This long piece in the London Times describes the efforts of some British Muslims to prohibit blasphemy, either through legal action or through mob violence:
Britain faces an alarming rise in intimidation and threats of violence against those perceived to have insulted Islam, a new report will warn.
Protests condemning acts of apparent blasphemy have become more frequent and radicalised, according to independent research commissioned by the government’s counterextremism chief.
The report, seen by The Times, exposes links between activists at the forefront of recent protests in the UK and an extremist Islamist political party in Pakistan whose members have regularly called for blasphemers to be beheaded.
It has been a long time since anyone was beheaded in Britain on religious grounds.
Robin Simcox, the government’s counterextremism tsar, commissioned the research after three blasphemy flashpoints in the UK: the 2021 protests against a teacher in Batley, West Yorkshire, who received death threats and is still in hiding…
Still in hiding, three years later–a teacher in West Yorkshire.
…after showing pupils a cartoon of the prophet Mohammed; Birmingham protests the following year over the screening of the film The Lady in Heaven, which depicted Mohammed’s daughter; and last year’s controversy in Wakefield, also in West Yorkshire, after a copy of the Quran was slightly damaged at a high school.
Some of the anti-blasphemy initiative is coming from Pakistan:
It described as “most alarming” the emergence of a UK wing of Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP), a political party that was temporarily banned there because of violent rallies and its support for mob executions of perceived blasphemers. British mosques have hosted speakers who are supportive of TLP and each of the protests in Batley, Wakefield and Birmingham involved activists with links.
The report warned that such rhetoric “has the potential to radicalise their audience around the issue of blasphemy” and that this in turn “may increase the likelihood of sectarian violence and terrorism in the UK”.
The report stresses that most UK-based blasphemy activists have rejected violence and condemn terrorist acts such as the 2015 shooting attack in Paris on the offices of Charlie Hebdo, the satirical magazine, in which 17 people died.
However, it says many are calling for stricter laws in the UK against blasphemy and seek to criminalise insults against Islam, which they present as part of a wider war on the faith by so-called enemies of Islam in the West.
Britain has admitted large numbers of Muslims from Commonwealth countries, and they now constitute a substantial political bloc. In recent months, they have repeatedly taken over large swaths of the city of London with kill-the-Jews rallies. While British authorities deplore these demonstrations, they seem to have been cowed by the implicit threat of violence that they manifest.
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