“should be knighted by the Queen and all London should give him a parade”
I didn’t actually want to write anything about “Lionheart”, the British Nationalist Party-supporting blogger who claims to be under threat of arrest in the UK for anti-Muslim tirades made on his sewer-like blog. However, as someone with a particular interest in free speech issues, I didn’t want to be accused of ignoring a “hard” case, and so I made some observations here and here (more accurately, I didn’t want to accuse myself – I doubt anyone else cares what I think one way or the other).
However, I now find myself drawn to a third posting on this unwelcome subject, as various conservative figures continue to make hysterical claims about the UK and offer not just support for “Lionheart’s” free speech, but warm endorsements of his project. We’ve seen Atlas Shrugs and Irene Lancaster already; today is the turn of Phyllis Chesler:
Islamist rule over the UK may, alarmingly, be on its way. Today, the British police want to question and/or arrest the British blogger known as Lionheaert. His crime? Turning his life around as a young school dropout and petty drug dealer and emerging as a believing Christian who opposes the drug plague in his hometown of Luton and who views the Pakistani Islamist and al-Qaeda control of the drug trade in Luton as both criminally and politically dangerous. For this, Lionheart has been charged with “stirring up racial hatred”—which is a crime in the UK.
In fact, we don’t know why exactly he has been accused of “stirring up racial hatred”, but we can be sure it wasn’t simply for complaining about “Pakistani Islamists”. Sadly No has gathered some particularly inflammatory and sanguinary quotes from the blog that may be the real cause, although we can’t be sure. Chesler herself avoids any quotations from the blog; perhaps through laziness, perhaps because they are rather off-putting. It should also be noted that he hasn’t been “charged” – as EU Referendum observes, the arrest is probably an “‘administrative’ device” needed for a formal record.
Chesler continues:
Ironically, what is said in mosques and madrassas and on protest marches all over the UK is never considered to constitute a “racially” motivated hate crime. As George Orwell understood, not all pigs are equal.
A more appropriate Orwell quote here might be the ironical “Ignorance is Strength”, since Chesler seems eager to demonstrate her own lack of knowledge – one of Abu Hamza al-Masri’s 2006 convictions was for just the offence of “inciting racial hatred”; other Islamists have been jailed on similar grounds.
Chesler goes on to suggest that “Lionheart” “should be knighted by the Queen and all London should give him a parade”, and she commends his “‘stirring’ and highly informative articles”. Naturally, there is no word about his open support for the British National Party, which he expresses in those very articles. The BNP, it should be noted, a thuggish organisation whose leaders have only laid aside a long history of Jew-hating in favour of Muslim-bashing for strategic reasons (even Melanie Phillips understands this).
There follows a cozy interview between Chesler and “Lionheart”, in which he talks about his religious faith, but avoids repeating his belief that “the Living God is on the side of the BNP”. Interestingly, he also claims that he is being supported by Glen Jenvey, who has featured on this blog in the past, and who has links with the weird VIGIL Network.
Of course, none of this means that Chesler or “Lionheart’s” other admirers actually share his enthusiasm for the BNP, or that they would go along with other things on his blog, if they actually read it in detail. More likely, they’ve simply seen a situation that can be spun as a story of Muslim conspiracy and liberal “oppression”, and decided to make the most of it. I don’t claim to know whether they are truly as ill-informed as they appear, or whether they simply assume that their target readership will be too stupid to notice or too lacking in intellectual integrity to care.
UPDATE: Looks like Chesler is to the right of Little Green Footballs: although LGF headlined its piece as “UK to Prosecute Blogger for Criticising Islam”, in an update the author notes the BNP connection and adds that “I am not supporting what Lionheart says on his blog”.
“Lionheart” is rather sore over this:
Little Green Footballs you are a traitor, nothing less than the equivalent of a Second World War Nazi collaborator who would have been shot because of his treason – I am sure there are many who would have obliged!
One wonders if Chesler and Lancaster and “Lionheart’s” other supporters will concur…
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