White House Set to Accept Koran Burner Hamit Coskun as Refugee if he Loses Appeal Tomorrow
The Trump administration is in talks to accept Hamit Coskun, who burnt a Koran in a protest outside the Turkish embassy, as a refugee from Britain if his ‘blasphemy’ conviction is reinstated by the High Court this week. The Telegraph has the story.
State department officials are preparing to help Hamit Coskun flee the UK if he loses a ‘blasphemy case’ this week.
The potential intervention is likely to escalate transatlantic tensions over free speech, which critics have claimed is being eroded under Sir Keir Starmer’s Government.
Coskun overturned a conviction for a religiously aggravated public order offence after he burnt the Koran outside the Turkish embassy in London.
However, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) is contesting that decision at a hearing in the High Court on Tuesday. A senior US administration official said his case was “one of several cases the administration has made note of”.
Coskun sought asylum in the UK from his home country of Turkey, saying Islamic terrorists had destroyed his family’s life. He told the Telegraph that, if he did lose his case, he may be forced “to flee” and seek protection in the US.
“For me, as the victim of Islamic terrorism, I cannot remain silent. I may be forced to flee the UK and move to the USA, where President Trump has stood for free speech and against Islamic extremism,” he said.
“If I have to do so, then, to me, the UK will have effectively fallen to Islamism and the speech codes that it wishes to impose on the non-Muslim world.”
On February 13th last year, Coskun, who is of Armenian-Kurdish descent, travelled from his home in the Midlands to the Turkish consulate in Knightsbridge.
He then set fire to the holy book and held it above his head, shouting “Islam is religion of terrorism” and “f— Islam”.
As Coskun did so, Moussa Kadri, a passer-by, attacked him and appeared to slash at him with a blade before kicking him when he fell to the ground.
Kadri was given a 20-week prison sentence, suspended for 18 months, while Coskun was originally charged by the CPS with harassing the “religious institution of Islam”.
However, the charge was later amended after the National Secular Society and the Free Speech Union took up his cause and argued that he was effectively being accused of blasphemy, an offence abolished in the UK 18 years ago.
At his trial, lawyers for the CPS insisted that Coskun was not being prosecuted for setting fire to the Koran.
Instead, they claimed, he was being prosecuted for “disorderly behaviour in public”. Coskun was convicted of a religiously aggravated public order offence and fined £240.
At Southwark Crown Court in October, however, that conviction was overturned.
Toby said:
If the CPS succeeds in getting Hamit’s acquittal overturned, breaking an Islamic blasphemy code, whether it’s ‘desecrating’ the ‘holy book’ or showing a class of schoolchildren cartoons of Mohamed, will become a religiously aggravated public order offence, just so long as the blasphemer is violently attacked by Muslim fanatics. You’ve heard of the heckler’s veto. This will create a stabber’s veto. It will sound the death knell for free speech in Britain.
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: Watch Toby on GB News last night explaining why it will be hugely embarrassing for Sir Keir Starmer and the British Government if Hamit is granted political asylum from the UK by the US on human rights grounds.
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Our Yankee cousins are treating the UK and EU just as they treated the Soviet Union in the 1950s. I wonder why?
I wonder if they’ll consider taking in Tommy Robinson. I mean, when will it ever be deemed safe for him to come back to the UK, given the state dhimmified Britain is in these days? It’s not like he can rely on police protection. Maybe his pal Elon will put a word in for him…
Regarding this Hamit chap: don’t you find it weird that if he and his family were being persecuted in Turkey that his first thought after being in the UK for 5mins is to publicly burn a Koran? Not very bright or considerate to your family, really, is it?
Doesn’t exactly say: “Now I’ve been fortunate enough to be granted asylum, I’m going to quietly get on with my life and support my wife and kids to settle in to British life, now that we’re no longer having our lives destroyed by Islamist nutters.”
< 3 seconds after setting fire to a Koran on a busy, Muslim-filled street, proceeds to get chased by knife-wielding Islamist nutter > 🤦♀️🥴
I agree with you that his action showed an immense lack of thought and care for his remaining family members in Turkey. But looking at the wider picture: were those around him in the street aware of his background and, if so, would it have made any difference to the way they attacked him?
If he had stood outside a church and burnt a Bible, would he have been subject to the same kind of attack from passers-by and prosecution? I think not. I genuinely feel that the Christian heritage of this country matters less to its government than the imported religions of immigrants, and that the law is being mobilised to disadvantage Christianity.
It is a sad indictment of the current state of the UK that people feel they may need to seek refuge in the USA to flee religious persecution.
The authorities in Turkey would know that he had been given asylum and there would be a big target on the backs of his family. The man is now prominent so if anything happens to his family it will quickly become an international incident. So you could argue that his family are now safer…. maybe!
Well it does seem that some people are prepared to fight tyranny whatever the cost.
But is he going to continue his Koran-burning in the States, if they let him in? Perhaps it’ll be a condition that he stops with that high risk nonsense. Because if he’s not careful he’ll wind up like poor Salwan Momika: Iraqi refugee and serial Koran-burner in Sweden, who was assassinated by Islamists? Hit men? The people briefly arrested were released and nobody was ever charged, so his murderers are still walking free. Rumours are that the government had him killed as he was a threat to national security, but I’m not sure if there’s any truth to that.
By that standard, isn’t it weird that young Muslim men supposedly fleeing persecution to the safe haven of this country immediately look for white female children to have sex with?
Not the first move of a genuinely frightened and traumatised person I would have thought.
i would have thought they would have settled down, got a job and have nothing but praise for a country that will facilitate their every need, even over and above its own people.
But hey, what would I know? I’m just a stupid white person who obviously does not understand cultural “sensitivities”
This is where Toby – and others who aren’t quite able to bring themselves round to the absolute free speech position – need to make their mind up.
He has said in the past that he believes in total free speech, except for a handful of exceptions, one of which is where there is a direct and imminent risk or threat of violence. But that exception is precisely what justifies the “stabber’s veto”.
In the end, the only position that supports free speech is the axiom that the correct response to words is words, never violence. And if you uphold that principle, all the responsibility for violence falls on the violent person, not on the person who speaks. Which is how it should be. And then you can have absolute free speech, without excuses or exceptions.
“one of which is where there is a direct and imminent risk or threat of violence”
I think they may be referring to the imminent unlawful action exception to the US 1st Amendment (“Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech….”). Brandenburg v. Ohio – Wikipedia I don’t know what the justification is for this exception (the 1st Amendment is about as unambiguous as it gets) but I strongly doubt that it would be deemed to apply to this case, at least not by the current Supreme Court.
I tend to think it better to have no exceptions though.
Terminiello v. City of Chicago – Wikipedia
Terminiello v. City of Chicago, 337 U.S. 1 (1949), was a case in which the Supreme Court of the United States held that a “breach of peace” ordinance of the City of Chicago that banned speech that “stirs the public to anger, invites dispute, brings about a condition of unrest, or creates a disturbance” was unconstitutional under the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution.
Arthur Terminiello, a Catholic priest under suspension,[1] gave a speech to the Christian Veterans of America in which he criticized various racial groups and made a number of inflammatory comments. There were approximately 800 people present in the auditorium during the speech and a crowd of approximately 1,000 people outside, protesting the speech. The Chicago Police Department was present, but was unable to maintain order completely.
This Kurdish Terrorist is a complete fraud! HE IS NOT A VICTIM OF ISLAMIC TERRORISM! He was RELEASED from a Turkish prison after serving his sentence for KURDISH TERRORISM, and could easily have stayed there with his family, or moved to his mother’s ancestral homeland of ARMENIA, where he would have been welcomed by his mother’s relatives there. But no, he drove his wife and daughter thousands of miles across the whole length of Europe and multiple safe countries to get to England (though none of them speaks English or has any connection to Britain at all), where he became impatient with the British government for taking a couple of years to decide his Fake Asylum application, even though he and his family were given a house and welfare benefits the whole time. So in order to force the British government to give him asylum, he cooked up this PUBLICITY STUNT of burning a Koran outside the Turkish Embassy, then said Muslims came to his house and “threatened him with an ashtray” (yes, really), then claimed to be “a victim of Islamic Terrorism”, getting the Brits to feel sorry for him, treat him as a hero and defend him in… Read more »
I predict that if Two-Tier and the Marxists remain in power for much longer there’ll be a great many more people burning Korans in the hope they’ll get asylum in the States.
Much of the Quran is gibberish. There are around 30 different versions of the Quran in print, which destroys the central claim of islam – that the Quran was dictated to the prophet, assed on by word of mouth and then written down without any mistakes.