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@Gnomeshatecheese @Flick https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/02/03/its-official-islamic-blasphemy-laws-have-come-to-britain/

You might have imagined that in a modern, liberal democracy such as Britain that blaspheming against a religious text would be none of the police’s business. After all, laws criminalising blasphemy against Christianity were officially repealed in England and Wales in 2008, with the last successful blasphemy conviction obtained in 1977. But the old crime of blasphemy has been slowly replaced with a new raft of criminal offences against so-called hate speech.

According to Greater Manchester Police, the alleged Koran burner was arrested under suspicion of a ‘racially aggravated public-order offence’. Assistant chief constable Stephanie Parker told GB News that police felt compelled to make a ‘swift arrest’, fearing the livestream could cause ‘deep concern… within some of our diverse communities’. The modern language of diversity and multiculturalism disguises the medievalism of the decree that’s being enforced.

The injunction to police so-called hate speech, especially when it comes to ‘Islamophobia’, has led British police forces to routinely do the bidding of Islamic reactionaries. In 2023, when four boys in Wakefield brought a Koran to school, and one ended up lightly scuffing it, police recorded it as a ‘non-crime hate incident’. Ten miles down the road, at Batley Grammar School, a teacher was forced into hiding in 2021 after showing a cartoon of Muhammad in his religious-studies class. He remains in hiding to this day, but no action has ever been taken against those who maliciously circulated his name or sent him credible death threats. If anything, in the eyes of the authorities, his hardline Islamist aggressors, whose religious sensitivities were offended, were the actual victims here.