Homophobic Stickers Merit a Slap on the Wrist
Mohammed Hasnath posted a whole bunch of these stickers around the East End of London (where I work):
“Basically, some people just handed them to me so I just put them up. I didn’t say anything, it doesn’t say that I am going to punish them it just says what God says in the Koran.
“I wasn’t the one who made them, some people gave them to me and I only put up a few, there were hundreds of them up. I didn’t know the police were going to get involved or that it was a offence or anything.”
And in response he was given a slap on the wrist:
Hasnath, who lives with his family in Tower Hamlets and survives on job seekers allowance, was fined £100, ordered to pay £85 costs and a £15 victim surcharge. The offence could not carry a custodial sentence.
District Judge Coleman said: “I think you used these stickers deliberately to offend and distress people, you certainly succeeded in doing that.
“You have upset people and they deserve an apology, you are not entitled to behave in this way.”
An apology? £100? Inciting homophobic hatred in the community is worthy of a trivial fine and a demand for an apology? This asshole should be in jail! What if that sticker had said ‘Muslim free zone’? ‘Jew free zone’? I can’t believe that a message of outright hatred, with the clear implicit threat of violence, wouldn’t merit a custodial sentence. Turns out it could have – last month the CPS said:
“This case has now been referred to the CPS Special Crime and Counter Terrorism Division to consider whether a section 29C (1) of Public Order Act 1986 offence should be added. This offence is committed if a person uses threatening words or behaviour, or displays any written material which is threatening, if they intend thereby to stir up hatred on the grounds of sexual orientation.”
So they decided not to bother even trying to jail him for up to six months, sending out a message that there are no meaningful consequences to anti-gay extremism like this. Others have pointed it out for many other reasons recently, but it’s clear that there’s something really rotten at the heart of the Crown Prosecution Service.
UKIP Show Their True, Racist Colours
At least the horrible Nigel Farage knew how to keep a lid on UKIP’s racist element. His successor as leader Lord Pearson however seems to have no such qualms:
The UK Independence Party is to call for a ban on the burka and the niqab — the Islamic cloak that covers women from head to toe and the mask that conceals most of the face — claiming they affront British values. The policy, which a number of European countries are also debating, is an attempt by UKIP to broaden its appeal and address the concerns of disaffected white working-class voters.
UKIP would be the first national party to call for a total ban on burkas, though the far-Right BNP believes they should be banned from schools.
Lord Pearson of Rannoch, the leader of UKIP, said yesterday: “We are taking expert advice on how we could do it. It makes sense to ban the burka — or anything which conceals a woman’s face — in public buildings. But we want to make it possible to ban them in private buildings. It isn’t right that you can’t see someone’s face in an airport.”
He explained that UKIP wanted to bring to the fore the issue of the increasing influence of Sharia in Britain: “We are not Muslim bashing, but this is incompatible with Britain’s values of freedom and democracy.”
He’ll start claiming to have Muslim friends next. I don’t like the burka or niqab either. They irritate my sense of equality, I feel they’re an exercise is misogyny, and their basis in Islam is open to interpretation. But I’m well aware that Britain’s real values of freedom and democracy are based around people being allowed to live their lives as they choose. If a Muslim woman feels the cultural need to cover her entire body in a public space she should be as allowed to, as say any other woman would be to wear the most immodest clothing. Not Muslim bashing? Of course the rotten little racist is. The country’s no more at risk from Sharia law than from imminent Nazi German invasion.
Muslims to Protest Against Sharia Law
For those of you sufficiently outraged at the intended (it isn’t even planned) march on Wootton Bassett by Islam 4 UK, be aware of the counter demonstration and who’s running it:
The British Humanist Association (BHA) has today supported calls from British Muslims for Secular Democracy to counter a demonstration planned by Islam 4 UK in Wootton Bassett. Islam 4 UK, a group who have held demonstrations in the past calling for Shariah law in the UK, plan to hold the march in the town which has become a symbol of mourning for British service men and women who have died in conflicts abroad.
If the march goes ahead, British Muslims for Secular Democracy are planning to organise a counter demonstration bringing together a number of religious and non-religious groups.
Pepper Harow, Campaigns Officer, stated, ‘The BHA supports free speech, democracy and freedom of belief and expression. By organising this march against such values, Islam 4 UK seek to offend and to divide. The BHA will support any counter demonstration that brings together people from diverse backgrounds and celebrates the values that we share as a free and open society.’
On public order grounds it’s pretty obvious the Islamist march will never take place. I just hope that those so easily drawn into Islamophobia appreciate that Islam 4 UK really doesn’t represent British Muslims.
Our Surveillance Society Protects Noone
Dominic Lawson has it just right:
This is the background which makes the way in which a Nigerian man was able to detonate an explosive on a transatlantic flight all the more irritating – and it would have been vastly more than irritating if Mr Abdulmutallab’s home-made bomb had ignited as he intended. It turns out that, following an explicit warning by his father to the US authorities about his “extreme” political views, Abdulmutallab’s name had been put on a security watch list, known as Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (Tide). Now, guess how many names are on this list. A thousand? Ten thousand? No, this list, according to Washington officials, contains more than half-a-million names.
So no wonder Abdulmutallab was not subject to any special concerns by officials as he boarded Northwest Airlines Flight 253 on Christmas Day. If, through sheer bureaucratic over-enthusiasm the authorities have managed to create a list of over half-a-million possible terrorists (perhaps including a handful of Austrian bus-spotters) they might as well have an invisible list with no names, for all the use it will be.
If we are almost all potential terrorists, then we have entered a world of such morbid suspiciousness that none of us can feel safe: exactly the inverse of what our masters’ policies are supposedly designed to achieve.
And this is what the database state is all about: a lazy belief that by codifying, indexing and listing everybody and everything we don’t like on numerous databases, that through these means we can all be protected from every risk you could mention. ID cards will protect us from ID theft (what about just using a shredder?), the ISA will protect us from paedophiles (when local managerial protection and policies are more likely to work), the secret police databases will protect us from protesters (ironic considering many of us are protesters). In the meantime ID cards can be cloned, the ISA will never identify the real child abusers anyway and how on earth could a no-fly list of half a million ever notice Abdulmutallab? The airport security staff will no doubt have been spending so much time trying to threaten photographers that they failed to notice a man walking on a plane carrying a bomb.
I understand that governments will always look for the most efficient answers, but this one and the next have to realise that the security of those most at risk is being threatened by this detatchment from one another. Stop giving the wrong powers to the wrong people – it is the nature of power to be used, and the wrong powers will inevitably be misused. Just wait till the joys we have coming with the Digital Economy Bill.
