Civitas booklet says blasphemy has returned by the back door
The arguments in a new pamphlet from the Civitas think tank will be familiar to members of the NSS. We’ve been making them for the past ten years.
The author of A New Inquisition: religious persecution in Britain today by Jon Gower Davies, former head of religious studies at Newcastle University, says that the Religious Hatred legislation brought in under the banner of multiculturalism is, in effect, a new and more powerful blasphemy law.
He deconstructs multiculturalism in a way that the NSS has been doing for some time now, illustrating with court cases how Muslim activists have built the concept of “Islamophobia” into an impregnable defensive wall. It disables criticism of Islam and Muslims among liberals on the grounds that any disapproval is “racist”.
Having placed themselves beyond serious censure, Islamists then proceed to construct a victim culture which renders those they have harmed into persecutors. Mr Davies cites the reaction of the Muslim Council of Britain after the 7/7 bombings. The routine goes like this: first of all you distance yourself from the bombers by insisting that they are insane or “not real Muslims”, you then say that you are afraid of the backlash that will ultimately follow against “ordinary Muslims”, you then begin to complain about widespread “Islamophobia” and ill-treatment of Muslims (for which there is scant evidence) and — bob’s your uncle — the people who have been attacked — the citizens of London — become the aggressors and the people who have done the attacking — Islamists — become the victims.
This technique has succeeded in manipulating into existence a succession of laws that protect religion and lead to a severe curtailment of free speech.
Mr Davies uses as an example the case of the Vogelenzangs, a Christian couple who run a bed and breakfast establishment in Liverpool. They got into a debate/argument about religion with a Muslim woman guest. She subsequently complained to the police that she had been harassed on the grounds of her religion.
The Vogelenzangs were taken to court. When the evidence was examined by a judge, the case was thrown out. But the prosecution had had a deleterious effect on the Vogelenzang’s business, and the secular court had been put in the position of potentially having to rule on matters of theology.
It is good that these worrying issues have been raised again by Civitas and hopefully they will be widely discussed. It is time for the Racial and Religious Hatred Act (R&RHA) to be repealed along with all the other laws that restrict criticism of religion.
There is a difference between inciting violence and discrimination against individuals because of their religion and strongly disapproving of what those individuals believe and what those beliefs sometimes lead them to do.
So, there is nothing really new in this pamphlet, but the ideas need restating until those with the power to do something about it take notice.
One gripe, though. Mr Davies says: “No Christian demanded either the suppression of The Life of Brian or offered violence to the producers of the film.” This is untrue. The Festival of Light did its utmost to suppress this film and, indeed, several local authorities denied it a licence to be shown in cinemas in their area on the grounds that it was “blasphemous”. Some of those bans are still in place.
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