Alternative opinion

Someone passed me a different opinion on the BNP trial that I tried to cover a while back. Don't know where he got it and, as he /she sent it by email rather than as a posted comment, I'm assuming they also wish to stay below the parapet. Anyway - here it is.

RELIGIOUS HATRED: GORDON'S ON THE CASE

Much has been made of the wisdom of the Crown Prosecution Service
in its attempts to nail Nick Griffin and chums for inciting race
hatred. The prosecution was criticised on the grounds that it was
doomed to fail on legal technicalities, and that attempting to
police people's views on religion is A Bad Idea, even if it's
scuzz like Griffin. Nonetheless, when Griffin was acquitted,
Gordon Brown immediately called for legislation that *would*
prevent attacks on people via their faith.
That Griffin should have been acquitted isn't altogether
surprising. One of the problems for the CPS was the word
'racial'. Griffin's actual comments were things like calling
Islam 'a wicked, vicious faith', and of course Muslims aren't a
race. (The other problem for the CPS seems to be that the
comments were made in a private meeting, not a public one,
although we can't be arsed to look up the details.)
In many ways the CPS was right to attempt to prosecute. Griffin
has been keen to explain that his comments had to be taken 'in
context', and much of the speech was apparently uncontroversial.
However, the context is exactly what makes the comments
inflammatory since he was talking to an audience of BNP members
and sympathisers.
The BNP is currently treading a slightly confused line. On the
one hand it has tried to modernise itself, moving away from
actual 'send-'em-back' racism and anti-Semitism. Instead it
emphasises 'defending White culture' and suchlike. However, as an
organisation, the BNP quite obviously has its roots in
straightforward racism. It's got a neo-Nazi following, although
opinion in other far right 'organisations' such as Combat 18 is
divided on the BNP, with many regarding Griffin as a sell-out.
The street-level thuggery that is associated with the BNP is also
hinted at by the fact that even the small number of elected BNP
councillors have, between them, a fairly impressive list of
convictions to their name. What BNP voters actually think about
race and associated issues like repatriation isn't completely
clear, but it's a reasonable assumption that most are 'against'
ethnic minorities, whether they just think Asians get
preferential treatment from the local council, whether they want
mass repatriations or whether they're full-on 'the muds and ZOG
want to destroy the White race!' nutters.
As for Griffin's actual comments, the fact that much of his
speech was uncontroversial is nether here nor there. Although
Muslims aren't a race, saying that a *group* in society subscribe
to 'a wicked, vicious faith' quite clearly suggests that these
are wicked and vicious people. The comments made by Griffin's co-
defendant are even less cryptic. He referred to asylum seekers as
'cockroaches', and calling a group of people 'cockroaches' isn't
political debate, it's hatred. And what tends to happen to
cockroaches? They get exterminated.
Critics of the CPS have said that the prosecution is an attempt
to control what people think, and limit what they're allowed to
express. But this really is a non-issue. It's not illegal to
believe in repatriation, that a particular faith is wicked, that
the Jews control the weather or whatever the hell you want. It's
not particularly illegal to express these thoughts either. You
can sit and talk about repatriation until the banana boats come
home and you're not going to be locked up for it. However, what
you *can't* do is incite racial hatred. It's a perfectly
reasonable state of affairs. If you wanted to go around spouting
the old chestnut 'black people are genetically inclined toward
committing crime' you'd be censured, and rightly so. That's not
to say that you can't express views about race and crime. It's
widely discussed anyway, although serious academic debate is
about the correlation between race and crime and the *causes* of
that correlation, not the assumption that there's a genetic link
between race and crime, which is basically the racist view. As
such, it may be no bad thing to have legislation that outlaws
inciting hatred on the basis of religion, particularly where
someone's religion can be used as a cipher for their race, as in
the case (largely) of Muslims.
However, the Griffin case demonstrates a crucial difference
between protecting groups of people on the basis of something
tangible like their skin colour, and protecting people on the
grounds of their beliefs. Even if you have a law banning comments
that are basically hatred directed at members of a religion,
broad statements like 'Islam is a wicked [in the pejorative
sense] faith' are still highly problematic for the simple reason
that anyone who makes such comments is going to turn around and
say 'And I can prove it in court!' Are courts going to be
expected to address unproveable statements like 'Islam is
wicked'? Would there be court cases in which people quote
passages from the Koran which *do* condone beating your wife but
which aren't subscribed to by most Muslims (something that
Griffin did?) Or cite reports about the treatment of women in
Saudi Arabia? We're not Islam-bashing here - you could argue that
Christianity is 'wicked and vicious' too. Or what if you claimed
that 'Christians are insane'? They're clearly not in the sense
that the vast majority don't have a serious psychiatric disorder
but you could make a case that they do hold deeply irrational
beliefs.
In short, legislating for religious hate throws up a host of
rather strange problems. Still, we're sure that Gordon Brown has
given the issue plenty of thought and isn't just capitalising on
a populist issue that's received massive press coverage. That
would be *so* unlike New Labour.