ON February 13 Hamit Coskun, a 50-year-old atheist residing in Britain, decided to protest against the Erdogan government of Turkey. To make his point regarding the nature of the Islamic regime in Turkey, Coskun burned a copy of the Koran outside the Turkish consulate in Knightsbridge. In reactions reflective of both the ‘sensitivity’ of many Muslims and the nature of modern Britain, Coskun was immediately physically assaulted in response to his act of protest. Two passers-by attacked Coskun. The first, Moussa Kadri, shouting ‘f**cking idiot! Burn the Koran? That’s my religion!’ pulled out a large bread knife and twice attempted to stab Coskun. A second man is reported to have spat and kicked at Coskun at the same time.
While these assaults were unsuccessful, it is quite clear where the criminality lay. Coskun engaged in a form of protest that offended these men, who then responded with immediate violence. He could easily have been seriously harmed or killed. For most people, hopefully, offending someone is not a crime. Nor is it something any sensible person would think warrants knife assaults and potential murder.
In Britain, though, offending Islam is now a crime, just as it would be in a more honestly declared Islamic theocracy.
That Britain homes people who think they have a right to threaten the lives of someone who insults their religion is bad enough. It’s a problem that has been highlighted on multiple occasions when polling British Muslim attitudes. A disturbingly high number of Muslims do indeed think they are entitled to attack people who offend their religion. The standard Establishment response, for many years, has been to ignore this, or to take actions against the ‘offensive’ person rather than against those who react to offence with attempts to murder the person who angered them.
The Coskun case, though, takes that Establishment cowardice and pandering to the violent extremes of Islam one step further. Now, thanks to the precedent established in this case, we are in a situation where a person assaulted by Muslims after offending them is himself charged and blamed for the confrontation. This is the British justice system agreeing with Muslims that violence is an inevitable and at least partly justified response to perceived insults to their faith.
Last week Coskun was at Westminster magistrates’ court answering charges, while his attackers were not. He was accused of ‘disorderly behaviour’ and a ‘religiously aggravated’ public order offence. Coskun’s burning of the Koran was judged to have been disorderly behaviour ‘within the hearing or sight of a person likely to be caused harassment, alarm or distress’, and motivated by ‘hostility towards members of a religious group, namely followers of Islam’, contrary to the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 and the Public Order Act 1986.
The reality though is that in 1986, or even in 1998, Coskun would have been unlikely to have found himself arrested and charged for burning the Koran during a protest, especially having been the victim of a dangerous assault in the same moment. But since that time concepts such as ‘hate crimes’ and ‘non-criminal offences’ have added a whole new vagueness and subjectivity to our laws. This has coincided with an increasingly desperate and craven submission to Islam from all British officialdom, manifested in everything from security guards refusing to confront suicide bombers for fear of being called racist, to police and politicians ignoring child-rape gangs out of fear of damaging ‘community relations’.
Under Keir Starmer’s government, of course, we have had obvious two-tier policing; imprisonment of people essentially for being critical of Islam after three child murders, and armed Muslim gangs being told that none of them will be arrested. Laws criminalising criticism of Islam have been promised, but existing laws have proven very easily perverted to do the same thing.
The Coskun case, where the victim of an assault has to pay a fine for offending his attackers, is an obvious inversion of justice consistent with this general trend. The magistrate who decided to fine Coskun was not just, as many have opined, enforcing a new blasphemy law – he was in effect endorsing and agreeing with the assault. District judge John McGarva said this when fining Coskun £240:
‘Your actions in burning the Koran where you did were highly provocative, and your actions were accompanied by bad language in some cases directed toward the religion and were motivated at least in part by hatred of followers of the religion.’
For anyone who expects British justice to be rational and objective, this was a far more chilling moment than a relatively small fine would otherwise represent. By describing the Koran-burning as provocative and punishing it, the magistrate is agreeing with the most fanatical Muslims and with Coskun’s attackers that insults to Islam are criminal and require punishment. It is not just a minor fine. It’s an Establishment judicial green light for further and more deadly attacks of this nature.
The British justice system has told extreme Muslims that they are right – it has agreed with them that the fault for violence lies with anyone who offends them, rather than with their own lack of restraint and lack of respect for the law when they choose to assault those who offend them. The provocation argument here is a grotesque example of victim blaming, and logically of the same order of ‘justice’ we would find in a judge saying that a woman dressing ‘provocatively’ deserves to be sexually assaulted. In both cases, if for example a judge fined a woman for wearing a short dress and then being sexually attacked, we get a clear indication that the judge in question agrees with the assailant and has a contempt for the victim.
Most commentary on the fine has been focused on the issue of free speech, with a free speech organisation funding Coskun’s defence. And free speech is of course a vital right. But the issues are actually even more important than the idea that the State does not have the right to fine or arrest us based on subjective feelings and other people deciding to be angry and upset by a gesture we make or an attitude we express. Of course in a free society we would not be subject to fines for offending people, and we would be free to protest in any peaceful manner we chose. If it’s our own copy of a book, we should be entirely free to burn it and entirely protected, too, from violent responses to that.
But the problem is much deeper than just an infringement of our right to express ourselves as we please. Such a verdict coming after a physical assault is the State and the justice system saying they refuse to protect those who offend Islam and will in fact join the attackers in punishing them.
The abject cowardice of an officialdom terrified of the Islamic capacity for extreme and violent responses, of judges willing to punish victims of Islamic violence even if that denies basic and once universal free speech rights, is symptomatic of a culture captured by a minority faith and fear of that faith. It is the system saying: ‘We don’t want to protect you from those who respond violently to offence, we instead prefer to punish you for causing offence.’ This undermines the entire basis on which any of us are supposed to take the justice system seriously.
Justice requires objective judgments that aren’t favouring or fearful towards a single group. It requires at least knowing that anything can offend anyone and once you start legislating offence you are yourself offending against justice. It requires a system and a framework of law that looks at harmful actions rather than subjective emotions.
It’s not just terrifying that the British justice system is now so scared of the potential for large-scale Islamic rioting and violence that it enacts blasphemy laws by default. It is equally terrifying that our judges themselves aren’t rational and objective people and are instead the kind of people who might consider words as violence or who might understand reacting to offence with violence better than they understand the necessity of freedom and justice.
Really as soon as you start adding absurdities such as mind-reading whether an offence was motivated by something as broad and subjective as ‘hate’, rather than sticking to what was physically done and whether it entailed actual harm, you have made your entire justice system a purely subjective matter where judges deliberately favouring some groups above others get to decide, on subjective whims alone. In such circumstances the law becomes lawless, a purely arbitrary thing reflecting nothing but the prejudices and loyalties of the judge.
The judge likes or fears Islam and therefore offers it extra protections. Those extra protections are an active injustice that rewards the group which acts in a belligerent and violent manner. The Coskun case suggests that our judges have little or no respect for any kind of freedom, or if they do have that, it matters less than their cowed submission to Muslim demands.
You are very far along the path of submission if your main courts act like sharia courts, but that is what is happening. And I don’t think that it will stop at fines or at imprisonments during periods of riot. The precedent has been established for it to apply again, and with increasing severity.
