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The British elites have capitulated to Islamo-censorship Our backdoor blasphemy laws were decades in the making, inked in blood and cowardice. Tom Slater

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/05/09/the-british-elites-have-capitulated-to-islamo-censorship/

Does freedom of speech include the right to blaspheme? In 21st-century Britain, you’d have thought the answer would be ‘yes, obviously’. Our last blasphemy conviction was in 1977. England’s blasphemy law was abolished in 2008, having been a dead letter for decades. The centuries-long struggle for free speech in this country, as in so many others, was built on defaming gods, kings, clerics, prophets. Without the right to blaspheme, there is no right to speak freely. But in this identitarian age, what was once taken for granted is fast melting into air.

In Britain, in 2025, whether or not you should be able to criticise a religion, mock its practices, burn its texts, is an alarmingly live issue. And when I say ‘a religion’, you know which one I’m talking about. This debate has lit up again this week, following the charges brought against Hamit Coskun for burning a Koran outside the Turkish consulate in London in February. His one-man protest against the Islamist turn of Turkey under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been chalked up as a religiously motivated public-order offence, drawing the condemnation of shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick and causing an X feud between two MPs. Rupert Lowe – the member for the Very Online right – condemned our backdoor blasphemy laws, while Adnan Hussain – one of the so-called Gaza independents who rode a wave of sectarian, anti-Israel bile into parliament at the last General Election – accused Lowe of singling out Muslims under the guise of freedom of speech.

Hussain’s arguments are as banal as they are illiberal. Free speech isn’t absolute, ackshually. Those who claim to care about Koran-burners are really just racists. Do you know who also burned books? Hitler! What most sticks in the craw is how depressingly pedestrian they are – not simply among the ‘Gaza independents’, but also the liberal elites, who long ago sacrificed genuine liberalism on the altar of multiculturalism. It is their cowardice and relativism that has brought us to this point: where the old Christian blasphemy laws may be long gone, but informal Islamic blasphemy laws are fast taking shape, with hate-speech laws refashioned to forcefield a faith from criticism.

Those shocked to see a case like Coskun’s haven’t been paying attention. Ever since the Rushdie affair, we have witnessed an unholy alliance between Islamist censors, a cowardly political establishment and an increasingly identitarian left. The first protest against The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie’s ‘blasphemous’ novel which earned him the Ayatollah’s fatwa and almost cost him his life, was not on the subcontinent or in the Middle East, but in Bolton on 2 December 1988. While this movement never succeeded in getting Rushdie’s novel banned in Britain, or extending Britain’s blasphemy laws to cover Islam, it put the fear of Allah into anyone who dared publish a book, display a cartoon or make a statement that some perma-outraged prick, claiming to speak on behalf of Muslims, might deem to be offensive or heretical. This haunts us to this day, as the still-disappeared Batley school teacher or the recent – mercifully foiled – attempts to murder ex-Muslim Hatun Tash show.

The Collision of Islamic Culture With Western Civilization Importing Sharia. by Aynaz Anni Cyrus

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-collision-of-islamic-culture-with-western-civilization/

There was a time when Europe stood as a beacon of liberty — the birthplace of Enlightenment ideals, the defender of individual rights, the champion of human dignity.

Today, that same Europe hosts classes to teach adult men — not boys — that women are not public property, sexual objects, or spoils of war.

Not because these men are mentally unstable. Not because they come from war zones. But because they come from Islamic countries, where modesty is law, where female autonomy is rebellion, and where sexual violence is normalized — by culture, by clerics, and sometimes by the law itself.

These aren’t fringe cases. They are embedded practices. This is not satire. This is policy.

In Norway, asylum seekers — overwhelmingly from Islamic-majority nations like Afghanistan, Somalia, Syria, Iraq, and Pakistan — are now enrolled in government-sponsored “rape prevention classes.” These men are shown images of Western women in dresses, walking alone, drinking wine, or dancing — and are told: “This is not an invitation.”

They are taught that a woman’s smile doesn’t mean she consents. That women are equal. That sex without permission is rape.

Here’s the chilling part: to many of these men, this is news. This isn’t remedial education — this is reprogramming.

Because the worldview they bring isn’t just incompatible with Western norms.

Nigeria: Sharia-Based Discrimination Against Christians Including blasphemy laws and extrajudicial mob violence. by Uzay Bulut

https://www.frontpagemag.com/nigeria-sharia-based-discrimination-against-christians/

Christians in Nigeria are murdered almost daily through indiscriminate attacks led by Muslims. Nigerian Christian women are abducted, raped, gang-raped and sexually abused on a widespread scale. Violence is only one of the many forms of persecution that Christians in Nigeria face. They are also subjected to systematic, Sharia-based discrimination, a situation which is particularly routine in the majority-Muslim northern states.

One of the methods used to silence Christian voices utilizes the deadly blasphemy laws. In many cases, Muslim mobs take the law into their own hands and execute Christians who they accuse of blasphemy.

In 2022, for instance, Deborah Samuel Yakubu, a second-year Christian college student, was stoned and burnt to death by a mob of Muslim students in Sokoto, Nigeria, after being accused of blasphemy against Islam.

The Council on Foreign Relations reported:

Ms. Yakubu was thought to have ‘blasphemed’ Islam and Prophet Muhammad after a voice note that she left on a WhatsApp group responding to another student’s post on the theme of Islam rubbed her colleagues the wrong way. After forcibly extracting her from a safe room where the school authorities had hoped to hide her, a mob comprising Ms. Yakubu’s colleagues struck her repeatedly with stones and clubs before eventually setting her lifeless body on fire, all the while shouting “Allahu Akbar” (God is great).

Footage of the killing would later appear on various social media platforms.

A Nigerian analyst said:

Christians have to be very careful in discussions with Muslims as their words can easily be used against them. Christians have been killed when they were accused of speaking ill of Muhammad or Islam. Many opinions spoken by Christians are deliberately misconstrued and regarded as blasphemous. In several instances mobs have killed Christians for simply preaching in public or expressing opinions on issues.

The Next Pope Needs to Preserve Judeo-Christian Civilization by Lawrence A. Franklin

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21590/the-next-pope

Some Catholics who are sensitive to the Holy See’s influence on international affairs may be hoping for a Pope who exercises decisive moral clarity in condemning brutal behavior, whether in Africa, China or elsewhere.

Pope Francis seemed to be infrequent in his condemnation of Islamist atrocities and when he did condemn them, he would be quick to criticize those who equated the religion of Islam with violence. Mass murders of Catholics and other Christians by Islamists take place daily in Nigeria, Mozambique, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

There are heroic candidates among the “Papabiles” (Papal possibles) such as the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, who offered himself in exchange for the hostages seized by the Gaza terrorist group Hamas.

Although the Vatican’s reason for being is to guide souls to God, its pronouncements on secular affairs not only have a profound impact, literally, on the lives of millions of Catholics, but on preserving the Judeo-Christian values upon which civilization is built, as well.

While the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics wait prayerfully for the elevation to the papacy of the 267th pope, successor to the Christ-appointed St. Peter, most of the rest of humanity may be wondering what impact the new pontiff could have on global affairs.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leadership, which did not send a representative to the funeral of Pope Francis, has cause to be attentive. If this week’s Papal Conclave selects Philippines Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle, the Archbishop of Manila, CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping would have reason for concern.

Does The European Union Actually Expect Radical Islamists to Reform Themselves? by Nils A. Haug

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21586/eu-palestinians-islamists

The European Union’s decision to grant the Palestinian Authority (PA) a sum of $2 billion to assist them to “reform themselves” can only be the result of wilful blindness, cognitive dissonance and what by now can only be ascribed to a proud European tradition of Jew-hate.

Israel’s warnings of the PA continuing to seize Israel’s land by phases — as planned by the PLO 10-Point Program of 1974 and advanced by former PA Prime Minister Salman Fayyad’s plan — to “create facts on the ground” with illegal buildings — are largely ignored by the West. So far, the PA, with the funding from the EU, has built more than 97,581 illegal structures on Israeli land that is still to be negotiated.

The Palestinian Authority also full-throatedly incites terrorism in its education system and bountifully funds terrorist acts. The total so far disbursed as remuneration for the PA’s “Pay-for-Slay” program and acts of terrorism reportedly exceeds $1 billion. This transaction has been in place for decades.

The EU’s naiveté (to be kind) is already bringing disaster upon many of its member nations by allowing unlimited Muslim migration, presumably in an unconditional desire for every vote imaginable.

Israelis are understandably against an untenable two-state solution — which they accurately see as no solution at all.

The European Union’s decision to grant the Palestinian Authority (PA) a sum of $2 billion to assist them to “reform themselves” can only be the result of wilful blindness, cognitive dissonance and what by now can only be ascribed to a proud European tradition of Jew-hate.

The PA, despite claiming to be secular, is saturated with an Islamist mentality in support of jihadists. The PA plays the West by displaying a veneer of reasonableness, victimhood and the bogus claim that it would, in an ever-extending future, accept some kind of peace with the Jews. This fiction is supposedly backed by an equally bogus claim that it would be willing — under conditions which would always be suicidal for the Jews to accept — to establish a two-state solution in Israel’s ancestral homeland.

This romantic fantasy persists in the face of the Palestinian Authority’s elaborate, extremely concrete programs with the European Union to appropriate land which, according to the 1993 and 1995 Oslo Accords, must still be negotiated, as well as a continuing jobs program that the PA offers, similar to Murder, Inc. The PA’s “Pay for Slay” program lavishly rewards Palestinians who murder Israelis. The more Israelis they murder, the greater the sum. A 2024 report notes that the PA disburses more than $16 million each month to the Palestinian murderers and their families.

The West Eats Itself By J.B. Shurk

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/05/the_west_eats_itself.html

Western governments undermine elections, religious freedom, free markets, and free speech.

The same Western leaders who speak endlessly about “protecting Democracy” continue to rig elections, outlaw political parties, and prosecute candidates.  Germany has declared Alternative for Germany — now the country’s most popular party — an “extremist group” on par with domestic terror organizations.  The European Union helped Marxist globalists in Romania invalidate a presidential election and ban the winner from office.  France and Brazil have followed the U.S. example of bringing ludicrous criminal charges against popular anti-Establishment politicians, and while President Trump overcame the sham prosecutions targeting him, Marine Le Pen and Jair Bolsonaro are fighting just to survive. 

Let’s not forget either that the Ukraine-Russia War drags on today only because U.S. and European forces helped overthrow the legitimately elected Ukrainian president, Viktor Yanukovych, back in 2014.  His transgression?  Yanukovych’s government was pushing back against the EU’s efforts to absorb Ukraine into its continental empire.  The same NATO and EU talking-heads who denounce Russia’s conquest of its neighbor are mostly mad because they hoped to conquer Ukraine first.

It’s a disorienting time for Westerners who once respected their civic institutions.  The Cold War mentality of the twentieth century created clear distinctions between closed, communist systems and rights-based, free societies.  In the West, people could freely practice the religious tenets of their respective faiths; in communist societies, people were expected to obey the quasi-divine strictures of the State.  In the West, people could own property and freely exchange goods and services; in communist societies, people owned nothing and received only what the State gave them.  In the West, people could speak their minds and publicly debate new ideas; in communist societies, people adhered to politically correct ideology under the constant threat of arrest, torture, and even death.  The West was supposed to err on the side of individual freedoms, even when those freedoms permitted awful people to say awful things. 

Western societies did not always live up to the principles that distinguished them from totalitarian regimes, but respect for personal freedom did serve as an effective guardrail that kept Western governments from careening toward totalitarianism, too.  

What’s going on today is entirely different.  

The delicious media meltdown over Reform’s success The media elites’ hissy fit over the local-election results is a hilarious rage of the entitled. Brendan O’Neill

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/05/05/the-delicious-media-meltdown-over-reforms-success/

The BBC’s mask didn’t so much slip on Friday as completely disintegrate. When Andrea Jenkyns, formerly of the Conservative Party, was elected the Reform UK mayor for Greater Lincolnshire, the Beeb put out one of the weirdest and most telling tweets of recent times. Jenkyns’s victory marks ‘a return to politics for the former Greggs worker and Miss UK finalist’, it said. Greggs worker? Heaven forfend! You could almost hear the sloshing of spilt macchiatos as the Oxbridge tits of the BBC’s social-media team clocked that someone who once served sausage rolls to the hard-up was now a mayor.

It was undiluted class snobbery. It was a sly jeer designed to get the Beeb’s more middle-class readership chortling with gleeful derision at the thought of such riff-raff-coded people now running the country. I was just a ‘Saturday kid’ at Greggs, when ‘I was 16’, protested Jenkyns. Others pointed out that she’s since been a Conservative MP and even a minister in both Boris Johnson’s and Liz Truss’s governments. Doesn’t matter, guys. Thirty-five years ago she heated up Cornish pasties for hungry working-class people and in the eyes of the BBC that makes her a strange and possibly unsuitable person for high politics.

The Beeb deleted the tweet. Maybe someone’s knuckles were rapped. But we could all see what was happening here. For the benefit of non-British readers, Greggs is a bakery that serves piping-hot pastries and sweet treats. It is especially popular on high streets in ‘left behind’ towns. And it has become shorthand among the chattering classes who can’t quite bring themselves to say ‘oik’ anymore. Make no mistake – when the Beeb said ‘former Greggs worker’, rather than ‘former minister’, it was implying that Jenkyns has rubbed shoulders with wrong’uns; with the little folk who not only voted for Brexit but, worse, also prefer a Greggs chicken bake to a salmon and spinach brioche roll from Benugo.

The Commons foreign affairs hanging tribunal Parliament should be investigating its own deafness to facts about Israel Melanie Phillips

https://melaniephillips.substack.com/p/the-commons-foreign-affairs-hanging

A recent hearing of the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee demonstrated that Israel’s defenders and its critics appear to inhabit entirely different planets.

The committee, which was taking evidence on “the Israeli-Palestinian conflict”, had invited two of Israel’s doughtiest champions, the lawyer Natasha Hausdorff and the writer Jonathan Sacerdoti, to address it.

For the committee’s chair, the Labour MP Emily Thornberry, this appeared to be not so much a fact-finding exercise as a tribunal in which Hausdorff and Sacerdoti were in the dock.

Thornberry asked Sacerdoti: “How do you see ideally Gaza in ten years’ time? What would be a good outcome?” Sacerdoti replied that this would be a de-radicalised Gaza whose inhabitants were no longer committed to genocidal acts.

But as Thornberry’s subsequent challenges to him demonstrated, the only good outcome for her seemed to be a Palestinian state.

When it was Hausdorff’s turn, sparks really flew. “What’s the optimistic future for a Palestinian mother in Gaza, what’s the best thing that could happen?” asked Thornberry.

In any moral universe, the best thing that could happen to such a mother would be for her to stop telling her children that their duty was to murder Jews and martyr themselves in the process, as so many Palestinian Arab women boast of doing.

‘I Saw You Come Out of the Church’: The Persecution of Christians, March 2025 by Raymond Ibrahim

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21584/persecution-of-christians-march

“Our imam had assured us that when you kill a kafir [infidel], Allah rewards one with a Jannah [paradise]… so I wanted to get that Jannah.” — Hanifa Hamiyat, a Muslim woman who poisoned and killed three people: a young Christian couple, as well as her own 18-year-old daughter, who accidentally ate the same poisoned food the Muslim woman had offered to the Christians; Morning Star News, March 28, 2025, Uganda.

“Pure genocide” experienced by Christians at the hands of Muslims, headlines…. – Nigera

“During the time I was there, Ali did bad things with me… He also beat me whenever I used to cry for my parents and told him that I wanted to go back home. I was kept locked in a room most of the time.” — Saba Masih, age 12, kidnapped, and forced by her kidnapper to convert to Islam and marry him. When her father reported the kidnapping to the police, “the police deliberately misstated Saba’s age,” writing down that she was 16, even though her father kept insisting she was 12; Morning Star News, February 7, 2025, Pakistan.

[E]ven in Indonesia, which is often presented as an exceptionally moderate Muslim nation, Christians are being persecuted for blasphemy…. — Morning Star News, March 21, 2025, Indonesia.

Coptic Christians, for some inexplicable reason, must have become the most careless and fire-prone people in the world: more Coptic churches than any other kind seem to keep “accidentally catching fire.” — Coptic Solidarity, March 17, 2025, Egypt.

The following are among the abuses and murders inflicted on Christians by Muslims throughout the month of March 2025.

Uganda: On March 16, Hanifa Hamiyat, a Muslim woman poisoned and killed three people: a young Christian couple, as well as her own 18-year-old daughter, who accidentally ate the same poisoned food the Muslim woman had offered to the Christians for sharing Christ with the daughter. The Christian woman she killed was six months pregnant. When local leaders later questioned Hanifa, she confessed to poisoning the food, saying:

“I never intended to kill my daughter, but my plan was to kill the neighbors because of taking my daughter to church during this holy month of Ramadan. Our imam had assured us that when you kill a kafir [infidel], Allah rewards one with a Jannah [paradise] called Firdausi, so I wanted to get that Jannah.”

Europe’s Illegal Land-Grab: Part II by Karys Rhea

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21491/europe-illegal-land-grab-part-ii

[T]he IDF tends to be… focused on immediate, critical threats from Lebanon, Syria, Gaza and Iran.

[Many in Israel] demand a zero-tolerance policy towards illegal construction, regardless of EU funding and lawsuits, and have called on the Israeli government to initiate a long-overdue diplomatic effort that will make it clear to the EU that it has established red lines that will be enforced.

It may even be that right-wingers such as [Finance Minister Bezalel] Smotrich and others have risen to power precisely because of growing Israeli frustration over fundamental threats such as this one having long gone ignored.

In 1967, Israel fought a monumental six-day war against neighboring Egypt, Syria and Jordan, who attacked the small country with the declared goal of wiping the Jewish state off the map. To the amazement of the international community, Israel unexpectedly emerged victorious, gaining control over multiple territories, including the West Bank. Historically known as “Judea and Samaria,” and before 1948 home to a thriving Jewish population, the West Bank was illegally occupied by the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan without international recognition from 1948 to 1967. In that time, Jordan ethnically cleansed the Jewish residents and destroyed dozens of synagogues. It re-named the region the “West Bank,” meaning “west of the Jordan River,” to sever any Jewish connection to the land in an attempt to legitimize its occupation of territory that was never part of its internationally recognized borders.

When Israel wrested control of the West Bank from Jordan in 1967, it refrained from annexing the territory, immediately offering to exchange land for peace. This unprecedented overture was met with the resounding “Three No’s” at the infamous 1967 Arab League Summit in Khartoum: “No peace with Israel. No negotiation with Israel. No recognition of Israel.” Consequently, the West Bank came under Israeli military rule.