Muslims have no right not to be offended, insists Home Secretary Suella Braverman following the desecration of a copy of the Qur’an. Damage to the sacred book at a Wakefield high school being recorded as a ‘hate incident’ did nothing to deter Braverman from ordering the police to prioritise freedom of speech over taking offence in new draft guidelines.
“The new code will ensure the police are prioritising their effort where it’s really needed and focusing on tackling serious crimes such as burglary, violent offences, rape and other sexual offences,” she said.
Braverman used a Times article about the desecration of the Qur’an to announce that she was working with the Education Department to issue new guidance on ‘blasphemy’ incidents in schools.
There is “no legal obligation to be reverent toward any religion,” she argued. “We do not have blasphemy laws in Great Britain and must not be complicit in the attempts to impose them on this country,” she wrote, avoiding any reference to the fact that such legislation still applies in Northern Ireland, where there is strong religious antagonism between two Christian denominations.
The existence of laws prohibiting hate, defamatory, and malicious speech in several statutes renders any defence of absolute free speech irrational, coming from a Home Secretary tasked with law and order, it’s absurd. However, her contempt for the tenants of her office is unsurprising, given that she was forced to resign in her first 45-day stint as Home Secretary, for violating the ministerial code.
Her grandstanding promise to reduce net migration from over 200,000 to “tens of thousands” was one of many red flags about her competence when she first took office. She also mischievously singled out Indian migrants, who make up the vast majority of visa overstayers, peddled headline-grabbing soundbites about her obsessive “dream” of deporting asylum seekers to Rwanda, and dismissed opposition MPs as “Guardian-reading, tofu-eating wokerati [sic].”
Braverman’s targeting of Muslims is not new, given her exploitation of a flawed review of the divisive Prevent strategy, which made no mention of the numerous non-Muslim organisations extremely critical of it, including Amnesty International which described it as a “plain anti-Muslim” strategy, to smear two Muslim organisations as terrorism apologists, evaluations that many saw as breaching of parliamentary privilege.
The Home Secretary is now antagonising Muslims seeking to defend sacred beliefs, claiming that “nobody can demand respect for their belief system, even if it is a religion.”
People are legally entitled to reject and leave any religion, she riled instead. Judging by the latest census figures, the number of Christians in the UK has dramatically declined, with more under-65s self-identifying as atheists than Christians for the first time. In contrast, the most thriving appear to be among Muslims, with an average age of 27, some 13 years younger than the median age of the overall population, and far less than the 51 years for Christians.
Her implication that Muslims want a special status for Islam is deceptive, given that all communities would prefer greater reverence for what they hold sacred. It is hardly constructive to use such language to brand Muslim leaders as “self-appointed hotheads” to gain a modicum of respect.
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