By Jacob Mchangama
In February, 50-year-old Hamit Coskun was charged with causing “harassment, alarm or distress” to the Islamic faith after burning a Quran outside the Turkish consulate in London. A KC told the National Secular Society that the charges were “plainly defective”, while the NSS accused prosecutors of reintroducing a blasphemy law “by the back door”.
It’s true, if Coskun is convicted, that this would mark yet another step in Europe’s steady capitulation to the “Jihadists’ Veto” — where fear of violent backlash dictates the boundaries of lawful expression. Coskun said his display was a protest against Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. On X, Coskun claimed that Turkey is being turned into a “base for radical Islamists”. He also wanted to express solidarity with Salwan Momika, an Iraqi refugee who was assassinated in Sweden in January after burning Qurans in repeated public protests.
Coskun’s reference to events in Sweden illustrates a broader European trend. A spate of Quran burnings, particularly in Scandinavia, has exposed the growing influence of what might be called outsourced censorship. This is the result of a mix of pressure from authoritarian regimes, especially the member states of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC); threats from jihadist groups; and appeasement by liberal democracies.
The OIC is an intergovernmental body representing 57 Muslim-majority countries that has in recent decades often conflated blasphemy — which is legal in most Western liberal democracies — with impermissible hate speech under international human rights laws. Clearly, this is a strategy to spearhead global laws against blasphemy.
Read More
Jacob Mchangama is the Founder and Executive Director of The Future of Free Speech. He is also a research professor at Vanderbilt University and a Senior Fellow at The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE).