23 Sep 2010 | Index Index, minipost, News and features
Police have arrested six men on suspicion of inciting racial hatred after they posted a video on the Internet in which they appear to burn two copies of the Koran on 11 September.
The men have been released on bail, but will face court hearings in Gateshead, police said in a statement earlier today. Two of the men were arrested on 15th September and a another four on 22 September. The arrests follow controversy over plans by US preacher Terry Jones to hold an “International Burn a Koran Day” to commemorate the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
23 Sep 2010 | Uncategorized
News has emerged that six young men in Gateshead in the north-east of England have been arrested for burning a Koran and posting the video on YouTube.
A couple of weeks ago, a Times reporter asked me if Pastor Terry Jones, who at the time was creating a stir with threats he would burn a Koran, would be arrested if he did so in the UK. I told them it was unlikely, unless he had gone out of his way to do so in front of a mosque on Friday, or in a location with a lot of Muslims around, in which case the Public Order Act could be brought into play, and/or the Incitement to Racial and Religious Hatred Act.
I was half right. The Gateshead men, apparently English Defence League supporters, were arrested on suspicion of inciting racial hatred. Not religious hatred.
Legally speaking, it is at least technically possible to arrest someone of incitement to religious hatred. So why did the police not use this power in a case where the target was a religious text?
Back in 2005, when the Incitement to Racial and Religious Hatred Bill was being debated, secularists campaigning against the bill (of whom I was one — I was working at New Humanist magazine at the time) worked to make the bill pretty much unworkable in practice. Consequently, Section 29j of the Act states:
Nothing in this Part shall be read or given effect in a way which prohibits or restricts discussion, criticism or expressions of antipathy, dislike, ridicule, insult or abuse of particular religions or the beliefs or practices of their adherents, or of any other belief system or the beliefs or practices of its adherents, or proselytising or urging adherents of a different religion or belief system to cease practising their religion or belief system.
We were quite pleased with this. And possibly right to be, as there have been very few actions under this legislation since it was introduced in 2006.
So are the police not even using this legislation? Were the Gateshead arrests made under the guise of racial hatred because they felt more likely to secure a conviction?
A source tells me the police are claiming that the burning of the Koran itself is the crux of the arrest: not the posting on YouTube. But I cannot imagine how the burning of a book, no matter how precious that book is to some people, is a crime in and of itself. And I certainly don’t understand how it’s a race crime.
23 Sep 2010 | Uncategorized
The BBC has flagrantly breached its duty, under the Communications Act 2003 (s.319) to present news with “due impartiality”. For four days, sixteen hours a day, its news reporting of the papal visit has been grovelling and entirely uncritical.
The Pope is a political figure (hence his “state” visit) and no significant critic or opponent was invited to balance the parade of biased interviewees, inevitably biased because they were almost all Catholics. Even on Saturday, when up to 15,000 citizens marched to Downing Street, the protest was largely ignored by the BBC. Their speakers included Richard Dawkins, whose important speech refuting the Pope’s claims about atheism causing the Holocaust was entirely ignored. This was biased and unbalanced censorship of news, for which Ofcom must hold the BBC’s Catholic editor-in-chief Mark Thompson responsible. The BBC became a vehicle for endless and mindless Catholic propaganda.
One of Britain’s leading media law experts, Geoffrey Robertson QC, author of Robertson & Nicol on Media Law (fifth edition) and also author of The Case of the Pope said, “This breach of the due impartiality requirement was blatant and deliberate, and a disgrace to British broadcasting.”
23 Sep 2010 | Index Index, Middle East and North Africa, minipost
A judge who was suing two activists and a blogger with defamation, blackmail and “abuse of the Internet service” has withdrawn the lawsuit. Gamal Eid of the Arabic Network of Human Rights Information (ANHRI), Ahmed Seif El Islam Hamad of the Hisham Mubarak Law Centre (HMLC) and blogger Amr Gharbeia reached an out-of-court settlement with Judge Abel Fatteh Murad on 18 September. The trial date was originally set for July, but hearings were postponed five times. The three men agreed to withdraw a complaint accusing the judge of plagiary.
