Silenced: How Apostasy and Blasphemy Codes Are Choking Freedom Worldwide (54 page)

As we already seen in Australia’s
Catch the Fire Ministries
case, blasphemy and religious hate-speech laws also punish and chill those expressing certain theological beliefs. Another notable example occurred in France, where writer Michel Houellebecq was tried in September 2002 on charges of inciting religious hatred in an interview with a literary journal. Regarding his feelings about Islam, he stated, “You could call it hate.” While rejecting all forms of monotheism, he claimed that “the stupidest religion of all is Islam.” The Paris mosque rector demanded that Houellebecq be punished because “Islam has been reviled.” Houellebecq responded that, in his own mind, his comments had been directed at beliefs, not people: “I have never shown any contempt for Muslims, but I still have as much contempt as ever for Islam.” Asked if he still believed Muslims to be stupid, he replied, “I didn’t say that. I said they practice a stupid religion.” Stressing that Islam was not a race but a religion, he also argued, “You can’t be racist against Islam.” The court terminated the case, finding Houellebecq’s remarks displayed “ignorance” about Islam, but not an intention to affront Muslims.
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Charges have also been leveled at ordinary citizens for peaceful—albeit sometimes distasteful—expression about Islam. In 2006, a sixty-one-year-old German man, who sent toilet paper printed with the words “Koran, the holy Qur-an” to the media and mosques, was convicted under German law of disturbing public order and slandering religious beliefs. He had also sent a letter describing the Qur’an as a “cookbook for terrorists.” His notes led to death threats against him, and, in July 2005, Iran’s government sent a démarche to Germany’s Foreign Ministry.
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Prosecutors argued that his writings “posed a risk, under the cover of free speech, to peaceful coexistence” between cultures, and he was sentenced to a year’s imprisonment—which was suspended for five years—and 300 hours of community service.

Angered by van Gogh’s murder, a Dutch man hung in his window a poster advertising a far-right movement and stating, “Stop the tumour that is Islam. Theo has died for us. Who will be next?” After being convicted by two lower courts, he won on appeal, arguing that he was criticizing radical forms of Islam hostile to Western society.
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In Austria, Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff was put on trial for a briefing on Islam that she gave to a gathering of an anti-immigration party in Vienna. A diplomat’s daughter who had lived in Iran and Libya, she depicted Islam as a danger to Western values and spoke critically of the treatment of women. The court found that Austria’s free-speech guarantees protected her from hate-speech charges. However, the case turned on the judge’s reasoning that her statement that Islam’s prophet Mohammed was a “pedophile” was false since his child bride Aisha (usually reported as age six at the time of marriage and nine at the time it was consummated) remained his wife when she turned 18. On February 15, 2011, the trial court found her guilty of defaming Islam’s prophet and thus of vilifying Islam and fined her 480 Euros.
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Religious speech regulations were also invoked to police in a Muslim-Christian dispute in the United Kingdom, resulting in further rupture of social harmony. After a religious dispute with a guest in March 2009, Ben Vogelenzang and his wife, who owned a bed-and-breakfast hotel in Liverpool, were charged with the “religiously aggravated” use of “threatening, abusive or insulting words,” an offense under the Public Order Act 1986 and subject to increased penalties in cases involving religious hostility, under the Crime and Security Act 2001.
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The Vogelenzang’s guest, sixty-year-old British Muslim convert Ericka Tazi, contacted the police following a heated religious debate with the Christian owners, which she claimed began when the hotelier saw her wearing an Islamic headscarf, or
hijab
. Tazi reportedly complained that Vogelenzang called her “a terrorist or a murderer” and labeled Muhammad a warlord, comparing him to Saddam Hussein and Hitler. Vogelenzang’s wife, Sharon, was said to have described the headscarf as a form of “bondage.” Vogelenzang, in turn, said Tazi called the Bible false and Jesus a minor prophet. The couple, who, according to various reports, had once either fostered or adopted a Muslim child, strenuously denied being Islamophobic. The charges were dismissed, but the case led to an 80 percent drop in business for the Vogelenzangs over a nine-month period.
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In both Australia and Canada, high-profile hate-speech cases have produced a political and, in the latter case, judicial backlash. The
Catch the Fire Ministries
case spurred calls to weaken Australia’s religious vilification laws. The backlash was further exacerbated by frivolous complaints, including one by a convicted child sex offender, calling himself a witch, who claimed he had been vilified by a Salvation Army Bible class taught to prisoners.
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Some Anglican, Catholic, Jewish, and Quaker representatives, as well as Muslim ones, lauded Victoria’s Racial and Religious Tolerance Act for “exposing” the work of “religious extremist and race hate groups.”
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But the Anglican bishop of South Sydney, Robert Forsyth, argued that such laws could criminalize merely the “strong” expression of genuine
convictions. Cardinal George Pell, Catholic archbishop of Sydney, warned that they would “end up curtailing free speech as well as deepening the rifts between different religious groups.” He added, “Being part of Australian life means you can criticize and will be criticized, sometimes unfairly. That is one reason why we manage to live together in peace.”
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The
Catch the Fire Ministries
case disillusioned one of the Religious Tolerance Act’s main Muslim supporters about the wisdom of such laws. Amir Butler of the Australian Muslim Public Affairs Committee reported: “At every major Islamic lecture I have attended since litigation began against Catch the Fire Ministries, there have been small groups of evangelical Christians—armed with notepads and pens—jotting down any comment that might later be used as evidence in the present case or presumably future cases.” As he wrote in
The Age
newspaper: “If we believe our religion is true, then it requires us to believe others are false.” Vilification laws thus became “a legalistic weapon by which religious groups can silence their ideological opponents, rather than engaging in debate and discussion.”
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In Canada, too, some Muslims have concluded that hate speech and blasphemy prosecutions are bad for Islam. The moderate Muslim Canadian Congress (MCC), which had warned that the CIC’s allegations against Steyn and
Maclean’s
would “serve no purpose other than to reinforce the stereotype that Muslims have little empathy for vigorous debate and democracy,” lauded the case’s dismissal. It also argued that the CIC’s “editorializing,” by gratuitously declaring the defendants’ writings “Islamophobic,” sent “a very dangerous message to moderate Muslims who reject Sharia and do not take inspiration from overseas Islamic countries or groups.”
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In effect, according to the MCC, Canada’s human rights commission had “taken sides in the bitter struggle within Canada’s Muslim community where sharia-supporting Islamists are pitted against liberal and secular Muslims.”
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Alan Borovoy, one of the architects of Canada’s human rights legislation and the general counsel of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, has had second thoughts about the usefulness of hate-speech hearings. He lamented that Section 13.1 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, banning “hate messages,” has been used or threatened to be used against a film sympathetic to South Africa’s Nelson Mandela, a pro-Zionist book, a Jewish community leader, and Salman Rushdie’s
Satanic Verses
—none of which bore the slightest resemblance to the kind of hate material or hate mongers that he thought were the law’s original targets.
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Critics of the legislation argue that, as Ezra Levant has stated, “the process is the punishment,” since those charged with human rights offenses must foot their own legal costs while the plaintiff pays nothing.
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Borovoy added that “during the years when my colleagues and I were laboring to create such commissions, we never imagined that they might ultimately be used against freedom of speech … No ideology—political, religious or philosophical—can be immune … A free culture cannot protect people against material that hurts.”
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Concerns about the Canadian human rights process increased when, in mid-2008, reports became public that,
in what appeared to be entrapment undertaken to elicit an incriminating response, serial complainant and former commission investigator, Richard Warman, had posted offensive messages on extremist websites under pseudonyms and using an unsuspecting neighbor’s Internet connection.
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Amid growing controversy, in September 2009, Athanasios Hadjis of the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal found that Section 13 violated the Canadian Charter of Rights’ guarantee of free expression, since its use was not “remedial”—an important criterion for the lawfulness of human rights commissions set forth in a previous Supreme Court decision—and instead had become punitive.
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Hadjis chose not to enforce the statute in the case at hand, brought by Richard Warman—the man behind the majority of Canadian hate-speech cases—against far rightist Marc Lemire. As Hadjis lacks authority to officially invalidate the law, his pronouncements are not decisive and, in any event, leave intact a Canadian criminal provision against hate speech, which is prosecuted in Canada’s regular judiciary. However, there is increasing doubt in Canada about the justice and efficacy of such laws.
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When the U.K. parliament sought to transform its blasphemy laws into hate-speech bans, it led to one of the most thorough critiques of such laws within any Western nation.
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However, the result was still confused: the bill was eventually adopted, but in a drastically neutered form. Meanwhile, the United Kingdom continues to prosecute hate speech under public order laws.

In 2001, British prime minister Tony Blair’s government began efforts to ban “incitement to religious hatred” with a draconian penalty of up to seven years’ imprisonment. Home Secretary David Blunkett contended it was necessary to “close a loophole” insofar as British law banned incitement on racial but not religious grounds. The Home Office emphasized the theoretical distinction between blasphemy and hate speech, and that the measure was for “protecting the believer, not the belief,” or “people not ideologies.”
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The bill was explicitly designed to replace the ancient blasphemy ban protecting Anglican Christianity and was widely regarded as a measure designed to protect Muslims. The Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) had long called for such legislation, and, in November 2004, a Guardian/ICM poll found that 81 percent of British Muslims wanted new legislation against incitement to religious hatred, while 58 percent agreed that “despite the right to free speech, in Britain people who insult or criticize Islam should face criminal prosecution.”
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Left-wing London mayor Ken Livingstone claimed that the legislation was needed to end affronts to multicultural decency, such as the insulting reception given his recent guest, Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who drew angry criticism after reports that he supported suicide bombing, wife-beating, and the murdering of Jews.
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During the British parliamentary debates and in the ensuing media coverage between 2004 and 2006, skeptics, including academics, writers, comedians, and
artists, led by comedian Rowan Atkinson, as well as MPs, members of the National Secular Society, and Christian groups, pilloried the proposed law.
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Atkinson warned that it could ban Monty Python’s
Life of Brian
and maintained “there should be no subject about which you cannot make jokes,” stating, “In my view, the right to offend is far more important than any right not to be offended.”
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Conservative David Davis, who also argued that “religion, unlike race, is a matter of personal choice and therefore appropriate for open debate,” noted that the ban would “technically prevent what many people may regard as reasonable criticism of devil worshippers and religious cults.”
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Indeed, the self-proclaimed “high priest of British white witches” said that witches and satanists were likely to invoke the new laws against their critics.
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Over 1,000 churches contended in a petition that it would not dampen religious hatred but might well have “the opposite effect” and would even criminalize “the mere quoting of texts from both the Koran and the Bible.”
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The bishop of Liverpool noted that even if the charges never made it to trial, “just the headline ‘Bishop’s sermon on ritual slaughter is referred to the Attorney General’ would create an atmosphere of fear.”
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The Christian-identified Barnabas Fund feared the law could “silence organizations like ourselves from highlighting the persecution of Christians and other human rights abuses which occur within some religious communities.”
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Secularist ex-Muslim Maryam Namazie warned of dire repercussions for those who, like her, already faced violent threats and social ostracism for criticizing Islamic extremism: “Even in the heart of secular Europe and the West, women who have resisted political Islam no longer feel fully safe.… We are already called racists and Islamophobes whenever we speak for women and against Islam and its movement.”
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Salman Rushdie urged that the proposal be dropped and noted that enduring offense was “part of everyday life” in countries such as Britain and the United States.
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He warned of attempts by right-wingers or racists to claim Muslims were engaging in hate speech, and by Muslims to prosecute writers like him.
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