The charge of blasphemy – backed by threats of violence – is being used to silence criticism of Islam. And our cherished freedoms are in peril
DURING the Middle Ages and beyond, thousands of people were put to death in Britain and across Europe for the abominable crime of ‘blasphemy’.
In 1656, the Quaker James Nayler was flogged, pilloried, branded on the forehead and had his tongue pierced by a red-hot poker — followed by an indefinite prison sentence including hard labour — for re- enacting Christ’s entry into Jerusalem on a donkey for Palm Sunday, by riding a horse into Bristol.
Thankfully, as the centuries passed, Britain gradually shed these theocratic tendencies, emerging as a bastion of enlightenment and liberalism.
Chilling
The last prosecution for blasphemy was as recently as 1977, when campaigner Mary Whitehouse successfully sued a gay magazine for an erotic poem about Jesus. When Britain’s ancient blasphemy laws were formally abolished in 2008, the matter was thought to have been put to bed.
Until now. As a new report makes clear, our country is increasingly facing the wrath of mobs of religious zealots who use violence and intimidation to police language and behaviour — and especially any criticism of Islam.
The vital new report was produced by Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens, a senior researcher in terrorism and radicalisation at King’s College London. He warns: ‘[Although] Islamic anti-blasphemy sentiment has been part of the religious activist landscape in the UK for decades … threats of violence have increased in frequency over recent years.’
In chilling terms, he then explains how such violence has been promoted in no small part by ‘the availability of jihadist propaganda online’. In other words, Islamists are being radicalised on the internet and then taking it upon themselves to resurrect the ‘crime’ of blasphemy in Britain.
Robin Simcox, the Government’s counter- extremism tsar who commissioned the report, did so in light of three alarming recent incidents.
In 2021, a teacher in Batley, West Yorkshire, was forced into hiding after showing pupils a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad for which he was subsequently subjected to death threats.
A year later, an angry mob staged a protest outside a screening of the film The Lady Of Heaven because it depicted the Prophet’s daughter. And only last year, four British schoolboys at a secondary in Wakefield were suspended after accidentally damaging a copy of the Quran.
Yet while these particular incidents may have prompted this timely report, I know that they are just the start.
Last year, moreover, a British teacher told me he and his colleagues were afraid of teaching the Holocaust to some Muslim students for fear of being met with antiSemitic rhetoric and even outright denial of the worst crime in humanity’s history.
At a time when our streets ring every weekend to cries of ‘jihad’ and calls to wipe the Jewish state off the map ‘from the river to the sea’, the importance of knowing where religious hatred can lead can hardly be understated.
Yet the phenomenon has been going on for years — and worsening more recently.
A 2007 report by The Historical Association found that one school had ‘deliberately avoided teaching the Crusades at Key Stage 3 because... balanced treatment of the topic would have directly challenged what was taught in some local mosques’.
Meanwhile, a poll conducted by Policy Exchange in November last year showed that 16 per cent of teachers had selfcensored to avoid causing religious offence.
As the think-tank aptly put it, fear of antagonising Muslims has created a ‘de facto “blasphemy code” in schools across the country’. Take the proudly secular Michaela Community School in Brent, north-west London, which was subject to bomb threats and had a brick thrown through a window after it told students not to pray during classroom hours.
Should we really be surprised that teachers shy away from certain topics when there are so many precedents for violence and intimidation?
Let me be clear: stories such as these are not really about a child’s ‘right’ to pray after double maths. The fanatics’ real aim is to undermine the secular, tolerant foundations of British society – which runs counter to their uncompromising creed. It is a classic example of what the Australian psychologist Nick Haslam has called ‘concept creep’ — the notion that a dangerous and harmful idea can gradually infiltrate society until it is too late to expunge it.
Each small victory for the radicals — every teacher suspended, every criticism silenced — only emboldens them.
And the worst part? This is not the work of a few lone actors. Instead, it’s a co-ordinated attack.
Protests
For the new report also reveals its ‘most alarming’ development: the rise of a British wing of Tehreek- eLabbaik Pakistan (TLP), a radical political party once banned in its home country after it called for blasphemers to be beheaded.
In the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, the death penalty is still in force for blasphemy. Just last week, a 22-year-old student was sentenced to death for allegedly sharing ‘ blasphemous’ pictures over WhatsApp.
Meleagrou-Hitchens’s report not only shows that British mosques have hosted talks by preachers who support TLP, it reveals that the party has even arranged a series of protests against ‘Islamophobia’
in Britain. At the most recent documented demonstration, in January last year, one speaker proclaimed: ‘When it comes to the honour of the Quran we will... sacrifice our lives and also the lives of the enemies.’
Make no mistake, if these radicals were ever to get their way, the four young boys who accidentally damaged a Quran in Wakefield would risk execution. And I am not being sensationalist: Beheadings for blasphemy are exactly what the TLP advocates.
Hatred
And what is more galling still is that they are exploiting the modish concepts of ‘Islamophobia’, racism and intolerance to bully their critics into silence, elicit sympathy from the Left and peddle their dogma unchallenged.
The late journalist and critic Christopher Hitchens — Alexander’s father — put it best when he described Islamophobia as ‘a word created by fascists and used by cowards to manipulate morons’. His words have never rung more true.
Of course, hatred towards any group of people based on their religion is inexcusable.
But just as one can criticise Israeli policy towards Palestine without being antiSemitic, as a society we must be able to criticise the imperial jihadist dogma of certain Islamist extremists without being labelled ‘Islamophobic’.
On advice from the police, that well-meaning teacher from Batley Grammar — who showed students a picture of Muhammad — is still in hiding three years later, living under a new identity.
Countless lives have been torn apart by Islamist antiblasphemy activists — and many have been killed around the world for speaking out.
The future of the Britain we love is at stake.
If our politicians continue to view criticism of Islam as a hate- crime, then concept creep will continue apace — and the freedom we cherish will be stolen from us.