.... It's a breathtaking display of moronic behaviour and intolerance, and I'd be lying if I said I felt any real sympathy for the culprits, but the fact of some men getting arrested for burning a book does pose some difficult questions.
If they'd done it outside a mosque, I'd personally have no problem with them being arrested for incitement, but it seems they have been arrested for the straightforward "crime" of burning a copy of the Qur'an, with the location and audience not being relevant – writing over at Index on Censorship, Padraig Reidy suggests that the arrests aren't even based on the video being posted online, but rather the simple fact of a Qur'an being set on fire.
[COMMENT] I agree that Qur’an burners are mindless idiots. I disagree that it would have been OK for them to have been arrested for ‘incitement’, even had they done it front of a mosque. There are two notions of incitement that all too often get conflated.
The first is incitement in the sense of directly persuading others to commit violence. The second is incitement in the sense of causing offence that provokes others to be violent. Incitement in the first sense should be illegal. Incitement in the second sense should not. [New Humanist] Read more [via Butterflies and Wheels]
