Four radical Islamists have recently been imprisoned for participating in last year's demonstrations against the Danish cartoons of the prophet Mohammed. Shockingly, three have been sentenced to six years, and the fourth to four years. However objectionable these men's opinions are, and however obnoxious their means of expressing them, they have essentially been jailed for several years for taking part in a non-violent protest.
How is this possible? The three men sentenced for six years were convicted of soliciting murder. This is patently ridiculous. Whose murder did they solicit? Whom did they expect to carry it out? Their conviction might have been defensible if the men had corralled impressionable youths into carrying out suicide bombings, or hired a contract killer to take someone out. In fact, what they did was stand outside the Danish Embassy shouting stupid slogans about killing British soldiers and bombing Britain and Denmark. The fourth man was convicted of incitement to racial hatred. Incitement is a dubious enough concept, which assumes that those 'incited' have little or no moral agency of their own. But the notion of 'soliciting' is even worse: it attributes the accused with direct responsibility for crimes that never happened, where there can have been no reasonable expectation that any crime would ensue.
No doubt the sentences were meant to be shocking, to 'send a message' to other radical Islamists that their hateful ranting will not be tolerated. The rest of us should be shocked too, for the message is loud and clear: you can now be locked up for several years for nothing more than hateful ranting. It doesn't take a great leap of imagination to think of other situations in which such a liberal interpretation of criminal responsibility might condemn other non-violent protesters with very different political views. The threat to free speech is clear and present.
Dolan Cummings
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