Editorial: Islam cannot be alone given protection from blasphemy

​For decades now there has been something almost demented about the liberal, western approach to Islam.

​While far-sighted writers and commentators like the late Christopher Hitchens and Martin Amis grasped the problems with extreme Muslims after the Salman Rushdie affair in 1989, to this day there is a belief among many of the western elite than Islamists are only the victims.

The very same people who would mock Christianity and do everything they could to suppress Christian fundamentalists go weak at the knee in the face of the Muslim variety. Yet anyone who knows the first thing about religion and the influence of it in the world today will know that the latter is far more virulent, fanatical and dangerous than the former.

In fact this was plain when Iran issued a fatwa against Rushdie for insulting the prophet Muhammad in a novel. It is unthinkable that a Christian country would issue a death sentence for an equivalent insult to Jesus, or that fanatical Christians would hunt down an author who had written such an insult in order to murder him. But western authorities cannot see such an easy point.

This week Hamit Coskun, a Turkish man, was found guilty of a religiously aggravated public order offence after burning a Koran by the Turkish embassy in London. It is hard to envisage someone being treated the same for burning a bible. And the sentence imposed on Coskun would have been all the harder if he had been a white protestor. Yet, incredibly, it was Coskun who felt the force of the law, not the Islamist who ran at him with a knife.

Thank goodness for organisations like the Free Speech Union, led by Toby Young, and the National Secular Society that are challenging this case.

How typical of a Britain that is decent to the point of weakness to ban blasphemy, in effect only with regard to Christianity, but to subtly maintain it to protect Islam​.