Freedom Go To Hell

Over a month after the actual protests took place, it transpires UK police are to arrest certain participants of a London anti-cartoon demonstration. While the charges are not clear, they seem to be related to the inflammatory homemade signs the protestors carried, which included: "Butcher those who mock Islam", "Behead those who insult Islam", as well as "Europe you will pay, your 9/11 is on the way", or "7/7 is on its way." Prosecution is likely to occur under one of Britain’s several pieces of legislation which targets what in the US would be referred to as ‘hate speech’. A Metropolitan police spokesman stated "We have been advised today that there are sufficient grounds to arrest individuals for offences under the Public Order Act. This includes offences that are racially or religiously aggravated."

With their stark call that ‘Freedom go to Hell’ the protestors have caused a major controversy in Britain. The response of the authorities has been schizophrenic, allowing the protest to go ahead, protecting it from attempts to disrupt it and, according to the organizers, checking over and permitting the inflammatory signs. Now, a month later, they plan to make arrests. At one moment the authorities are keen not to encourage Muslim accusations of mistreatment, the next they act as if these cranks represent a serious threat to the UK. As we have argued here before, the response of political elites to such extremism is determined by their lack of confidence that they can counter such ideas with a positive agenda of their own.

Treating these groups as a serious threat only reinforces everybody’s, including their own, exaggerated sense of their own importance. After all, the protest under scrutiny managed to attract fewer than 700 participants from a British Muslim population of 1.54 million. Equally it reveals a deep distrust of Muslims in Britain, as if, unlike the general population, they might line up behind such people should they be given the chance. Indeed, the organizers of the protest, a group named al-Ghuraaba, play on this idea of difference; their name might be translated as “The Foreigners” or even “The Alienated” (they must have been reading their Camus!).

We must dismiss such childish provocation for what it is; a clever play on the current anxieties of British politics designed to generate maximum outrage and publicity. If we do not, we run the risk of allowing even greater intervention by the authorities and we will find that our freedom really has gone to hell.