Muslims not aware that the Blair administration is forever giving with one hand and taking away with the other should take note. For two pieces of legislation currently being rushed through Parliament – a law supposedly preventing Incitement to Religious Hatred and the Prevention of Terrorism Bill – both have the potential to foment Islamophobia.
The Serious Organised Crime and Police Bill, due to receive its Second Reading in the House of Commons on 7 March, contains proposals to ban hatred on religious grounds that will promote intolerance while seeming to encourage tolerance. Among other things, this sloppy piece of legislation would slur the difference between religion (a choice one may object to) and race (an ascribed status one may not); create unwarranted chaos over subjective terms like ‘hatred’ and ‘insulting’ (none are usefully defined in the Bill); make legal the notion that a perception of a fact is a fact (plaintiffs would be under no obligation to prove that a statement actually is capable of incitement); confuse the courts; and bring about caution in the media amounting to self-censorship.
Under this Bill, Salman Rushdie would have been punished not protected and cult satirical classics such as Not The Nine O’Clock News taken off the air. Criticism of Islamic shari’a law would be proscribed, and ‘defamation in the character of the Prophet Muhammed (PBUH)’, according to Iqbal Sacranie of the Muslim Council of Britain, would be ‘a direct insult and abuse on the Muslim community’ and illegal. Just as it is in Iran, Somalia and Syria, countries where apostates may be executed. This law is an affront to George Orwell’s dictum that ‘if liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear’.
Yet if this Bill is a cynical attempt to win over the Muslim support that Labour squandered through the war in Iraq, it would nevertheless not unambiguously favour Muslims. In Australia, where a similar law was passed, religious communities have started monitoring each other in order to bring cases: it rewards the least tolerant – those most anxious to take offence – rather than the most tolerant – those willing to turn the other cheek. Quite apart from how the BNP would exploit things, Muslims could find themselves in trouble for making even innocuous statements about Sikhs, Atheists, Scientologists, Satanists…
For all of us, and especially Muslims, the Prevention of Terrorism Bill would turn our to be even more punitive. One of the Prime Minister’s more egregious comments of late is that there is no greater civil liberty than to live free from terrorist attack. True, but this is disingenuous because it in no way justifies depriving citizens of their freedom on evidence that will never be subjected to the scrutiny of an independent court. The House of Lords and House of Commons Joint Committee on Human Rights has already come out strongly against the Bill on a wide range of points. The plan to impose house arrest ‘control orders’ at the discretion of the home secretary, it affirmed, is ‘unlikely… to be compatible’ with the ECHR, and, it added snidely, Charles Clarke’s insistence he should decide which citizens to detain without charge is an ‘eccentric interpretation’ of the traditional separation of powers between the executive and judiciary.
Even if, as now looks likely, select members of the judiciary will end up giving control orders, this could too easily become like a secret commission, as Baroness Kennedy said yesterday in the House of Lords. Mightn't it even be redolent of Charles I’s Court of the Star Chamber? There is, according to the Commission, ‘no need, in order to deal with the current threat to the nation, to take much wider powers by which the government’s own admission are not at present strictly required’. So why does the government want to make provisions for derogation? Why should it be given draconian powers it doesn’t need? If history teaches us anything, surely it's that the greatest threats to civil liberties come not from terrorists but from governments that have been allowed to exercise excessive power over their own people.
Just as the religious hatred law will, as Ken MacDonald, Director of Public Prosecutions, said, ‘criminalize a state of mind’, so this Prevention of Terrorism law concerns thought crime. If Muslims were put under house arrest, without trial, their coreligionists would feel they were being attacked for their religious background. In fact, according to The Independent, the delightfully incompetent Hazel Blears even managed to admit yesterday that the ‘reality’ was that ‘our counter-terrorism powers will be disproportionately experienced by the Muslim community.’ And what if the law supposed to protect Muslims then failed? What if Muslims also ended up in jail for implying, by the strength of their assertions about Islam, that all other religions were wrong? The two laws would turn out to be a double whammy. Ihtisham Hibatullah, spokesman for the Muslim Association of Britain, said yesterday: ‘we need to ask the Government to make its position in relation to Muslims very clear.’ He’ll be lucky if he gets a straight answer.
Comments (3)
A good article at the times website on this ...
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,1072-1505557,00.html
Posted by PhilB | March 7, 2005 8:18 AM
Posted on March 7, 2005 08:18
Nick,
You are saying "free speech will be closed down as a result". Do you honestly think Saint Tone of Sedgefield and his Government would regard this as a bad thing?
I recall the fuss about the BBC getting caned over the Iraqi war and Campbell gloating about getting control of the BBC and making it more accountable to our political Masters.
You REALLY think that the abolition of free speech and thought control by the Government is looked upon with dismay by the Politicians and the Courts? If they can only get everyone in the Country to think as they do, what an absolute Utopia we will be living in ... and reactionaries like us can be dragooned into compliance to recognise this.
As Hitler said, "Give me the boy and I will show you the man". And schools are a wonderful first step in shaping the thought processes of the future voters.
Brave new world indeed!
Posted by PhilB | March 3, 2005 5:20 PM
Posted on March 3, 2005 17:20
Kenan Malik, himself a Muslim, wrote in February's issue of Prospect “Every Muslim leader I have spoken to wants to use the law to ban The Satanic Verses.” As you say, this section of the Serious Organised Crime and Police Bill is a cynical attempt to win Muslim support. The proposal has already raised expectations among Muslims that they will be able to ban criticism of their religion. Other religious groups are now thinking "me too". These proposals have legitimised a rise in religious militancy among Sikhs and Christians. If passed, the law could kick off an "offence auction" where religious groups each try to prove that they are more victimised than the other. Free speech will be closed down as a result.
Posted by Steve | March 3, 2005 12:18 PM
Posted on March 3, 2005 12:18