The government has banned Terry Jones from entering the UK. Jones is the fundamentalist US pastor who threatened to burn a copy of the Koran outside his Florida church on the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Before he found fame through “International burn a Koran Day” his Dove World Outreach Centre had just 50 members. Jones is certainly a racist and homophobic Islamophobe — his website sells T-shirts, cups and baseball hats carrying the slogan “Islam is of the devil” — but he is not just anti-Muslim, he is an equal opportunities bigot who also believes Buddhism, Hinduism and Judaism are the devil’s work.
It seems unlikely to be a coincidence that the decision to ban Jones comes on the same day as Baroness Warsi’s speech claiming that anti-Muslim bias is now the social norm and calling for tolerance. But the government cannot have it both ways: banning a pastor for extremist views and “unnacceptable behaviour” (to use the Home Office’s phrase) is not the action of a tolerant society.
The government claims that “[T]he use of exclusion powers is very serious and no decision is taken lightly or as a method of stopping open debate”, but it has a worryingly broad basis for denying entry to the country that clearly limits freedom of expression.
Jones was originally due to come to the UK to speak at an English Defence League (EDL) rally in March before he was “disinvited” for being homophonic and racist. Prior to his EDL rejection a smaller group called England Is Ours had invited him to speak to its members.
The England Is Ours website provide links to links to the BNP, the National Front and StormFront. When I spoke to England Is Ours secretary Barry Taylor he said he has “no idea” if Jones is racist but he thought not because Jones has an “Egyptian chap as a pastor and some African–American chaps”. Taylor happily admitted Jones is anti-gay “but that’s a Christian thing.” Jones’s itinerary with the group –– a loosely organised collective of some 30 individuals –– involved two meetings “debating political issues” and an outdoor church service, not exactly the birth of a new political movement.
Surely, a pastor from Nowheresville representing just 50 people invited to speak to an organisation with only 30 members should not be the kind of “threat” that keeps the Home Office up at night as a threat to “community harmony”? The government should think twice before turning cranks into free speech martyrs.
Terry Jones in action below. More on exclusion orders here, here, and here
Pastor Terry Jones has been banned from entering the UK. Terry Jones is the controversial pastor who attempted to burn the Koran on the anniversary of 9/11.
The possible arrival of Pastor Terry Jones in the UK for an EDL rally has once again raised the spectre of the Home Secretary’s power to exclude unpleasant people from the country.
The last time we were down this particular path was with Zakir Naik, who was barred from entering the country in June because of his interesting views on Jihad and terror.
(By the way, if you are interested in Naik’s views, a large selection of his pamphlets is available outside the Islamic centre on York Way in London’s King’s Cross. I particularly recommend “Islam and Science”).
Anyway, the Naik dilemma afforded Home Secretary Theresa May an opportunity to put clear blue water between herself and her Labour predecessors, who had, from David Blunkett onwards, been seen as the greatest threat to civil liberties in the UK since King John.
May singularly failed in this, and now the Home Office is painted into a corner. Post-Naik (a much higher profile and more influential figure than Jones, incidentally), it risks being painted as “hypocritical” by Islamic groups.
As I’ve mentioned before, I don’t think hypocrisy is the worst sin, particularly when the alternative is the application of a poor principle. In this case, I think I’d prefer May to be hypocritical, and let Jones in.
Lots of people would disagree with this, not least Labour MP Jon Cruddas.
In somewhat Spartish language, Cruddas denounces Jones as “this Elmer Gantry of neoconservative extremism”.
After listing the arguments for allowing Jones into the country, Cruddas goes on the offensive:
“But we know what sits on the other side of the debit sheet. Mass disorder. Communities divided on racial and religious lines. Intolerance. Violence. Entire towns rent asunder.”
Really, Jon? Mass disorder? Entire towns rent asunder? Is that actually likely?
What we are dealing with here is the kind of rhetoric deployed in the past by the likes of the Workers’ Revolutionary Party. There is our way, or there is, inevitably, fascism. Cruddas is using rhetoric as dependent on impending crisis as the EDL’s does, with its screeching on the imminent Islamicisation of Europe.
Cruddas’s piece ends imagining Jones rasing “a toast to the new liberalism” – presumably meaning useful idiots like me and Sholto Byrnes over at the New Statesman, who Cruddas denounced in his article for being a bit concerned about the use of “public order” as a reason to stifle free speech.
Incidentally, Jones has been excluded before – from the German Evangelical Alliance. They kicked him out because of his theological flakiness and craving for the limelight. Could it be that we have all fallen for a massive publicity stunt? And that the EDL has taken on the tactics of its arch-rival, Anjem Chaudhary?
