The shameful story of Britain’s backdoor blasphemy laws
Liberal cowardice has fuelled Islamic intolerance – and cost lives.At 9pm, on 24 March 2016, Tanveer Ahmed entered Shah’s newsagents carrying a knife. The 31-year-old cab driver had travelled to Glasgow from his home in Bradford, incensed by Shah’s claims to holiness. Ahmed had left a friend a voicemail, saying: ‘Listen to this guy, something needs to be done, it needs to be nipped in the bud.’ He attacked Shah, stabbing him repeatedly in the head and upper body. Shah tried to escape outside. Ahmed followed. He repeatedly stamped on Shah’s head, shattering almost every bone in his face. As his victim lay bloodied and still, Ahmed walked into a bus shelter and waited for police to arrive. He told the cops, as they moved to apprehend him: ‘I have nothing against you and so I am not going to hurt you. I have broken the law and appreciate how you are treating me.’ But Ahmed remains unrepentant about his crime. During his trial, he put out a statement: ‘This all happened for one reason… Asad Shah disrespected the messenger of Islam, the prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him.’ Ahmed is now six years into a life sentence.
I thought about Shah in recent weeks, as the goings on in Wakefield began to emerge. Four boys have been suspended from Kettlethorpe High School for bringing a Koran into school and accidentally dropping it on the floor. Rumours originally swirled, thanks in part to a local Labour councillor, that the holy book had been desecrated. The autistic boy who brought it into school – on a dare, as it transpired – was menaced with death threats. His home was threatened with arson. And yet the response of the authorities, in effect, was to throw these boys under the bus. Not only did the school suspend these kids – for lightly scuffing a book – it also called the police in. The scuffing has been recorded by police as a ‘non-crime hate incident’, potentially haunting those boys’ job prospects for years to come. The mother of the autistic boy later addressed a local mosque, flanked by the school’s headteacher and a senior policeman, saying she would not pursue charges on the death threats so long as her son wasn’t harmed.
Did we learn nothing from Batley Grammar – another Yorkshire school, host to another blasphemy scandal, just 10 miles from Kettlethorpe, only two years ago? There, a teacher was forced into hiding after he showed Muhammad cartoons as part of a religious-studies class about free speech. Hardline religious protesters showed up outside the school, shutting it down for days. A local Islamic charity, Purpose of Life, published the teacher’s name online. The school gave in then, too. Batley Grammar’s headteacher, Gary Kibble, issued an ‘unequivocal apology’ to the mob gathered at his school’s gates. Today, that teacher is still in hiding with his family, their names and phone numbers changed. People’s lives are being torn apart, upended, occasionally ripped away from them entirely, all because they have ‘blasphemed’ against a religion. This shameful, medieval situation reflects so much that has gone rotten with modern Britain.
Over the past 30 years or more, Britain has been nurturing this Islamist-style intolerance in our midst. It goes back to the Salman Rushdie affair, and to how the fatwa – the price placed on the author’s head by the Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989; a bounty that a knifeman in New York came terrifyingly close to claiming last year – first came about. The first protest against The Satanic Verses, the ‘blasphemous’ novel charged with insulting the prophet, was not on the subcontinent or the Middle East, but in Bolton on 2 December 1988. Another protest, in Bradford in January 1989, made international headlines. These were the culmination of a homegrown, anti-Rushdie campaign – albeit one, as Tim Black has noted on spiked, that was fomented by an array of largely Saudi-backed Islamist groups.
These protests were also kindled by a policy of state multiculturalism, which primed British Muslims to see themselves as separate, distinct, with their own state-funded ‘community groups’ acting as their ‘authentic’ voice.https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/03/12/the-shameful-story-of-britains-backdoor...
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