The new Jesus and Mo strip, called “bans”, refers to the Qur’an ban in Denmark, giving a link to the story in France 24.
An excerpt:
Denmark’s parliament on Thursday adopted a law criminalising the “inappropriate treatment” of religious texts, effectively banning Koran burnings after a series of desecrations of Islam’s holy book sparked anger in Muslim countries over the summer.
The bill, which prohibits “inappropriate treatment of writings with significant religious importance for a recognised religious community”, was passed with 94 votes in favour and 77 opposed in the 179-seat Folketing.
“We must protect the security of Denmark and the Danes. Therefore, it is important that we now have better protection against the systematic insults we have seen for a long time,” Justice Minister Peter Hummelgaard said in a statement.
In practical terms, it will be forbidden to burn, tear or otherwise defile holy texts publicly or in videos intended to be disseminated widely.
Those who break the law, which will be evaluated after three years, risk a fine or up to two years in prison.
Over the summer, Denmark and neighbouring Sweden became the focus of anger across several Muslim countries after a slew of protests involving burnings and desecrations of the Koran.
Clearly, they’re scared of Muslim ire. I guess it’s illegal to burn the Bible, the Bhagavad Gita, and the Book of Mormon. Up to two years in prison! This is the result of Denmark taking in a large number of Muslim immigrants who are allowed to foist their religious beliefs on the whole country.
Well, the cartoon. Mo is absolutely correct, but inverts the sentiments behind the law to get angry. After all, people can’t burn the Old Testament, either, so the law is also antisemitic.
What happens if burning its holy book turns out to be a ritual of some future religion?
Then surely that would be a sanctification of the “holy” text involved, not a desecration.
In the wording given for the legislation, this would be “
inappropriate treatment of writings with significant religious importance”.The approved way (according to various imams) of treating a Koran which has worn out to the point of unusability is, in fact incineration. But probably not in a street demonstration on a Friday afternoon. One incineration would be appropriate ; one would be inappropriate.
It’s also likely to fail, during the early stages of growth of this putative new religion, at the “[of] importance for a recognised religious community” test, since a small (even if growing rapidly) religion would take a considerable time to reach a high enough body count to be “recognised”. See, for example, the flurry of news items a few years ago, of Pastafarians struggling to get their colanders recognised as the religious headgear of their religion. Being a mere few percent of the population, Pastafarians were not (generally, then) a “recognised religious community” – and a large part of the point of people submitting passport photos, driving license photos, etc while wearing the Colander of the Holy Pasta was to force “the authorities” to bite the bullet on defining what constitutes a “recognised religion”. If that had the coincident effect of bringing the whole topic into disrepute for all religions … well “boo-hoo-tick-tock” (the sound of crocodile tears hitting legal parchment).
Right!
Several days ago, Newsweek posted an interesting essay by Kristen Waggoner entitled “Ireland Must Say No to Orwellian ‘Hate-Speech’ Laws”. One has much reason to be concerned about the future of freedom of expression in our country, but far more alarming is the situation in Europe.
“Book of Mormon” – the religious text, or “Book of Mormon” the … libretto (is that the word?) of the stage musical?
That the stage show was inspired by Pythonism does help in confusing the issue.
I’m not sure that the Danish policy of appeasement is going to end well.
Rarely does.
I hope people creates thousands of “I’m not burning a sacred book”, or, “I’m not burning a page that contains text from a sacred book” videos, just to see what happens.
It’s a half empty, half full glass of thing.
Denmark and Finland has prohibited book burnings, Sweden and Norway hasn’t.
Meanwhile, despite propaganda – lately in part officially blamed on Russian agents – Scandinavia remains among the most islam friendly parts of the world.