March 27, 2024 - 7:00am
Thanks to the newly published Khan review, we now have the clearest picture to date of what actually happened in Batley in March 2021, when a schoolteacher was forced into hiding after showing caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad.
The review clearly lays out the personal impact that the saga had on this innocent man, something which was sorely lacking in investigations and reviews at the time, as well as in the statements of key local leaders — which focused almost entirely on the supposed offence caused.
This is symptomatic of the guiding principles and priorities of too many institutions, which privilege “local dynamics” and “community relations” at the expense of the overall health of British democracy. Usually, attempting to “sooth community tensions” just means cowing to the loudest voices of self-appointed community leaders. It also means that, elsewhere, religious institutions with clear extremist tendencies continue to receive funding and photo ops with local politicians, because maintaining the relationship with that institution and its proclaimed access to the nebulous “community” is more important than anything else.
What makes that approach even more dangerous in this case is the authorities’ failure to wake up to the fact that they were in the eye of a blasphemy storm. West Yorkshire Police initially assessed that Batley was a “neighbourhood incident”, to be dealt with by neighbourhood officers. Yet this makes little sense: from Sir Salman Rushdie and Theo Van Gogh to Jyllands-Posten, it’s clear that blasphemy affairs are global, not local, and you don’t need to be a public figure to find yourself a target. That the Batley incident came just six months after the beheading of schoolteacher Samuel Paty in France, as well as the ensuing international fallout, demonstrates unforgivable myopia and naivety.
In 2022 and 2023, protests outside Cineworld theatres and the Wakefield Quran “scuffing” incident show that few lessons were learned, as authorities again failed to understand they were confronting a blasphemy problem. This left cinema managers and the mother of an autistic schoolchild to fend for themselves. The case of Batley was not dissimilar.
Blasphemy has been a key front for both Sunni and Shia Islamists against the West since the 1989 Satanic Verses fatwa. But the main driver behind the increased frequency of blasphemy disputes in Britain is the increasingly radicalised fervour of Barelvi extremists in Pakistan. There, extremist movements such as the Tehreek-e-Labbaik (TLP) venerate the Bradfordian murderer of a Glaswegian shopkeeper accused of blasphemy alongside the assassin of Salman Taseer, the governor of Punjab who defended Asia Bibi. Their supporters have openly called for jihad at protests in Britain.
However, as one police officer told the review, the lack of training on such issues is “dismal”, covering reminders such as remembering to take off your shoes in a mosque, but leaving few with any understanding of “the Sunni–Shia schism never mind other sects”. Of course, this includes “Barelvi clerics who preach murder for anyone who insults the Prophet”.
The officer is right to raise the alarm. Blasphemy extremism is a malignant growth in Britain that will metastasise the more it is left unchecked. It also feeds off the cowardice and complacency of democratic institutions which, in attempting to stay on the right side of blasphemy allegations, only embolden the accusers.
Others are hesitant to speak up on these controversies out of the bogus fear of fuelling a far-Right narrative, but nothing has fuelled a far-Right narrative like the cowardice of liberal institutions in the face of extremism. The shameful abandonment of the Batley schoolteacher cannot now be undone, but its repetition can be prevented.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
SubscribeIt goes to show that certain communities are dominated by these religious politics that come to dominate the regional culture. I wouldn’t then jump to the global when it’s sufficient to say that the problem of Islamism is national looking at the willingness of elements of the Left in Britain to deploy radicals to intimidate democratic representatives and the Jewish community alike.
There is a similar model in France; both countries have suffered from complacency over the religious communitarianism that now dominates the multicultural model. If anything Britain is worse because it recognises multiculturalism and does little to impose a little more secularism, while France may hold on to illusion of republicanism but at least maintainsim laïcism as a principle.
Then you get liberal media outlets like The Times of London claiming that British multiculturalism is such a success that it’s a model for the world, including for Australia and the US. Quite the reverse…
With respect, I would suggest there is very little to be gained from comparison with the republican France. Laicism, and Secularism on the republican model has never existed in this land and, in fact, our entire modern political history has been defined against it.
Indeed own poltical culture and history, one could argue, was founded, developed and perfected in the very same spirit of “religious communitarianism” which we might criticise in the Ummah.
I am thinking of the Test, and Corporation Acts, the Established Church, The religious character of public education. our marriage and inheritance laws, the Protestant Succession, our law courts and legal system, The 26 Lords Spiritual in the Upper House, the Ministerial right to oversee the Epsicopacy and vote on church matters. Almost all our civil and political culture is religiously based. It is Christian, it is Protestant.
The problem is that religious belief and participation is withering on the vine and we are left with a social contract most people cannot begin to understand – “and hark what discord follows”.
Until you bring in a millet-style system where these ‘community leaders’ are punished for the failures of their underlings this country will slowly go the way of the Roman Empire in the west. You can’t have groups of Goths, Alani and Suebi running about without consequence.
You are quite right but we neednt look that far. It was precisely the method James VI used to pacify the border reivers.
The Ballad of Johnnie Armstrong being a lesson in commnity relations
What is a ‘millet-style’ system? (I only know millet as a grain.) Did you mean military?
Mr Wright sees life through a grainy screen.
I am astonished these days how often the obvious passes itself off as meaningful critique. I have to teach research methods as part of my job, and forced reflection has led me to conclude that our complete disregard for history (even the recent past) means we are continually reinventing the wheel and lack a strategic framework within which to nest our ideas.
“ its repetition can be prevented.” But probably won’t because our political leaders appear to be spineless.
With respect to the good intentions of the writer, he has yet to grasp the seriousness of the situation and the late hour at which we have begun to engage with it.
The campaign in Batley will very likely have been sincere expression of local feeling among the Muslim citizenry. It is not an aberration but a perfectly commonplace expression of the democratic will such as you might see in Islamic mass-democracies such as Pakistan or Malaysia or Indonesia. And it is irresistably set to be the pattern of things to come in this Kingdom. That, simply put, is the paradigm we occupy in Britain now, not the unitary democracy of Atlee and Churchill.
“Britain’s most precious asset is our diverse and cohesive democracy. Built on centuries of hard‑won rights, our democratic freedoms form the bedrock of our nation.”
This, the very first paragraph of the Khan review, shows the basic error which drives all subsequent errors. It sees ‘cohesive democracy’ as a hard-won civic right rather than a fragile and ephemeral cultural achievement. ‘Diversity’ in the sense now understood by our political engineers has had almost no part ot play in it. To call it the ‘bedrock of our nation’ is to get things precisely back to front. Order precedes Liberty.
Mass democracy in this land has only existed for just over a century. It was established, incrementally over centuries, in a nation of almost monolithic ethnic and religious conformity, hedged in by a shared religious and civic culture, coagulated over 1000 years. After the mass immigration of the last two decades there will be no return to this, or to any other mid-20th century decencies, I’m afraid. Far from being a ‘malignant growth’, blasphemy laws are the natural and inevitable (and legitimate) development of Islamic settlement in Biritania.
There simply aren’t the tools to counteract it in a liberal democratic society.
Whilst your diagnosis is correct in many respects, your prognosis is ill-considered. The very reason the changes that’ve occurred during the 1000 years of which you speak is due to our ability to adapt to changing circumstances. It’s not that a liberal democratic society should lack the necessary tools to curb the excesses of illiberalism, simply that we’ve chosen not to do so.
A typical example would be the threat posed by the IRA on mainland Britain between the 1960s-1990s. No member of the IRA would’ve been allowed to stand outside a school (or anywhere else) proselytising on behalf of that organisation. The links with terrorism were perfectly clear, as are the links with terrorism of some of the organisations cited in this article and Comments. We had a liberal democracy 50 years ago, and still have the wherewithal (if not yet the backbone) to impose limitations on what is acceptable on our streets, and in any public sphere.
Thank you for your thoughtful response.
Certainly the IRA is an interesting example to think with. The legality of Sinn Fein and its adjacency to IRA militancy is instructive both in what it shares with Islamism and what is doesn’t.
Sinn Fein/IRA, I understand, were extremely marginal and unpopular within the Catholic and Nationalist mainstream in Ulster. They really were an extremist fringe. Incidents like that which ocurred at Batley probably represent the bourgeiose mainstream of Muslim middle class opinion.
Current polling, for what it’s worth, suggest 43% of British Muslims support the enforcement of some aspect of Sharia law in Britain. 36% of 16-24 year olds believe in the death penalty for apostasy and, by way of comparison, a healthy 75% of Pakistani Muslims support that country’s blasphemy laws. How does a liberal democracy such as ours deal with a constituency like that? Because we certainly now have one.
That is the question the author of this article should be asking. This is not a question of managing an upstart tendency or an eruption of fanaticism but living with the settled convictions of a self confident and assertive Islamic citizenry, His nip-this-in-the-bud analysis is a decade out of date. The horse has bolted, to mix metaphors!
Thanks also for your considered response.
“How does a liberal democracy such as ours deal with a constituency like that?”
By making it clear that those seeking to intimidate – beyond the simple but limited right to protest – will not be tolerated and will face legal sanctions which exist but are being ignored by the police and judiciary.
That would send a clear enough message concerning how we’re prepared to defend our values and way of life. Of course, it’d cause some gnashing of teeth to begin with (and no doubt wailing too) but it would signal an end to the fallacy that liberal democracies can’t defend themselves whilst upholding their hard-won principles.
The worst sanction that the UK could bring to bear on radical Muslims is deportation. So why not start doing it? Send them back to where they came from, on mass if needs be. Law abiding Muslims think this is an acceptable answer as do many UK citizens. It would send a powerful message. Come to the UK, stir up religious foment, and lose everything you have gained by coming here. End of. With human rights come personal responsibility. Time to drive that home?
I really want to THANK Lancashire Ladd and William Amos for how they have engaged each other. I remember a time that this was normal among educated people. There is no snark or desire to put down but a way of engaging that used to be quite normal and is now even among intellectuals mostly disappeared. Thank you! Thank you for a reminder from my now seemingly very distant past. Sigh.
Dame Sara Kahn identifies “freedom-restricting harassment” as a problem but instead of recommending that the police come down hard on the perpetrators of such threats and harassment she recommends yet another bureaucratic Quango this time focusing on social cohesion. Jobs for the boys and girls but nothing positive to prevent the appalling level of violent threat and harassment that is visited by radical religious and other groups on those who don’t toe the line.
The police are happy to harass those guilty of hurty words that might offend but not actual threats and harassment that make life intolerable (as outlined in the report) to many of those who offend religious zealots and ideological zealots. This is what needs to change.
I am afraid the police in Scotland are being transformed into a ‘Morality Police’ in the style of Iran. Little interest in crime but with plentiful opprtunities to harass and assault young women and girls.
What else can you expect when the PM is a Muslim?
This is the simplest matter in the public sphere at the moment – naked violent intimidation by belligerent authoritarians of anyone who dares speak in opposition, and the complete collapse of civil authorities who should be charged with opposing the bullies with whatever force is necessary to enforce civilized norms. Violent bullies do not improve if not opposed; they get even worse.
I’ve written to my (supposedly Conservative) MP several times in the past few years about how it has appeased shouty/ aggressive mobs to the detriment of democracy. I’ve only ever had mealy-mouthed replies with no indication that the government is about to do anything about this.
Ive written again this morning quoting a couple of paras from Page 86 of the Kahn Review (linked in the article) but I am not convinced anything will be done.
“At the heart of this incident is an issue of leadership. The attempt to appease aggressive actors and failing to protect democratic freedoms may be considered successful in the short term. But in reality, this only galvanises such actors who believe that by engaging in such intimidatory tactics their unreasonable demands will be met. This is one reason why in the last few years we have seen increasing numbers of protests outside schools and other institutions. Such actors know that more often than not, their demands will be met by fearful statutory bodies, schools and local authorities.
In the absence of strong leadership, the silence of the council and weak response from political leaders, the interests of Islamist and far right actors were served who then attempted to hijack the tensions. This theme has been repeated throughout the evidence gathering for this Review – in the absence of leadership and a clear condemnation of threatening activity directed at individuals, extremist groups will attempt to exploit and push their own divisive narrative, further fuelling anger and radicalisation and undermining cohesion further. The Reviewer is concerned that the failure to defend democratic freedoms when threatened and the inability to address FRH will result in a gradual erosion of our democratic values. Such institutions must be held to account as to how they respond to such incidents. ”
Immigrants who demonstrate hostility to Western cultural values should be expelled.
One can scan a long way down the comment section, brushing through words like “extremism”, “community”, “religious”, “newcomers”, even “jihadist” and so on before finding a mention of The Cause That Dare Not Speak Its Name. The problem is *Islam*, with mighty support from willfully ignorant Leftists, and away from a microphone everyone knows it.
Be careful. You may not be typing your words in Scotland but they can certainly be read there. On April 1st Humza Yousaf’s new Hate Crime Act comes into force. It apparently applies to anyone publishing things hurtful to Scotland’s muslims, even if living outwith that country.
Unfortunately for the Scottish Government, they have brought in a law that could break the Scots law system. If Police Scotland arrest every Scot who believes in biology and that sex is immutable , then everyone who is against Islamic extremism, the PF’s ofgice wil be swamoed. The court system will be backed up and there will be no place in the jails for murderers and fraudsters and rapists. Why? Because we are not scared of the Donald Duck law, but H Useless should be scared of Scotland’s citizens and our adherence to the truth.
The men who burned My Rushdie’s novel in Bradford, decades ago, should have been locked up for threatening behavior for as long as the law allowed…and then, if they held a second passport (as they almost certainly did)…deported. Some of us said so at the time, and were shrieked down as racists and bigots. Quite possibly by those who read Unherd!
Let’s hope it is not yet too late…
I have so far only read the Executive Summary but did not see a mention of the disruptive effects ( to social cohesion) of DEI, although there was one comment that police prioritize chasing down hurty language. DEI is a growing menace to our way of life, sowing seeds of dissent, frustration and conflict, and freedom-restricting harassment, aided and abetted by weak politicians, school boards, museum administrators, etc etc.
Islam seems to be acting like it is the official state religion in countries where it is a minority religion. This is due to the Elite of Europe and America having choses atheism as their religion and not defending the local religion. With no defense by local elites Islam becomes the DeFacto official religion. Elite luxury opinions soon become laws enforced by the government upon commoners.
Yet another piece by another ‘expert’ that conveniently omits that Islamic materials explicitly demand this behaviour as a duty.