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Comment by michh | Hacker News Reader

I don’t know where you’re getting your news but this simply isn’t true

Directly from the courts of law. When European governments and courts do unflattering things, the media makes sure to shuffle it under the carpet. There's a very different culture around free speech and public debate in Europe vs America.

Yeah, but all you reference is Finland. That’s one country with strict blasphemy laws, not specifically about Islam, but about any religion. It’s curious you seem to only care when they apply it to Islam. You get into the same amount of trouble there whether the book you’re burning is a bible or a quran.

And, yeah, I agree. Finlands blasphemy laws are bad and need to be abolished. But the way you’re representing them as specifically about islam and as being representative for most of Europe comes across as disingenuous to me.

And, yeah, there’s more European countries classified as red (worst category) on https://end-blasphemy-laws.org/countries/ but definitely not a majority. Israel is on there too by the way.

> That’s one country with strict blasphemy laws, not specifically about Islam, but about any religion. It’s curious you seem to only care when they apply it to Islam.

The police, the prosecutors and the courts only care about this law when it applies to Islam. Yes, it is very curios indeed!

> You get into the same amount of trouble there whether the book you’re burning is a bible or a quran.

That's absolutely not true. You in fact get into no trouble at all.

I have downvoted your comment because of "the media makes sure to shuffle it under the carpet". These cases are widely reported in national media.

I wasn't familiar with the Finnish politician, but it's easy to find coverage of the case and related news on Finland's national broadcaster: https://yle.fi/a/74-20015426

Well I'm not talking about any Finnish politician. I'm talking about everyday people who get sentenced by the courts for blasphemy against Islam. These cases get local media coverage at most.

Believe me, I think blasphemy laws should be abolished everywhere, but publicly burning Bibles/Qurans/whatever doesn't sounds like a "everyday people" activity to me.

It's not, but it should be allowed to be an everyday kind of thing. If your society does not allow open critique of itself to be normalized, that's bad.

But the US right definitely has no high ground to go around complaining about freedom of speech in the one country that has exceptionally weird and dumb blasphemy laws, seeing as we now live in a USA where the Whitehouse is explicitly saying only they can choose what information journalists have access to. The evangelical right were explicitly calling to deport US citizens for expressing their opinions on college campuses. IMO, reacting at college kids saying the country sucks is one of the most unamerican and pathetic things you could possibly do, but we did once shoot a bunch of college students who dared to stand in a crowd because we shouldn't have been bombing Cambodia, and 58% of the country, when surveyed by Gallup, blamed the students for the incident, so hey, maybe we have made progress, since we only deport them now, instead of murdering them.

I don't think burning religious books should be allowed to be an everyday thing because it would impact the air quality.

This is a somewhat typical European response, even though you might not be European: always blame the victim.

Everyday people are killing each other in trenches in the Ukraine as we speak.

The cases I know where "everyday people" have been sentenced for blasphemy against Islam is when people have emotionally lashed out. One case where a gay man live streamed himself spitting at the Quran and cursing it after the Orlando nightclub massacre in the name of the Quran. It wasn't a real Quran, but the court said that it didn't matter. He might not be an "everyday person" to you. You might have acted more cool in such a situation.

And there are a plethora of other cases where Europeans have been sentenced for publicly criticizing Islam, where no Quran burning has been involved.

The situation in reality, beyond hacker ideology, is that European countries are prosecuting and sentencing people for blaspheming or criticizing Islam. And it usually is not activists who are targeted.

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