by David Shipley, Spectator
I had hoped I would never have to write about Hamit Coskun again. After the Quran-burner won his appeal in October, it seemed that this particular battle in the free speech wars was over. Unfortunately the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) have other ideas. On Friday evening the state prosecutor announced that it was going to appeal Coskun’s successful appeal. The language in their appeal application is particularly revealing.
In that document the CPS describes burning a Quran as ‘an obviously provocative act’, which is ‘highly controversial’ and ‘has led to widespread international protests and condemnation, particularly from Muslim communities and governments, and has provoked numerous well-documented incidents of disorder and violence’. This is similar to the arguments they made at Hamit’s original trial. The fact that Moussa Kadri went into his home, returned with a knife and slashed at Hamit with it was held up as evidence of how provocative the Quran burning must have been.
In an even more disturbing part of the CPS appeal application, they describe burning a Quran as ‘an act of desecration’, and are concerned that Coskun’s case ‘will undoubtedly be relied upon in future public order cases involving inflammatory acts of desecration’. Put simply, they want to be able to continue to prosecute and convict anyone whose actions violate Islamic blasphemy codes.
The mask is off now. In the world of the CPS, violence committed by unstable Muslims who can’t bear the sight of a book being burned is proof that those books shouldn’t be burned. Even worse, they are speaking the language of Islamic blasphemy codes, trying to introduce the idea that burning a book is an ‘act of desecration’ simply because Muslims believe it to be so.