"Say your loved ones were killed in a terrorist attack and the terrorists justified their bloody actions with quotations from a holy book. Would the burning of such a book not be a quite understandable reaction to express your sense of grief and contempt?"
So the issue driving the government’s motivation to keep the blasphemy law was the holy book of a specific religion and its prophet, not holy books and prophets in general. Interestingly, the Danish government also justified its decision to keep the blasphemy law with a reference to possible international reactions to blasphemous speech in Denmark. The result was that religious fanatics in the Muslim world now have the power to trigger blasphemy charges in Denmark in order to demonstrate to the outside world that the government accepts their threats and violence as the most serious argument for upholding the rule of law. To me this sounds like a very paradoxical understanding of the rule of law in one of the most stable and peaceful liberal democracies in the world.
So the issue driving the government’s motivation to keep the blasphemy law was the holy book of a specific religion and its prophet, not holy books and prophets in general. Interestingly, the Danish government also justified its decision to keep the blasphemy law with a reference to possible international reactions to blasphemous speech in Denmark. The result was that religious fanatics in the Muslim world now have the power to trigger blasphemy charges in Denmark in order to demonstrate to the outside world that the government accepts their threats and violence as the most serious argument for upholding the rule of law. To me this sounds like a very paradoxical understanding of the rule of law in one of the most stable and peaceful liberal democracies in the world.
In fact, several observers have made the point that the severe blasphemy laws in Pakistan serve as an incitement to violence against blasphemers, not as a legal instrument to secure the social peace. In Pakistan, as in several other Muslim-majority countries, blasphemy is a capital offense on a par with a terrorist attack killing hundreds of people. That is part of the reason why there are so many extrajudicial killings of blasphemers in Pakistan. When the government communicates to the public that blasphemy is more or less as evil as killing hundreds of innocent people, it should not come as a surprise that a lot of people are willing to take the law into their own hands. In 2011, Mumtaz Qadri, who worked as a bodyguard for Salman Taseer, the governor of Punjab province, killed the man he was assigned to protect because Taseer had spoken out against the blasphemy laws and defended a Christian woman who was standing trial on blasphemy charges. Qadri was praised as a hero, even by Pakistani lawyers. He was executed in February 2016.
With this in mind, one may feel tempted to ask: Might getting rid of blasphemy laws in the long run pave the way for nonviolent reactions to blasphemy?
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