from The Jewish Chronicle
Last week’s decision not to prosecute an east London imam who urged Allah to destroy Jewish homes would be easier to understand if the UK had a strong free speech tradition.
But in a country where police knock on newspaper columnists’ doors for “Non-Crime Hate Incidents” and dispatch entire squads to arrest pensioners over social media posts, this case suggests a dangerous inconsistency in how the law is applied.
The same British authorities that so zealously enforce some of the most restrictive speech laws in the Western world tend to transform to First Amendment purists when it concerns Islamist hate preachers or Hamas apologists indoctrinating students at our finest universities (See our March 11 leader on the LSE book launch event).
It is often argued that scripture and context may justify more leniency in religious cases. But as Tom Wilson from the Counter Extremism Group explains, the critical context is this: the mosque sermon calling for Allah to destroy Jewish homes came merely two weeks after Islamist terrorists actually destroyed hundreds of Jewish homes – murdering, torturing, raping and abducting thousands of Jews in the process. And Hamas, like all Islamist terrorists, likes to quote a lot of scripture to justify its barbarous acts.
Another relevant context is that this country too has suffered numerous Islamist-linked terror attacks that have resulted in hundreds of victims. MI5 itself states that “Islamist terrorism is the most significant terrorist threat to the UK by volume”.
But the danger does not have to rise to the level of terror to demand our authorities’ proper application of the law. Passages such as the one cited by the east London imam incite hatred that often leads to intolerable abuse and violence against the Jewish community in everyday life.