Koran-burner Hamit Coskun has exposed the cowardice of Starmer
Even so, revelations that Starmer once defended someone who desecrated an American flag – even though he and his ilk remain silent over the persecution of those who desecrate Korans – sticks in the craw. So many alleged human-rights champions are remarkably selective about whose rights they are and aren't willing to defend.
Today, at Westminster magistrates' court, Turkish asylum seeker Hamit Coskun will go on trial for burning a Koran outside the Turkish consulate in London in February. His protest against the Islamist turn of Turkey earned him a charge of disorderly behaviour likely to cause 'harassment, alarm or distress', supposedly motivated by his 'hostility towards members of a religious group, namely followers of Islam'.
Worse still, Coskun was attacked at the scene. First by a man with a knife, then by a delivery rider who ran over his hand. Coskun claims he was later menaced at his home in Derby, waking up to find two Iraqi men, armed with knives, in his kitchen, threatening to kill him if he burned a Koran again. He's now in a safe house for his own protection.
If the Prime Minister might not be able to comment on this particular case, which has not yet run its full legal course, then at least he should have commented more vigorously and sooner about the spate of Islamic blasphemy controversies that have preceded it – from the Batley Grammar scandal to the Wakefield Koran-scuffing, in which an autistic schoolboy was bombarded with death threats and slapped with a 'non-crime hate incident' for dropping the holy book on the floor. Starmer only expressed concern three years after the case; he was Leader of the Opposition throughout that time.
Starmer's silence on these matters is particularly deafening now it has been revealed that, in his days as a human-rights barrister, he successfully defended a peace activist who defaced the American flag outside a US airbase in Norfolk. His client, as Starmer put it back in 2001, had every right to 'peaceful protest in a free and democratic society'.
He might have been defending a client under cab rank rules, in which a barrister is obliged to defend a client he might not agree with, but the principles of a peaceful and democratic society in which someone should be allowed to burn anything they own is nevertheless one we should all support. Whether or not he personally supported flag-burning, he was right to defend the right to do it. On matters relating to free speech, he should forcefully defend the right to blaspheme Islam.
What changed? What makes flag desecration permissible but Koran burning an unacceptable, perhaps even bigoted, provocation? If you take freedom of speech and the right to protest seriously then you can surely make no moral distinction between arresting someone for standing on a flag and arresting someone for burning a book, so long as it is their property and no one was endangered.
The problem is, from Starmer down we are led by supposedly liberal elites whose liberal principles abandon them when it comes to Islam, or indeed any number of topics they have decided are 'uncomfortable'. With an obnoxious mixture of cowardice and paternalism, they have decided that this one faith, unlike any other, must be ring-fenced from offence.
So, in the name of defending Muslims, they treat Muslims differently to everyone else. They claim to care about human rights, then look the other way when an asylum seeker is arrested for protesting against the very ideology that he says led him to flee his country. Keir Starmer is the embodiment of a not-so-liberal establishment that has truly lost its way.
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