“The convictions of five young Muslim men jailed over extremist literature have been quashed by the Appeal Court.”
Wednesday, 13 February 2008
http://news.bbc.co. uk/1/hi/uk/7242724.stm
When I read this article today it didn’t surprise me really. It seems the world has taken a lenient position towards Muslim’s. Yes Muslim’s are lovely people in the main not every Muslim person is extreme or violent. However if a British person had been looking at a website that taught how to kill people or taught them about terrorism then I am sure they would have been jailed. Yet these five Muslim men got away without any form of punishment. What kind of a statement does that make to other offender’s? Does it say that it’s alright to look at extreme websites? People have been jailed in the past for looking into extremism. A British convert was jailed for 15 years in 2005. Read the article below:
“A British Muslim convert was jailed for 15 years yesterday after being caught with details of how to fire mortar bombs and secret codes to facilitate terror attacks. In the first major terrorist trial since the London bombings, Andrew Rowe, 34, was found guilty of two charges at the Old Bailey. He received seven and a half years for each offence.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2005/sep/24/terrorism.politics
Hugh Muir
The Guardian,
Saturday September 24 2005 Why then do these 5 Muslim’s get away without being punished?
“Irfan Raja, Awaab Iqbal, Aitzaz Zafar, Usman Malik and Akbar Butt were jailed for between two and three years each by the Old Bailey for downloading and sharing extremist terrorism-related material, in what was one of the first cases of its kind.
But at the Court of Appeal, Lord Phillips said that while the men had downloaded such material, he doubted if there was evidence this was in relation to planning terrorist acts.
He said the prosecution had attempted to use the
law for a purpose for which it was not intended.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7242724.stm
So if we believe that these men were not planning terrorist attacks what were they doing with the material? Is it justified to say they were just intrigued and wanted to look at others suffering in the name of religion? Surely this just discriminates Muslim’s even further. It will be too late to punish these men if they really do commit an act of terrorism and what’s not to say that in a few years time they will indeed carry out an act of terrorism. What kind of a law do we have when it can be so strict for one set of people and then so lenient for another? What kind of a world are we living in?
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