the election campaign when Mr Clarke – billing himself as ‘Labour’s home secretary’ – wrote to every mosque in the country highlighting Conservative and Liberal Democrat opposition to the proposals. There was a clear implication that the government was trying to secure the Muslim vote.”

Editorial in the Sunday Times, 16 October 2005

Short version: laws that penalise Muslims, good; laws that protect Muslims, bad.

Christian group may seek ban on Qur’an

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A Protestant evangelical pressure group has warned that it will try to use the government’s racial and religious hatred law to prosecute bookshops selling the Qur’an for inciting religious hatred.

Christian Voice, a fringe fundamentalist group which first came to public prominence this year when it campaigned against the BBC’s broadcasting of Jerry Springer The Opera, was among the evangelical organisations taking part in a 1,000-strong demonstration against the bill outside parliament yesterday as the House of Lords held a second reading debate on the measure.

Its director, Stephen Green, said the organisation would consider taking out prosecutions against shops selling the Islamic holy book. He told the Guardian: “If the Qur’an is not hate speech, I don’t know what is. We will report staff who sell it. Nowhere in the Bible does it say that unbelievers must be killed.”

Guardian, 12 October 2005

It seems to have escaped Green’s attention that under the provisions of the Racial and Religious Hatred Bill it would be necessary for the Attorney General to initiate a prosecution. And what are the prospects of the Attorney General acceding to demands from a nutty Christian sect that Muslim bookshops should be prosecuted for selling the Qur’an? Precisely nil.

What is more worthy of comment is the fact that yesterday’s protest against the bill involved a block between right-wing evangelical Christians and militant secularists. According to reports in the Morning Star and the Metro, the former group brandished placards reading “Freedom to Preach” and “Don’t Let Terrorism Win”, and joined together in singing “In the Name of Jesus We Have the Victory”, while Keith Porteous Wood of the National Secular Society hailed the demonstration (which had the official backing of the NSS) as “a measure of the breadth of the opposition to this bill”.

You might wonder what such disparate groups have in common. An interest in fomenting hatred against Muslims free from state interference, perhaps?

Religious hatred bill: ‘censorship by stealth’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Condemning the religious hatred bill, Mike McNair claims that “the chilling effect of the new act will be considerable. Behzti and Jerry Springer, the Opera would not be staged; Monty Python’s Life of Brian might be filmed in the US, since the first amendment is robust, but would not be shown by British cinemas, and a great deal of the television series would not be broadcast; Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses might well be de facto banned by English law”.

Weekly Worker, 29 September 2005

This is not only hysterical nonsense, it’s also unbelievably ignorant. The staging of Behzti was already covered by the provisions in the 1986 Public Order Act dealing with incitement to racial hatred, as Sikhs are held (on the basis of case law) to be members of a mono-ethnic faith. The extension of those provisions to cover religious hatred, as is proposed in the present bill, would make zero difference to whether or not Behzti could be prosecuted for inciting hatred. The effect of the bill is simply to extend to other faiths (notably Muslims) the defence already available to Sikhs and Jews under existing law.

In another article in the same issue Jack Conrad approvingly quotes Labour MP Bob Marshall-Andrews: “… there is a profound difference between hatred based on race, sex or age – all of which are thrust upon us; we have no choice – and on religion, which is not thrust upon us. Religion is a matter of choice.”

This argument was demolished by Sadiq Khan MP in the same House of Commons debate: “The idea that one cannot choose one’s race but can choose one’s religion so that the former but not the latter should get protection is absurd. Some people talk about religion as a lifestyle choice, but what is being suggested – that Britain’s 1.6 million Muslims should convert to Christianity or become atheists?”

‘Don’t sacrifice free speech to appease the Muslim fanatics’ says McKinstry

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Leo McKinstry in the Express usefully summarises all the lies and distortions promoted by opponents of the religious hatred bill. “It is a scandal that centuries of the right to free expression can be overthrown because of the craven wish to appease Islamic extremism.” You know the sort of thing.

McKinstry claims: “Our laws already provide ample protection against genuine hate crimes. In 2003, for instance, Mark Norwood, a British National party activist in Shropshire, was prosecuted under the Public Order Act for displaying a poster which read: ‘Islam out of Britain’.”

In fact, the successful prosecution of Norwood was not for inciting hatred – he was convicted (in 2002) on the relatively minor charge of causing religiously aggravated “harassment, alarm or distress”. An attempt to convict another BNP member, Dick Warrington, under racial hatred legislation for displaying a poster with the same “Islam Out of Britain” slogan failed because Islam is not a mono-ethnic religion and therefore it is held that Muslims cannot be victims of racial hatred.

It is nonsense to claim, as McKinstry does, that only Muslim organisations back the proposed new law. The Board of Deputies of British Jews, the Church of England, the Catholic Bishops of England and Wales, the Hindu Council and the Network of Sikh Organisations are among those who support the Bill.

And so on, and so forth.

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Boris Johnson on Islam

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“What makes modern Islam so politically troublesome is that some Muslims can be induced to take offence not just at an insult to Islam, but at any injustice suffered by one of their co-religionists, and it is this deep personal sense of outrage – scarcely explicable to our post-enlightenment souls – that helps the whacko imams to warp the alienated young men into becoming suicide bombers….”

Boris Johnson outlines his – sorry, “our” – attitude to Islam. He adds: “The proposed ban on incitement to ‘religious hatred’ makes no sense unless it involves a ban on the Koran itself…”

Daily Telegraph, 21 July 2005