Is Islam a Race? Birmingham Trial Will Tell
5th April 2014
Burton’s trial is very worrying for anyone who holds dear freedom of speech and other basic civil liberties. One of the worrisome aspects is the conflating of “religion” with “race”. Islam is clearly not a race and Muslims belong to all races, including whites. Furthermore, the Crown Prosecution Service considers those two charges (racially- and religiously-aggravated crimes) as distinct ones.
But, despite officially paying lip service to this distinction, in Tim Burton’s case the CPS is trying to combine and confuse the two because it does not have sufficient ground to get a conviction on the “religiously aggravated” charge — which requires stronger evidence -, so decides to prosecute using the easier “racially aggravated” one.
As the CPS’s own website says, “So it will be more difficult to prosecute for inciting religious hatred as opposed to racial hatred”.
You might think this a silly question — which it is — but modern politics, and (sadly) modern law, wrestles with such silly questions all the time, with seemingly absurd results more often than most people would find comfortable.