Speech or incitement?

Remember those Danish cartoons - you know those 12 inflammatory cartoons - that caused outrage among Muslims throughout the world?

Remember the outrage? I bet my friend VolK does. She was making her very first visit to London during the time of the cartoon protests and got to see the big parade from the window of her first hotel and then she moved hotels only to find out she was just around the corner from the Danish Embassy.

Remeber what some of the protesters said - "Bomb, bomb Denmark" and "Bomb, bomb USA" and one exhorted Osama Bin Laden to attack Denmark so that the mujihadeen brothers could take the Danish wives as war booty. And there was more stuff about beheading those who insult Islam and Denmark would pay with blood and so on.

You might also remember that the only people arrested at the time were some folks protesting the protesters in favour of free speech. But the police have made up for that and done some investigation and handed over files to the Prosecution Service...we do have some standards in the UK, you know, and they're not double all the time.

Just yesterday, the first of this lot was convicted for inciting murder - a Mr Umran Javed of Birmingham, UK.

He's very sorry for all the trouble he caused and he was just angry at the time - he didn't really want anyone to bomb the USA or Denmark. Course not. He and some of the other Islamists who've gotten themselves in trouble over pesky placards and incitement have kind of plead the "heat of the moment" defense. But Mr Javed's got form. At least I think he has - maybe it's a different Umran Javed.

Here's something from Eye on the World last week:

A British Muslim Umran Javed, who is on trial for soliciting murder and inciting racial hatred and who claims that he is being misunderstood, had this to say back in 2001 (taken from the BBC's Panorama program)

You can follow the link to see who wanted to bomb that time.

And here's something from a 2005 Jihad Watch post:

Another Muslim extremist, Umran Javed, told the debate that although he did not see an attack on Ireland as likely, retaliation would come "swiftly" if Ireland increased its support for the United States...

OK...the dude is bad. But does he deserve to go down? Is his shouting and slathering really incitement? I certainly find what he said offensive. I find it scary and I think it's just the tip of a very big iceberg of Islamist hate. I personally wish that Umran Javed would fall into the sea. But am I hypocritical if I rejoice in him being convicted?

I grant that the kind of stuff he said - including Remember the lesson of Theo Van Gogh - was at the very least in the gray area between offensive but permissable speech and incitement. But shouldn't incitement have some kind of direct effect to make it really incitement?

I'm not talking about what the actual law is here. In the UK, the free speech law is an ass. You can be convicted of stirring up religious or racial hatred. People have been convicted for calling each other nigger. Black people have been convicted for calling each other nigger. I don't think that's right. But just because people are being put away or persistently prosecuted under these laws doesn't mean that my opinion about the limits of free speech should change. I don't think it ought to be against the law to call somebody a racial epithet (though I agree that it's not nice.) And I think that there ought to be a test of reasonableness applied to incitement. Does a reasonable person think that even a mad person would take Javed's words and then act on them directly. From what I've seen, I'm not sure. But of course, I haven't seen all the evidence and I didn't sit on that jury*.

What others say:

Exile from On the Wing in Denmark:

The Old Bailey did it right. The jury convicted Umran Javed of soliciting murder and inciting racial hatred during the oh-so-spontaneous islamic demonstration in London in february last year. Finally the Brits have tired of muslim indignation. About time too. The time has long passed for some "British indignation" served cold, courtesy of Her Majesty's Prison.

Peter Sanderson is pretty equivocal and says:

Although I think they are absolute morons, they are entitled to their idiotic opinions. As long as they stick to waving placards around and not actually bombing Denmark, I can live alongside them happily.

I understand his sentiments, to some extent I've expressed them myself. But I don't think he quite gets just how dangerous these people are. Though it's interesting that the image he chose for his post was this one:









Yes, that's right - it says "Freedom of expression go to hell". Hoisted by their own placard?

And finally, Craig at Bring It On - explores the legal framework around incitement in the US - and isn't sure that Javed could have/should have been convicted. I guess my free speech fundamentalism is largely framed by my US outlook.

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* and thank goodness I'm not on that jury - as according to Brights News Feed

Supporters of Javed in the coutroom apparently protested loudly at the conviction, one man shouting “Allahu Akbar, I curse the judge, the court, the jury, all of you.”