On July 1st 2015 the Eastern High Court passed what has been called a “historic” judgement, when Said Mansour as the first person in Danish legal history had his Danish citizenship revoked. Mansour was also sentenced to four years in prison and deportation to Morocco, after the court found him guilty of “inciting terrorism”.
While the district court did not find reason to revoke Said Mansour’s Danish citizenship, the decision in the High Court was near unanimous. This fact is especially interesting when one remembers how many MPs put pressure on the court when the case was before the district court. This political pressure on the judiciary was even endorsed as the Prosecutor General asked the police to drop the case of violation of procedural law against the politicians.
The facts, which are said to underlie the judgement, are that Said Mansour via the internet has shared publicly available videos, songs and pictures and distributed books, which are also publicly available. Said Mansour has repeatedly explained that what he calls for is armed struggle against the occupying forces in the Muslim countries as well as the dictators in the Muslim world. Although we in Hizb ut Tahrir do not consider armed struggle against the regimes as the correct way to change society, we understand the obvious difference between this and killing of civilians or terrorism – two activities in which the Western states have distinguished themselves with their continuous state-terror in Muslim countries and support for regimes that do not hold back on the use of torture and mass killings.
Comparing the course of this case with the legal consequences, or lack thereof, for the many non-Muslim Danish citizens who are flooding the social media with public calls for killing Muslims and burning mosques, the only conclusion is that Denmark has parallel law, where certain laws are only used against Muslims.
Once again, it becomes clear that anti-terror legislation is in fact weapons of law used in the fight against Islam in this country – weapons of law that are periodically upgraded, in this case by creating a precedent for revoking citizenship in order to intimidate Muslims for expressing themselves and sharing news, videos, books etc. which are already publicly available. Thus, this case is bigger than Said Mansour, who was already convicted on the same accounts earlier.
One cannot help but wonder where all the freedom-of-speech-champions went. Those who defend fiercely and encourage smear campaigns and hateful attacks on Muslims regardless of the cost and impact on society. As has been shown many times before, it is clear that “freedom of speech” is nothing but a thin political sham to hide behind when it serves an agenda.
In the attempt to fight Islam and intimidate Muslims, the western countries undermine their own principles and ideals of “freedom”, “rule of law” and so on. This paradoxical policy, where they trample on their own values to preserve them, is in itself an ideological defeat, and it is a downward spiral that can only lead to further decay.
We assure the authorities that threats of revocation of citizenship will never be enough to make the thousands of Muslims in this country, who hold on to their Islamic identity, bow down to the secular values of freedom.
Elias Lamrabet
Deputy Media Representative of Hizb ut Tahrir in Scandinavia
Friday, 16th Ramadan 1436 AH
03/07/2015 CE
No.: 10/15