The protests against the film The Lady of Heaven reminded me of a demonstration I attended as a child. My father had taken me to Hyde Park to stand with thousands of other British Muslims to oppose Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. Ban the book, the cries went up. Some began to burn copies. Others started to chant ‘Death to Rushdie’. My father quickly grabbed my hand and turned away. ‘We are not a people who burn books or kill authors,’ he said later. He never joined a protest again.
Last week, angry young Muslim men surrounded shopping malls and cinemas in Leeds, Bolton, Sheffield, Birmingham and London to demand the banning of The Lady of Heaven. Cineworld, caught off-guard, backed down and accepted the mobs’ demands.
The BBC and Sky News, rightly worried about free speech, hosted debates (a trading of insults, really) between leaders of rival factions. More than 130,000 people signed an online petition demanding the film’s removal.
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