Poor England

I would like to be upset with what the British judge did, but I think he’s right:

The country’s top judge has dealt a significant blow to a key plank of the Government’s anti-terrorism legislation after he overturned the convictions of five Muslim men jailed last year for downloading and sharing extremist terror-related material.

The Lord Chief Justice ruled that unless there was clear evidence of “terrorist intent” it was not illegal to read or study such literature.

The ruling from Lord Phillips is the latest blow inflicted by the judiciary on controversial terror laws, leading to claims that some of the legislation was hastily drafted and is therefore not legally watertight.

The prosecution of the five young Muslim men was regarded as a test case, and is likely to lead to other convictions being overturned.

These include that of 23-year-old Samina Malik – the so-called “lyrical terrorist”. She was the first woman to be convicted under the Terrorism Act and was given a nine-month suspended sentence in December after being found guilty of possessing terrorist manuals.
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Irfan Raja, Awaab Iqbal, Aitzaz Zafar, Usman Malik and Akbar Butt were all convicted last year after becoming “intoxicated” with jihadi websites and literature.

I can that the behavior in which the young men engaged would give the police grounds to closely scrutinize these men, and others like them, or even justify (strongly) search warrants.  I have a problem, though, with arresting people for reading the wrong things, and that’s true no matter how vile or even dangerous their reading material is.   Having disgusting thoughts is a person’s own business.  Much as one would like to enlighten the person, in a free society, a person’s thoughts should be his own — although I should have the freedom to make information available to you that might change your mind.  Of course, once you take a step to bad acts, no matter how small that step . . . well, that’s another story altogether.

This story struck me for one other, unrelated reason.  It was a reminder yet again that, outside of London, the North of England has become something akin to Pakistan West.  When I was on my Junior Year Abroad in England, I attended a school in the North of England and liked it so very much because it was so much more English than the South of England, which had a more international flavor (both because it had more tourists from all over flooding in and because it got overflow from London). To me, nothing epitomizes more the changes in England in the 26 years since I lived there than the fact that most English parts of England have been, in certain large chunks, recolonized by people whose values are the antithesis of long-standing English values.