Police have publicly named a man and disclosed his address after he was charged with allegedly burning pages of the Koran, despite the clear and immediate risks posed to those accused of ‘blasphemy’ by radical Islamists.
The 47-year-old has pleaded guilty to causing racially and religiously aggravated intentional harassment, alarm, and distress after setting fire to the Islamic holy book in Manchester city centre during a live stream on social media.
At Manchester magistrates’ court, the prosecution said the act had caused distress to a bystander, Fahad Iqbal, who attempted to intervene. In a victim impact statement, Iqbal told the court: ‘I was quite shocked, disgusted and offended. I’m a Muslim. I still can’t believe someone would do this. When he began to burn the Koran, my heart was about to break out. This is the most emotion I have ever felt.’
Despite his guilty plea, Greater Manchester Police’s decision to disclose the defendant’s personal details has provoked serious concerns given the well-documented dangers faced by those accused of blasphemy. The Free Speech Union believes GMP should have liaised with the Crown Prosecution Service before making these details public. The failure to do so will almost certainly result in a direct threat to his life.
Footage posted on X shows a man standing in the Glade of Light, a memorial for victims of the 2017 Manchester Arena bombing, setting fire to pages of the Koran.
Following the arrest, Assistant Chief Constable Stephanie Parker said: ‘We understand the deep concern this will cause within some of our diverse communities and are aware of a live video circulating . . . We made a swift arrest at the time and recognise the right people have for freedom of expression, but when this crosses into intimidation to cause harm or distress, we will always look to take action when it is reported to us.’
During the hearing, the defendant – who was visibly distressed and in tears – was defended by duty solicitor Zoe Earle. District judge Margaret McCormack, while acknowledging defendant’s recent loss of his daughter, told him: ‘The Koran is a sacred book to Muslims, and treating it as you did is going to cause extreme distress. This is a tolerant country, but we just do not tolerate this behaviour.’ The judge ordered a pre-sentence report, with sentencing scheduled for April 29. As part of his bail conditions, the defendant is banned from posting on social media.
The incident follows a broader crackdown across Europe on acts deemed blasphemous. Social media posts accompanying the Manchester video claim the act was carried out in solidarity with Salwan Momika, the Iraqi-born activist at the centre of a major diplomatic crisis after publicly burning copies of the Koran in Sweden.
Momika, who sought asylum in Sweden, set fire to a Koran outside Stockholm Central Mosque in 2023, triggering protests across the Middle East. His actions led to violent demonstrations, diplomatic protests, and a tightening of Sweden’s laws on public desecration of religious texts. Last week, Momika was shot dead in his Stockholm apartment in what police described as a targeted attack.
In recent years, Sweden and neighbouring Denmark – both historically strong defenders of free expression – have moved to restrict Koran-burning protests under pressure from Muslim-majority countries. Denmark has criminalised the public desecration of religious texts, including the Koran, punishable by up to two years in prison. Sweden, meanwhile, is considering legal measures to curb religiously offensive protests deemed a national security risk, following the successful prosecution of right-wing politician Rasmus Paludan for hate crimes after he burned the Koran during protests in Malmö in 2022.
These legislative shifts follow lobbying from the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, which has long sought international restrictions on the so-called ‘defamation’ of Islam. In bowing to diplomatic and security concerns, Scandinavian governments have set a perilous precedent, one in which secular democracies prioritise religious sensitivities over individual freedoms.
Blasphemy laws were abolished in England and Wales in 2008, reinforcing the principle that religious beliefs should not receive special legal protection from criticism. While the Public Order Act 1986 makes it an offence to use threatening words or behaviour intended to stir up religious hatred, Section 29J – which was introduced precisely to prevent the reintroduction of blasphemy laws in another form – explicitly protects expressions of criticism, antipathy, ridicule and even insult toward religions and their adherents.
Yet despite these safeguards, recent cases suggest a shift toward indirect enforcement of blasphemy restrictions via laws concerning public order, hate crime and incitement. In this case, Greater Manchester Police arrested the man on suspicion of a racially aggravated public order offence. This charge originates under the Public Order Act 1986 – most likely under Section 4A or Section 5 – but is treated as ‘racially or religiously aggravated’ under Section 31 of the Crime and Disorder Act 1998, which increases the penalty where hostility toward a racial or religious group is demonstrated or presumed.
Nowhere is this shift more evident than in English schools. In Wakefield, four students were suspended in 2023 after a Koran was accidentally scuffed at Kettlethorpe High School. Though an internal investigation confirmed there was no malicious intent, West Yorkshire Police recorded the incident as a ‘hate occurrence’, and one of the pupils – who was autistic – received death threats, briefly forcing him into police protection.
Also in West Yorkshire, a teacher in Batley was driven into hiding in 2021 after displaying a cartoon of Muhammad during a religious studies lesson. This single act, undertaken during a lesson on blasphemy, led to several days of demonstrations outside the school gates, with large groups of Muslim men gathering outside the teacher’s family home. In response, the school swiftly suspended the unnamed teacher pending a formal investigation. Gary Kibble, the headmaster, issued an ‘unequivocal apology’ for the teacher’s use of a ‘totally inappropriate image’. Footage on social media showed police reading out the headteacher’s apology statement to the mob. After receiving death threats, the teacher was put into police protection and remains in hiding nearly four years on. According to his family, he suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder and is unlikely ever to return home.
Across Europe, a pattern is emerging. While legal mechanisms are increasingly used to suppress religiously offensive speech, the parallel threat of mob violence ensures that even those who escape prosecution face severe consequences.
Book burnings are crude, deliberately provocative, and a poor substitute for reasoned debate. But as Jacob Mchangama points out for UnHerd, ‘when conducted by private individuals, they serve as non-violent symbolic expressions intended to convey a message – the essence of free expression’. Given the UK’s legal protections for free expression, the arrest in Manchester raises a difficult question: Are we witnessing the quiet return of blasphemy laws, not only through public-order and hate-crime legislation but also through the ever-present threat of retaliation?
(Photograph: Terry from uk, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)
Dr Frederick Attenborough Is Executive Communications and Research Officer for the Free Speech Union.
This piece was first published in TCW Defending Freedom, and is reproduced by kind permission.
If you enjoy The New Conservative and would like to support our work, please consider buying us a coffee or sharing this piece with your friends – it would really help to keep us going. Thank you!
This article (Blasphemy Laws via the Front Door) was created and published by The New Conservative and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Frederick Attenborough
See Related Articles Below
Labour’s crackdown on “Islamophobia” is yet another crackdown on free speech
I warned this would happen —and now it’s happening
MATT GOODWIN
Well, I did warn you this would happen and now it’s happening. Labour’s crackdown on free speech in this country is about to move up a gear.
Since coming to power only a few months ago, Keir Starmer’s Labour government has already moved to undermine free speech on multiple fronts.
Labour has defanged an important law to protect free speech in our universities, a law I helped create. Since the Southport atrocities, the party’s also expanded the deeply Orwellian ‘non-crime hate incidents’, which will be used to try and control debate.
Labour’s also sought to stigmatise political opposition to its project by describing millions of people, including those who ask tough questions about the rape gangs, as ‘far right’. And, meanwhile, the party’s said nothing at all about Labour activists and politicians openly calling to shut down GB News and “kill” Elon Musk’s X platform.
And now, as I predicted, we learn that this deeply authoritarian Labour government is pressing ahead with a draconian new definition of ‘Islamophobia’ which will further erode free speech, free expression, and entirely legitimate debate about Islam and its compatibility with Western ways of life.
What’s Labour planning to do, exactly?
Well, as reported yesterday, the Labour government, under Angela Rayner, is planning to create a new ‘council on Islamophobia’, which will ‘help advise on drawing up an official government definition for anti-Muslim discrimination’.
And if the idea of Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner deciding what you can or cannot say about this issue does not alarm you then some of the other details certainly will.
Like the fact that liberal Tory Dominic Grieve is being ‘recommended’ to chair the new council —a man so comfortable with free speech in this country that after the Brexit referendum he spent years demanding that the British people be forced to vote again in a second referendum, presumably so they could make the ‘right’ decision.
More importantly, like the Labour Party, Grieve also endorsed a controversial report by the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG), published in 2018, which set out a definition of ‘Islamophobia’ that will almost certainly be adopted by Starmer’s Labour government and then, in turn, imposed on public institutions and the rest of us.
And what is this definition of ‘Islamophobia’, exactly? Well, here’s where we encounter a much bigger problem than Keir Starmer, Angela Rayner, and Dominic Grieve. The definition that I suspect is about to be imposed on us is so vague and broad that it will, inevitably, end up stifling free speech and debate about Islam.
‘Islamophobia’, we’re told, ‘is rooted in racism and is a type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness’. But what does this even mean?
What counts as targeting ‘expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness’? Anything that will be perceived as ‘Islamophobic’ by Muslims and their self-selected representatives — that’s what.
Examples of Islamophobia, we’re told, include ‘making mendacious, dehumanizing, demonizing, or stereotypical allegations about Muslims as such, or of Muslims as a collective group, such as, especially but not exclusively, conspiracies about Muslim entryism in politics, government, or other societal institutions’.
What happens, then, if the British people want to debate the fact, supported by rigorous surveys, that nearly one-third of British Muslims think the implementation of Sharia law in Britain over the next twenty years is ‘desirable’, or that nearly 40% of all British Muslims and nearly half of all young Muslims in this country think the formation of a political party for Muslims would be desirable? Would this be considered ‘Islamophobic’, an attack on ‘perceived Muslimness’?
And if ‘conspiracies about Muslim entryism in politics’ is ‘Islamophobic’ then what happens if, say, somebody wants to highlight the fact there are already highly organised and well-resourced activist groups in Britain telling four million Muslims how to vote at national elections and what to demand politically? If we want to debate this obvious sectarianism in our politics would this be considered ‘Islamophobic’, too?
Or what about the fact that Muslims are nearly twice as likely as the average British person to think it’s perfectly acceptable to protest outside the home of a politician if that politician happens to hold a different view on Israel and Palestine? Would calling this out, would defending our democracy, also be considered ‘Islamophobic’ at some point in the future, as some kind of attack on ‘perceived Muslimness’?
And if ‘conspiracies about Muslim entryism’ into our national political life, laws, and institutions are included in this remarkably vague definition then what are we to do with the finding that while only 16% of British people think it should be illegal to show a picture or cartoon of Mohammed, more than half of all Muslims think it should? Would defending our existing laws be seen as an attack on ‘perceived Muslimness’, would standing up for the Batley school teacher be ‘Islamophobic’?
Shocking: what British Muslims think
Bizarrely, if you question these claims of ‘Islamophobia’ then that also makes you an Islamophobe. According to the report, even daring to suggest that Muslims or presumably their representatives might be ‘inventing or exaggerating Islamophobia’ is … you guessed it … ‘Islamophobic’. Ask questions about Islam and you risk being stained as an Islamophobe; question the scale of Islamophobia in modern Britain and that also makes you an Islamophobe. It’s not hard at all, in other words, to see how in this way the public square is curtailed and entirely legitimate debate is shut down.
Just as worrying is that ‘claims of a demographic ‘threat’ posed by Muslims or of a ‘Muslim takeover’ are cited as yet another example of ‘Islamophobia’. But where is the line here? What happens, say, if I decide to write a Substack post highlighting rigorous and reliable forecasts which show how Europe’s Muslim population will exceed 58 million by the year 2030 and, if European nations continue to pursue mass immigration, then by the year 2050 the share of populations that is Muslim could reach 31% in Sweden, 20% in Germany, 18% in France, and 17% in the UK, just 25 years from now?
If somebody out there —say a self-styled representative of Muslim communities— decides that this debate about demographic change is ‘threatening’, or ‘targeting Muslims’, then will this critical debate about how our nations and cultures are being completely transformed also be shut down in the name of protecting Muslims from ‘emotional harm’? Will free speech and free expression be sacrificed on the altar of prioritising the emotional safety of just one minority group?
Suggesting that some Muslims might be ‘incapable of living harmoniously in plural societies’ is also considered ‘Islamophobia’. But what then are we to make of the finding that British Muslims are considerably more likely than the average British person to believe various anti-Semitic tropes, such as that Jews have ‘too much power’, to voice support for extremist terrorist groups like Hamas, to believe Israel does not have a right to exist, to think that homosexuality should be made illegal (a view supported by more than one in four Muslims), and gay marriage should be outlawed in modern Britain. By pointing to such empirical findings, by suggesting that —actually, yes— some Muslims do appear incapable of living harmoniously in modern, plural, liberal societies, am I being ‘Islamophobic’?
Lastly, and even more astonishingly given recent events, the report even mentions the ‘grooming gangs’ or rape gangs scandal as another example of ‘Islamophobia’. Apparently, suggesting that some Muslims might want to ‘subjugate minority groups’ or are ‘sex groomers’ is another example of attacking ‘perceived Muslimness’.
So what happens if somebody wants to discuss why victims of the rape gangs have very clearly explained how their abusers often sought to justify this sickening abuse and torture by pointing to their Islamic faith —variously telling their young, white, non-Muslim victims they should be raped for “not obeying Allah”, were “worthless Kaffir girls”, and having parts of the Quran read to them before they were abused?
No. It is not “far right” to care about the mass rape of young white children
Clearly, most Muslims would strongly reject any association between their Islamic faith and the actions of the predominantly Pakistani Muslim rape gangs. But the blunt reality is that as a free society we must always be able to have an open, frank, and rigorous debate about issues like this without having to worry about being shut down and stigmatised as ‘Islamophobic’. After all, doing this is exactly what led to the rape gangs scandal being downplayed and ignored for decades in the first place.
I could go on. But the key point is that the more and more I read through the thinking that underpins this looming definition of ‘Islamophobia’ that will almost certainly be embraced by Labour and then imposed on the rest of us the more I am deeply alarmed about the direction of travel and the very real threat this will pose to free speech.
As the Telegraph remarked this week, seen through the eyes of many critics this new definition is nothing more than a ‘a de facto blasphemy law’ which ‘stifles legitimate criticism of Islam as a religion’. And when it comes to those critics I am certainly one of them.
This article (Labour’s crackdown on “Islamophobia” is yet another crackdown on free speech) was created and published by Matt Goodwin and is republished here under “Fair Use”
*****
Angela Rayner’s Islamophobia council threatens free speech
RAKIB EHSAN
Labour Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner is reportedly planning to establish a 16-person council, with the intention of devising an official Government definition of Islamophobia. Such an initiative, however, is fraught with risks.
The provisions of the current Islamophobia definition don’t just place severe restrictions on freedom of expression to the point of providing cover for the regimes of Muslim-majority countries; they also threaten to undermine scholarly investigations into critical matters of identity and cohesion in modern Britain.
Much of this stems back to 2018, when the All-Party Parliamentary Group on British Muslims produced a working definition of Islamophobia. The 2018 report — which is likely to inspire the work of the new council — asserted that accusing Muslims or Muslim-majority states of inventing or exaggerating Islamophobia was itself a contemporary form of Islamophobia. It also advanced the view that accusing Muslim citizens of being more loyal to the Ummah — or transnational Muslim community — was Islamophobic, even though research showed that Muslims in Britain were more likely to attach strong importance to their religious affiliation than their national identity. Meanwhile, a separate 2020 survey by ComRes found that more than two in five British Muslims believed their co-religionist compatriots tended to be more loyal to Saudi Arabia, which includes the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, than to the UK.
The APPG definition of Islamophobia is beset with problems, which is hardly a surprise when one considers the organisations and people involved in its oral evidence sessions and “community consultation” process. First, the recommended chair of the new council is former Tory attorney general and liberal conservative Dominic Grieve, who provided the introduction to the 2018 report. Can he really be trusted to develop a new and improved definition from six years ago? The same can be said of the group’s overreliance on the Runnymede Trust, the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), Muslim Engagement and Development (MEND), and the National Union of Students (NUS). Dr Chris Allen, a “hate expert” who stepped down from leading an academic-led review into the 2022 Leicester disorder following accusations of partiality, also fed into the work of the APPG on British Muslims.
Additionally, the APPG on British Muslims has been part of efforts to de-emphasise the Muslim background of those responsible for acts of terrorism and group-localised child sexual exploitation (GLCSE) — otherwise known as street-based grooming. Though it is important to combat sweeping generalisations, definitions of Islamophobia should not fuel institutional paralysis by detracting from the fact that Islamist extremism remains Britain’s principal terror threat and men of Pakistani Muslim heritage are disproportionately represented among GLCSE prosecutions.
Conflating anti-Muslim discrimination and criticism of organised religion risks the introduction of de facto blasphemy laws disguised as “pro-cohesion activity”. Last November, during “Islamophobia Awareness Month”, Labour MP Tahir Ali asked Keir Starmer if he would “commit to introducing measures to prohibit the desecration of all religious texts and the prophets of the Abrahamic religions”. Responding, the Prime Minister did not rule it out.
The matter has now been thrust back into the spotlight, with Greater Manchester Police recently arresting and naming a man for burning a copy of the Quran in Manchester city centre. This “state-enforced tolerance” will backfire in terms of cohesion, only serving to further antagonise those who believe there is creeping Sharia-inspired regulation of the public realm.
There is, however, scope for a definition of “anti-Muslim prejudice” developed through the lenses of opportunity and security. It should focus on tackling the “Muslim penalty” in spheres of British life such as the labour market and the private rented sector, where practical material improvements can be achieved in the name of fairness and integration. The dissemination of unfounded anti-Muslim conspiracy theories — especially those which risk endangering human life — should be treated with the utmost seriousness.
This is certainly a lesson to be learned from the rioting which unfolded following last summer’s Southport murders. But if primarily drawn from Britain’s grievance-industrial complex, the new council planned by the Labour government risks establishing an anti-freedom charter which provides a specific religio-political milieu with special protections.
A definition of Islamophobia adopted by Labour could be yet another example of “multicultural governance” empowering vocal identitarian activists. The danger is that this comes at the expense of collective public security.
••••
The Liberty Beacon Project is now expanding at a near exponential rate, and for this we are grateful and excited! But we must also be practical. For 7 years we have not asked for any donations, and have built this project with our own funds as we grew. We are now experiencing ever increasing growing pains due to the large number of websites and projects we represent. So we have just installed donation buttons on our websites and ask that you consider this when you visit them. Nothing is too small. We thank you for all your support and your considerations … (TLB)
••••
Comment Policy: As a privately owned web site, we reserve the right to remove comments that contain spam, advertising, vulgarity, threats of violence, racism, or personal/abusive attacks on other users. This also applies to trolling, the use of more than one alias, or just intentional mischief. Enforcement of this policy is at the discretion of this websites administrators. Repeat offenders may be blocked or permanently banned without prior warning.
••••
Disclaimer: TLB websites contain copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available to our readers under the provisions of “fair use” in an effort to advance a better understanding of political, health, economic and social issues. The material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving it for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material for purposes other than “fair use” you must request permission from the copyright owner.
••••
Disclaimer: The information and opinions shared are for informational purposes only including, but not limited to, text, graphics, images and other material are not intended as medical advice or instruction. Nothing mentioned is intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of The Liberty Beacon Project.
Leave a Reply