Arrested for Blogging
People have been arrested for blogging in China and Burma, and now this. The blogger called Lionheart expects to be detained upon his return to the United Kingdom. He has written on the dangers (especially to women) of radical Islam. Sections 18(1) and 27(3) of the Public Order Act of 1986 make it a crime to "Stir Up Racial Hatred by displaying written materiel." This law would violate the First Amendment of the US Constitution, but the UK lacks a formal Bill of Rights. Lionheart's posts are not racist, but plenty of people express hatred of women and Jews. Why doesn't the UK arrest a few of them? As odious as racial hatred would be, this prosecution threatens all bloggers.
posted by L. Riofrio at 11:50 AM
4 Comments:
The UK seems to have problems in dealing with some forms of Islam. A Telegraph article at
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;jsessionid=FXL3PWBKSFECNQFIQMGSFF4AVCBQWIV0?xml=/news/2008/01/06/nislam106.xml
says: "... Islamic extremists have created "no-go" areas across Britain where it is too dangerous for non-Muslims to enter ... The Rt Rev Michael Nazir-Ali, the Bishop of Rochester and the Church's only Asian bishop, says that people of a different race or faith face physical attack if they live or work in communities dominated by a strict Muslim ideology. ...".
Tony Smith
I just went to Lionheart's blog and it was blank! Who deleted the posts? Lionheart? The UK? Google? If Google will not help Big Brother Public Eye, I don't know who will.
Whoops, fixed that. Try http://lionheartuk.blogspot.com. Without agreeing or disagreeing with all his views, we can still see what he thinks. considering what Google has done in China, this is chilling.
For Tony: Even more chilling, the UK Dept of Health estimates that 66,000 women and girls have undergone mutilation. That is too horrible to describe!
"The UK seems to have problems in dealing with some forms of Islam. "
The UK has trouble dealing with anything. I'm British, and the politicians here are the slimest scum in the world.
With regard to Islam, I don't think that issues are really "religious" in the way that I understand the definition of religion (i.e. worship).
Nobody I know minds or is even interested in what religion a person has. It's only a problem when the religion is so extreme that it starts to inflict problems in other areas like social order. Extremist religious terrorism for example is something that people might complain about.
Obviously it is not solely Muslim. The Pope burned the Monk Bruno to death on 17 Feb. 1600 in the Vatican, just because Bruno's astronomy supported Copernicus and not Ptolemy. Bruno noted that as seen from earth, Venus and Mars are always less than 90 degrees from the sun, which implies that they orbit the sun and are closer to the sun than the earth. So they burned him for heresy.
I'm Catholic and was confirmed by the then Bishop Cormac of Arundel (he's now head of the Catholic church in the UK). I'm not particularly fond of religious terrorism. I think the Muslim extremism has been stirred up by American and British foreign policy/warfare in the Middle East.
It's kind of insulting to some of the tribal arab countries there, and they have different moral standards. Maybe the entire Western effort to impose democracy there today is misguided, like going back in time a thousand years and trying to impose democracy in England at that time. Before democracy was fully established here in England, there was a very savage Civil War with Cromwell having the king executed by beheading for high treason in London on 30 January 1649. Also in America, much more recently there was Civil War to have slavery abolished. Democracy and freedom take centuries to establish, and it is crazy to keep troops in Afghanistan and Iraq for ever, when it stirs up resentment and concern throughout the Muslim world. While 9/11 came before the Iraq war or the Afghanistan war, I don't think the West should be trying to impose any form of so-called democracy on other countries. They are justified in wiping out dangerous regimes like the Taliban, Saddam, etc., but that's it.
Seeing the state of Britain, I don't think that even the most radical Islam would make it much worse than it is now. In some political/cultural ways, Islam is a bit better than Christianity. Many Christians are hypocrites. At least some Muslims actually believe in defending their system of social values.
BTW, the police force here in the UK is basically a pantomine show. There's no jail space free even if people arrested are convicted, and most of the time the police bungle the prosecution evidence or don't bother to show up in court with any evidence, so the person is immediately freed and then sues the police for wrongful arrest and is compensated, at the public expense.
The UK police are really puppets on strings of the people who control their wage increases, i.e. the elected politicians of the day. This is why they do arrests which get in the newspapers, and don't bother investigating more mundane crime properly.
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