So is an open-ended law. So is a law where the proscribed activity is ill-defined. So is a law that’s so manifestly unjust that most people ignore it. So is a law that jeopardises the groups it’s supposed to protect.
You may think that ‘evil’ is an overstatement. Perhaps you’d rather opt for a more meiotic, more, well, British adjective, such as ‘ill-advised’, ‘unhelpful’ or ‘unwise’. However, I insist: laws that fall into the categories I mentioned are evil.
When a state issues a proscriptive law, it increases its own power while diminishing individual freedom pari passu. In a civilised country, this truism imposes certain requirements on all laws.
They must be just, necessary, precisely worded, objectively defined, enforceable without resorting to measures that are worse than the crime – and as few as they possibly can be without compromising law and order.
When laws fail to satisfy such requirements, they are tyrannical and therefore evil. No understatement, no equivocation – evil is an accurate description of such despotic diktats.
This preamble takes us to another new legal travesty currently being prepared by the government’s Working Group. It’s going to introduce a new acronym without which our legal lexicon is woefully incomplete: AMH, which stands for ‘anti-Muslim hostility’.
The Working Group has its work cut out. The impossible task before it is finding for AMH a niche in our legal codes that’s not already occupied by other laws.
‘Islamophobia’ has been tried and found wanting. As classically educated semantic rigorists like my friend Peter Mullen never tire of pointing out, ‘phobia’ stands for irrational fear.
Hence a chap who mentions in passing that Mohammad was a paedophile is supposed to be irrationally scared of Muslims. But the opposite is true: he is brave to the point of being reckless. By levelling that technically correct accusation, he risks having his head cut off if some pious and testosteronally active Muslims are within earshot.
That etymological conundrum made HMG seek another law, one built on a semantically unimpeachable definition of the transgression. In fairness to our government, which is often accused of being slow on the uptake, it always acts with remarkable alacrity whenever yet another bureaucratic sinecure has to be created.
Out went ‘Islamophobia’, in came the Working Group, and verbal acrobatics began at a ferocious tempo. AMH, as it turns out, means committing or encouraging or failing to report any criminal acts involving unlawful discrimination against Muslims.
Such acts include, but are not limited to, the “prejudicial stereotyping of Muslims… as a collective group defined by fixed and negative characteristics”. Yet the Working Group stressed that this is only the starting point.
The definition will “evolve”, but whatever emerges at the other end of that evolution has to be a redundant and therefore evil law.
We already have laws criminalising physical assault. We have other laws specifically criminalising assault for racial or religious reasons. We have still other laws banning discrimination on racial or religious grounds. We have a whole raft of laws proscribing verbal abuse involving threats of violence, targeted harassment, stalking or hate speech intended to cause alarm, distress or fear of immediate harm.
What’s left then? One thing only: an attack on free speech. Treating as a crime any statement a Muslim may not like, such as pointing out that marrying a six-year-old girl constitutes paedophilia. Or, on a more elevated level, that Islam is a patchwork quilt of a religion, essentially a Christian heresy with bits of Judaism and Zoroastrianism sewn in.
Or really anything the complaining party identifies as cause for complaint. In the spirit of the English Common Law, such open-ended interpretation has a precedent: the infamous Macpherson Report of 1999, an inquiry into the 1993 racist murder of Stephen Lawrence.
At the time a need arose to define a racist incident, and Macpherson obliged: his report defines it as “any incident which is perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person”. Sorry I mentioned the English Common Law: that definition constitutes a vicious mockery of any civilised legal system.
It’s for a good reason that Themis, the Greek goddess of law, is always depicted blindfolded. A just law is blind to any considerations other than objective proof of guilt or innocence. ‘Objective’ is the key word: the criteria involved are strictly factual and impersonal. A law that’s not evidence-based, one that defines guilt as anything the plaintiff perceives as such, is unjust, tyrannical and therefore evil.
Speaking of tyranny, how will the police know that an act of AMH was committed? The Working Group is happy to explain: the law will operate by “empowering people to report incidents”. This means the law can only be enforced by turning millions of people into snitches.
Here I’d like to draw your attention to the words “the victim or any other person” in the Macpherson Report, which evidently serves as the blueprint for the AMH farce.
A Muslim may not be offended by someone on a bus talking about Islamic terrorism, but another passenger may be because… well, just because. That sensitive soul will be “empowered” to report the incident. Take it from me: the next step will be criminalising witnesses who fail to report AMH.
How do I know? Oh well, you see, I spent the first 25 years of my life in a country that had such laws on the books. That produced millions of snitches who happily denounced anyone they disliked: their spouses’ lovers, overachieving colleagues, wags telling inappropriate jokes.
Those laws were complemented by others, those we called “knew but didn’t tell”. Such articles turned concerned citizens into sprinters: having heard a risqué political joke, they’d all rush to the phone, knowing that only the winner of that race would be spared a ‘knew but didn’t tell’ punishment.
Such laws corrupt societies for generations to come after they’ve been repealed: knowing that your best friend may kill you by a false denunciation doesn’t really foster mutual trust and social cohesion.
‘Knew but didn’t tell’ laws have existed in Russia at least since the reign of Ivan the Terrible (d. 1584), but in those days the snitch was the first one to be tortured as a way of establishing the veracity of his accusation. Under the Soviets, that practice was dropped: they didn’t care whether or not the accusation was truthful. “Give us a man; we’ll find a law” was the working principle there.
By the sound of it, His Majesty’s Government doesn’t care about justice either whenever its sense of woke propriety is offended. But why just AMH? How about AJewishH and AChristianH?
The comedian Jimmy Carr tells anti-Christian jokes with a venom typical of lapsed Catholics. When asked why he denies Muslims the benefit of his humour, he replies: “Simple. They could kill me.” Arrest him: the statement is AMH.
And while you are at it, also arrest Richard Dawkins, whose 2006 book The God Delusion is replete with both AJH and ACH.
Thus, he describes the God of the Old Testament as: “…jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”
As for the New Testament notion of God sacrificing his son to redeem mankind, Dawkins considers it “one of the most repugnant ideas ever to occur to a human mind”.
And in 2013, Dawkins tweeted that “Islam is the greatest force for evil in the world today.” That’s AMH if I ever heard it.
Lock him up and throw away the key, say millions of offended Jews, Christians and Muslims. Or barring that, stop coming up with new legal obscenities like AMH.
Such laws are redundant, ill-defined, open-ended, unenforceable and unjust. That makes them tyrannical and therefore evil.