One of the demonstrators was a small child with a placard that said, \u201cWhoever insults the prophet kill him.\u201d Another marcher wore a suicide bomber costume.<\/p>\n\n
Other signs in London said: \u201cBehead those who insult Islam,\u201d \u201cEuropeans take a lesson from 9\/11\u201d and \u201cPrepare for the REAL Holocaust.\u201d The organizer of the Feb. 3 event told the BBC that he looked forward to the day when \u201cthe black flag of Islam will be flying over Downing Street.\u201d<\/p>\n\n
But what stunned British writer Geoffrey Wheatcroft was something else he saw while blitzing through news reports about the waves of fury inspired by those 12 Danish cartoons of the prophet Mohammad.<\/p>\n\n
\u201cNot only did the police make no arrests\u201d during the London demonstration, even though it \u201copenly incited murder; they actually sheltered the fanatics,\u201d he noted, in a Slate.com essay. \u201cTwo men who tried to stage a peaceable counterdemonstration were hustled away for questioning. A working-class Londoner \u2026 was told in violent language by a cop to get back in his van and go away.\u201d<\/p>\n\n
This raises a disturbing question: Have British citizens lost the ability to exercise their free speech rights in public defiance of demands by many Muslim clerics and politicians for limitations on the freedom of the press in the West?<\/p>\n\n
It\u2019s hard to answer this kind of question right now because a \u201cmoral climate change\u201d has destroyed England\u2019s certainty that some things are right and some things are wrong, said Bishop N.T. Wright of Durham, in a speech last week in the House of Lords. Thus, civic leaders cannot agree on the meaning of words such as \u201cfreedom\u201d and \u201ctolerance\u201d and religious faith is seen as a threat instead of a virtue.<\/p>\n\n
\u201cThe 1960s and 1970s swept away the old moral certainties, and anyone who tries to reassert them risks being mocked as an ignoramus or scorned as a hypocrite. But since then we\u2019ve learned that you can\u2019t run the world as a hippy commune,\u201d said Wright, a former Oxford don who also has served as Westminster Abbey\u2019s canon theologian.<\/p>\n\n
\u201cGetting rid of the old moralities hasn\u2019t made us happier or safer. \u2026 This uncertainty, my Lords, has produced our current nightmare, the invention of new quasi-moralities out of bits and pieces of moral rhetoric, the increasingly shrill and polymorphous language of \u2018rights\u2019, the glorification of victimhood which enables anyone with hurt feelings to claim moral high ground and the invention of various \u2018identities\u2019 which demand not only protection but immunity from critique.\u201d<\/p>\n\n
Instead of focusing on the cartoon crisis, Wright described other signs of legal and moral confusion in British life. Prime Minister Tony Blair, for example, sent painfully mixed signals after last summer\u2019s suicide bombings. His government leaned one way when it tried to ban efforts to \u201cglorify\u201d terrorism. Then it leaned the other way with legislation that would ban the promotion of \u201creligious hatred.\u201d<\/p>\n\n
Wright stressed that it will be dangerous to pass laws that attempt to replace, amend or edit religious doctrines that have shaped the lives of believers for centuries. But politicians seem determined to try.<\/p>\n\n
Thus, Birmingham University forced the Evangelical Christian Union off campus and seized the group\u2019s funds because it refused to amend its bylaws to allow non-Christians or atheists to become voting members.<\/p>\n\n
Thus, Wright noted that police have shut down protests in Parliament Square against British policies in Iraq. Comedians \u2014 facing vague laws against hate speech \u2014 are suddenly afraid to joke about religion. And was there any justification for government investigations of the Anglican bishop of Chester and the chairman of the Muslim Council of Great Britain because they made statements critical of homosexuality?<\/p>\n\n
Public officials, said the bishop, are trying to control the beliefs that are in people\u2019s hearts and the thoughts that are in their heads. The tolerance police are becoming intolerant, which is a strange way to promote tolerance.<\/p>\n\n
\u201cPeople in my diocese have told me that they are now afraid to speak their minds in the pub on some major contemporary issues for fear of being reported, investigated, and perhaps charged,\u201d said Wright. \u201cI did not think I would see such a thing in this country in my lifetime. \u2026 The word for such a state of affairs is \u2018tyranny\u2019 \u2014 sudden moral climate change, enforced by thought police.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
One of the demonstrators was a small child with a placard that said, \u201cWhoever insults the prophet kill him.\u201d Another marcher wore a suicide bomber costume. Other signs in London said: \u201cBehead those who insult Islam,\u201d \u201cEuropeans take a lesson from 9\/11\u201d and \u201cPrepare for the REAL Holocaust.\u201d The organizer of the Feb. 3 event […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":610,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1530,120,323,373,1537,688],"class_list":["post-1373","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-anglicanism","tag-bill-of-rights","tag-england","tag-free-speech","tag-islam","tag-press-freedom"],"yoast_head":"\n