https://thecritic.co.uk/the-dark-reality-of-blasphemy-laws/ Consider what it says about a god if this can be framed as justice. What kind of deity would look across a world seething with violence and corruption and decide that what is downright intolerable is a man being rude online? In the UK, of course, de facto blasphemy laws have been established. A teacher is still in hiding after showing his students a cartoon of Muhammad. Children can be suspended from school for accidentally scuffing a copy of the Quran. Some Muslim public officials, as my esteemed colleague Tom Jones wrote last year, are openly campaigning for the prosecution of blasphemy. Labour MP Tahir Ali asked Keir Starmer if he will introduce laws to ban “desecration of all religious texts and the prophets of Abrahamic religions”. (Curiously, no one from the main Abrahamic religion in the UK was asking for this.) Such religious hypersensitivity is often dressed up in the language of minority rights. Don’t be fooled. Look at Saudi Arabia, where the full power of the state is coming down upon the head of a lone migrant worker. Yet some in the UK have expressed approval. “Well done Saudi Arabia,” posts Dr Rahmeh Aladwan, “We do not accept insults to any of our beloved prophets.” Some online have pointed out an irony here. Dr Aladwan has “free speech” in her X bio. She has been resisting her own prosecution in the UK on the grounds of “inviting support for a proscribed group” by allegedly posting pro-Hamas comments. You don’t have to support Aladwan’s prosecution to acknowledge the morbid absurdity of such an individual applauding the execution of a man over a social media post. Yet it is typical for third worldists to adopt the language of liberalism in Europe while endorsing totalitarian cruelty elsewhere. (Decades ago, this was the opportunistic two-step of communists.) The West’s own language of rights and freedoms is used against it not out of principle but as a blunt tool. Again, let’s hope that more sober and rational minds prevail in Saudi Arabia and that poor Anojan is freed. But let’s not forget the intellectual and spiritual darkness that is trying to consume him.