British police have started confiscating Muslim sectarian hate literature — some of it calling for murder — but won’t charge those distributing and displaying it with a crime.
Police in Glasgow were responding to the murder of Asad Shah, from the persecuted Ahmadi sect. They confiscated a hate posters targeting Ahmadis in a local shop, but insisted the no crime was committed.
A police spokeswoman told Herald Scotland: “While no criminality was established, advice was provided that the content of the leaflet could cause offence to a section of our community. The leaflet was removed with the shopkeeper’s consent.”
Two days ago, the UK’s most senior police officer vowed to protect the Muslim community generally after the killing of Mr. Shah.
Critics on social media have pointed out, however, that it is hard to imagine death threats and religious intolerance of this type not being treated as crime if it were to come from any other section of society.
Such posters and leaflets, denouncing Ahmadi Muslims as infidels and apostates and calling for “capital punishment” against them, have been a regular feature in Muslim shops, Mosques, public universities and streets for many years.
Back in 2010 Channel 4 ran an extensive report on the phenomenon, shortly after a massacre in Pakistan saw 93 Ahmadis slaughtered, that claimed the “hatred was coming to the UK”.
The majority of the hate literature, in 2010 and now, is produced by the Khatme Nubbawat group. According to their spokesman, when the Crown Prosecution Service investigated, they simply said the literature was “unpleasant” but that no laws were broken.
Similar Khatme Nubbawat fliers were being distributed in top London Universities just last year, as reported by Breitbart London, including one’s calling for the death sentence. Again, the police did not act.
Ahmadi shopkeepers and business are also frequently boycotted by mainstream Muslims, such as in this widely publicised case in Wimbledon from 2010. The police did not treat it as religious discrimination, however.
Khatme Nubbawat, who have called for Ahmadis to be killed, are officially affiliated to the Muslim council of Britain (MCB), the UK’s “largest national representative of British Muslim associations, mosques and schools”.
The MCB, in turn, is affiliated to the Muslim Brotherhood, and recently released a statement announcing that, in their view, Ahmadis are apostates – a charge that is punishable by death in many Muslim majority nations.
If the police were to start treating such incitements to violence and discrimination against Ahmadis as “hate crimes”, therefore, the MCB itself could also be guilty.
Two weeks ago Scottish Ahmadis launched a campaign against such extremism. Christian and Jewish groups turned up, but representatives of the Glasgow Central Mosque and the Muslim Council of Scotland declined.
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