In Adelaide, Judge Michael Higgins has spent the best part of a year wrestling with the crime of incitement to religious hatred which David Blunkett wishes to put on the British statute book. It's the first case of its kind in Australia and whatever happens Higgins is assured a place in legal history. But the prospect of recognition by his peers hasn't made the experience of trying to reconcile the mutually incompatible claims of fundamentalist Islam and fundamentalist Christianity any less wretched.

The poor man sounded at the end of his tether when he begged the parties, the Islamic Council of Victoria and Catch the Fire Ministries, to leave him alone and settle their dispute amicably.
"This case, quite frankly is getting out of control," he cried. "Is there any point in giving you half an hour to explore the possibility of mediation?" There wasn't. Although lawyers for both sides said that in normal circumstances their clients were civilised people who liked to keep grievances in proportion and reconcile differences amicably, the intolerable behaviour of the other side made reconciliation impossible. The judge said he hadn't seen anything to match their obduracy in his 19 years on the bench.

The Islamic Council has good reason to feel abused. Muslims members of the audience at a seminar for Catch the Fire, an evangelical Christian group which prays for Australia (someone must), heard that Daniel Scot described Muslims as terrorists and rapists who sanctioned the abuse of women and deceit in dealings with unbelievers. On his own admission, another pastor with the mission had put mosques in a list of 'strongholds of Satan' alongside brothels, off-licences and casinos. Yasser Soliman, the president of the Islamic Council, said Catch the Fire was whipping up a backlash against Australian Muslims after the 11 September and the Bali atrocities.

But then it turned out that Scot was drawing on personal experience. He is a Pakistani Christian who trained to be a maths lecturer. There was pressure on him to convert to Islam because university authorities said it was wrong for a Christian to have authority over Muslims. He refused and was charged under blasphemy laws, which carry a death sentence. 'The next day more than 5,000 students with pistols and daggers were searching for me. I was hidden in a church.' He fled to Australia in the 1980s.

Scot claimed he wasn't vilifying Islam, merely repeating received doctrines. Dr Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, political ally of Ken Livingstone, London's mayor and the new leader of its religious right, shows you can find priests who do indeed excuse wife battering as long as the husband 'beats her lightly with his hands, avoiding her face and other sensitive parts', the burning or stoning to death of men guilty of the 'abominable' crime of homosexuality and the rape of women who have opened 'the door for evils' by failing to 'maintain their modesty'.

Meanwhile, Catch the Fire could say with sincerity that it helped Muslim immigrants settle in Australia and found food, clothing and accommodation for them when they left transit camps.

The more he studied the evidence the more perplexed Judge Higgins became. He began by thinking the Christian ministers were guilty of inciting hatred, but at the same time as they were pouring scorn on Islam's tenets they were talking about the need to create a dialogue with Muslims. He was being asked to decide on the true message of holy books, a task beyond the power of most judges.

Not even the most strident supporter of limiting free speech could claim that the case had helped build a tolerant, multi-cultural Australia. The leaders of Catch the Fire received death threats and Muslim clerics and their lawyers were stalked. American born-again Christians and Saudi fundamentalists are watching the prosecution through narrowed eyes. Whatever the verdict, people who want to feel persecuted by the forces of the infidel will feel persecuted and become more convinced than ever that there was a giant conspiracy against their faith.

Amir Butler, executive director of the Australian Muslim Public Affairs Committee, was a supporter of laws against religious hatred but is disillusioned. 'At every major Islamic lecture I have attended since litigation began,' he said, 'there have been small groups of evangelical Christians, with notepads and pens, jotting down any comment that might later be used as evidence in the present case or presumably future cases.'

The evangelicals were mad and wanted to get even. But there was something more than that. Butler got to the heart of the difficulty of imposing censorship when he wrote in the Melbourne Age : "If we believe our religion is the only way to heaven, then we must also affirm that all other paths lead to hell. If we believe our religion is true, then it requires us to believe others are false."

Well, quite. To a devout Jew, what could be more hateful than Christianity's claims that Jesus was the son of God? To a devout Christian, what could be more hateful than Islam's claims that Jesus was only another prophet? To devout Jews, Christians, Muslims, and for that matter, Hindus, Buddhists, Zoroastrians, Jains, Bahais, Mormons and Moonies, what could be more hateful than athiests' claims that there are no gods and they should grow up? To the fundamentalist, anyone who recommends another path is sending people to hell.

People can't choose their skin colour, or their sex or their sexual orientation, which is why the racism, misogyny and homophobia the likes of Livingstone once opposed are so repellent. But a religion is a system of ideas like any other and must have its claims tested in the necessarily rough arguments of a free society. If people's sensibilities are offended, that's tough.

David Blunkett said last week that his proposed law wouldn't limit free debate. Sadiq Khan and other leading Muslim lawyers have built up an impressive dossier of evidence that 'Muslim' has become code for 'Paki' or 'wog' in the propaganda of British neo-fascism. If the BNP and others attack 'Muslims' rather than Asians they can't be prosecuted because there are laws against inciting racial hatred but not religious hatred.
All of this is true, but as the National Secular Society points out there are laws of incitement to violence and harassment which protect everyone. The question is, what would a law against incitement to religious hatred be used for? The optimistic answer is not much. Everyone in favour of censorship claims it couldn't possibly be used to gag the next Salman Rushdie. This is disingenuous. If incitement to religious hatred had been a crime at the time of the persecution of Rushdie, his enemies would certainly have tried to bring him to trial. Even if they had failed, the publicity would have made life harder for him and for the translators of The Satanic Verses who faced the possibility of being murdered for standing up for freedom of publication.

Anyone who believes the promises that no harm will come from censorship, should consider the history of pornography in Britain.
In 1857 the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Campbell, persuaded Parliament to limit free speech by passing the Obscene Publications Act. The Blunkett of his day was appalled that the Victorian pornography trade was growing without legal check in the Aldwych district of central London, which is now home of that model of modesty, the BBC World Service. MPs worried that great works of literature would be banned by Philistine civil servants and judges, but Campbell told them they had no need to fret.
His intention was to stop the 'sale of a poison more deadly than prussic acid'. Censorship would apply 'exclusively to works written for the single purpose of corrupting the morals of youth and of a nature calculated to shock the common feelings of decency in any well regulated mind'. Only hateful pornographers had anything to fear. His assurances were worthless. Dry guides on birth control were prohibited. The works of Emile Zola, Gustave Flaubert, James Joyce, D H Lawrence Jean-Paul Satre and even Daniel Defoe (for Moll Flanders ) couldn't be sold, while tens of thousands of authors and publishers censored themselves for more than a century.

After that experience, if you're relaxed about extending prohibition you should be careful about what you wish for because you will have no right to be dismayed by what you get.
 

A fresh attempt is to be made to make incitement to religious hatred a criminal offence, the home secretary, David Blunkett, will announce today.

The move, long demanded by Muslim organisations in Britain, was twice voted down by the House of Lords in December 2001, when Mr Blunkett tried to incorporate it into his emergency anti-terrorism legislation in the immediate aftermath of September 11.

Mr Blunkett was then faced with the choice of dropping the clause or losing his entire anti-terrorism bill.

At the time Liberal Democrat and Conservative peers said they had only opposed the measure because it was ill-suited to emergency anti-terror legislation and that they would have supported it if it had greater and separate parliamentary scrutiny.

Mr Blunkett will be hoping that they stand by that position when he resubmits the measure this autumn.

The effect will be to extend the law of incitement to racial hatred to those attacked because of their religion. Muslims, in particular, have long felt that the race hatred laws do not give them the protection they need.

"This will help tackle extremists who use religion to stir up hatred in our society, including religious extremists who preach hate against other religions," Mr Blunkett is expected to tell a seminar organised by the Institute for Public Policy Research today.

However, his decision to try again will infuriate advocates of free speech, including the National Secular Society, who fear that such a law will be used to muzzle those who simply criticise religion.

The move came after Germany's interior minister, Otto Schily, suggested at an informal summit of five key EU home affairs ministers that freedom of association may need to be restricted to combat fundamentalism.

At the end of the two-day meeting in Derbyshire, Mr Schily said: "We must see how we should interact or deal with Islamic groups, engage in dialogue with moderate groups but refuse a dialogue with groups which we consider a threat to society. We should have a ban on freedom of association where appropriate."

One fundamentalist organisation had been banned in Germany because it had "objectives which did not tally with our constitution," he said. "It won't do if the same thing is then not banned in a neighbouring country. We have to act in harmony."

Three Islamist groups are banned in Germany, including Hizb ut-Tahrir, which is legal and active in Britain. The group was banned in Germany 18 months ago after it was found to be distributing literature which advocated killing Jews and the destruction of the state of Israel.

The Home Office said the idea floated by Mr Schily would be considered as part the government's wide-ranging review of anti-terrorism laws now under way, but it stressed there were no immediate plans to ban Hizb ut-Tahrir in Britain.

The mini-summit, which included ministers from Italy, France and Spain as well as Britain and Germany, also agreed that Europe needed to harmonise its police, counter-terrorism and border control measures to tackle international terrorism.

They agreed to give the Europol police agency a significant boost in resources and information technology, while deciding to press the case for greater co-operation over DNA databases, biometric travel documents and residence permits.
 

The Prime Minister makes much of the "scare stories" and "myths" which opponents of further deepening of the EU supposedly propagate. They are based, apparently, on paranoia, and are products of not-so-latent xenophobia.

Well here's a very scary story which is not speculation but fact. This week democracy -- the right to vote for the party you wish to support -- ended inside one EU member state.

On Wednesday, the Belgian judiciary banned a political party from operating in Belgium. The reason? The country's political establishment dislikes its views.

The party it banned is not some obscure fringe organisation but one which has 18 MPs in the 150-seat Belgian parliament, many local councillors and two MEPs.

The opinion polls were predicting that it could win the most Belgian votes at the European and local elections in June.

The banned party is Vlaams Blok (VB). The Court of Appeal in Ghent -- notorious for its left-liberal bias -- deemed it to be an "undemocratic and racist" organisation because of its policy that immigrants should be given only two choices: "to assimilate or to return home".

Maybe such a policy is indeed racist; maybe it isn't. The VB itself, which has much in common with the Fortuyn List in the Netherlands, has been accused of this. But in a democracy, surely, that is a decision which voters should make, not judges.

But the VB's racism was merely an excuse. The real reason why the Belgian authorities have been bent on banning the VB for years has nothing to do with racism and the rights of immigrants. It is that the party advocates secession from Belgium and the establishment of a Republic of Flanders.

Worse still, as Belgium's only conservative party it upsets the country's cosy political applecart. The Belgian Establishment has responded not by defeating it in argument but by banning it.

After Wednesday's ruling, it is now illegal to distribute VB publications and its politicians are barred from state radio and television. The party is appealing against the ruling, but the Belgian judiciary's predisposition to do the bidding of the political class means that the appeal has almost no chance of succeeding. When the ban is confirmed, the VB will be proclaimed a criminal organisation and disbanded, unable to exist, let alone to field candidates and argue its case.

I hold no brief for the VB; and were I to have a vote in Flanders, I would not vote for it. But that is not the point. What happened in Ghent on Wednesday is a frightening, but classic demonstration of the political mindset which lies behind the EU's "ever-closer union": if you do not sign up to certain beliefs then your politics are, by definition, beyond the pale and thus illegitimate.

The ruling was merely the latest in a series of attempts to destroy the VB because of the threat it posed to the Belgian status quo. In 1999, "undemocratic and racist" parties were banned from receiving state funding (private donations of more than 125 euros are illegal in Belgium). This decision was immediately followed by an action against the VB on those grounds. When a Flemish judge refused to issue a judgment, arguing that these were matters for the electorate rather than the courts, the head of the Centre for Equal Opportunities, the quango which had brought the case, said that he would continue appealing until he had found a judge who would find against the VB.

This week one emerged: Alain Smetrijns, who happens also to be the chairman of the Lions Club in Ghent, a francophone pro-Belgian unity group.

Belgium is in many ways a mini-EU: an artificial state created (much like Europe's three former such states, the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia) as a result of political ideology rather than any sense of national unity, and held together by a political class which is prepared to subvert democracy to achieve its ends. Add to that a judiciary which, far from being independent of the political establishment, is an important part of the problem -- and you have a recipe for what took place in Ghent this week: democracy, Belgian-style, in which you may vote only for a party whose views are approved by the elites.

The actions may be specific to Belgium, but the lesson is of wider import. The EU is in the process of becoming just such an artificial state. The fate of the Vlaams Blok shows that worries about the future of democracy are not scare stories. They are real dangers and they are with us today.