I have no real desire to watch the movie ‘The Lady of Heaven’ about the life of one of the daughters of the Islamic prophet Mohammed and similarities to life in the modern world. It’s not my thing. I’d no more be interested in this movie than I suspect a Methodist would be interested in watching my favourite Jewish film Ushpizin. I might take some fleeting theological interest in the Lady of Heaven but it’s not something I would take time to either see at the cinema or search out on DVD.

It’s a film, as far as I can see that is mostly harmless. It’s a writers interpretation of what’s in Islamic texts set against a modern context.

However there is a problem and that problem is that there are a bunch of Islamic extremists from across the country don’t believe that this film is harmless and who have successfully managed to get this movie pulled from Cineworld cinemas. A day or so ago a manager of one branch of the Cineworld chain addressed a group of Muslim male demonstrators that the decision had been made to pull the film. His message of surrender to the violent or potentially violent hecklers veto was greeted, very ominously in my view, by chants of Allah hu Akbar from the demonstrators.

It is extremely shocking to see how a major cinema chain caved in to Islamic sectarian protestors. They caved in not just to a minority but to a minority engaged in what is an internal Islamic sectarian issue. Those behind this movie appear to be of the Shia persuasion and those who oppose the movie are Sunni Muslims.

The sectarian nature of the demonstrators who are opposed to the movie is made quite clear by some of the reports that are coming out about the demonstrations. Some of the demonstrators at a demonstration against the movie in Bradford have referred to Shia Muslims as ‘Kuffar’ or unbelievers.

Other commentators have been quite vehement about denouncing the censorship of this movie and the fact that the demonstrators were engaged in ‘open sectarianism’. The GB News presenter and founder of the Equiano Project, Inaya Folarin Iman called the censorship of this film by Islamist mobs as ‘shameful’. The Muslims against Anti-Semitism group also pointed out that some of those who are deeply involved in the protests against the film are making statements that are ‘chilling’ and look to me as if they are either an incitement or a justification of violence. This is what the speaker, alleged to be a guy called Shakeel Afsar who is said to have ‘previous’ when it comes to aggressive street Islamic activity, said:

“Birmingham will not tolerate the disrespect of our prophet (pbuh). There will outcomes from your actions. You will have repercussions for your actions. We have been trained from birth that we must defend the honour of our prophet & we will lay our life on the line.”

No matter how you look at it this looks like a threat of violence. The use of the words ‘repercussions’, ‘defend the honour of our prophet’ the references to ‘laying their lives on the line’ and casting the blame elsewhere for the offence that they’ve taken themselves, does look decidedly ‘martial’. In the context of a demonstration held by the followers of an ideology that has more than a little link with religious violence, this does look like a threat of violence. If these words were being voiced by say a Methodist for example then they would neither be credible or able to be taken seriously. But because they are spoken by a Muslim and it’s Muslims who are linked to a remarkably large amount of religious and religiously inspired violence, then that makes these threats of ‘repercussions’ look far more credible and realistic as a threat of violence. The writer Ella Whelan also commented on these words that look to me like a threat and said:

What distinguishes these protests from others is that the activists got their way. Further still, they included threats of further action, with one activist in Birmingham claiming that “we have been trained from birth that we must defend the honour of our prophet & we will lay our life [sic] on the line”. In response, one Cineworld employee in Sheffield was even sent out to address the crowd with a loudhailer, shouting “at a local level it wasn’t our decision to show this film, it came from above, we totally agree with what you’re saying and we’re not prepared at this cinema to show this film”. It is unclear what the employee was agreeing with — that the film was blasphemous (he didn’t look Muslim), or that arts institutions should bow down to those claiming offence.

Ms Whelan is correct. Unlike any other group that might like or dislike some artwork or novel or discussion or event, these Sunni Muslim extremists have won. They’ve successfully intimidated a business into kow towing to them and there appears to have been no pushback against these intimidatory demonstrators from either the police nor the UK Government.

So we can as you can see establish clearly that a generalised threat of violence has been made by one or more of these demonstrators. If that is the case then were are the police? Where are the arrests and the charges.

If it is indeed Shakeel Afsar who has made this seemingly threatening statement why is he still on the streets? If it was anyone else from any other group other than a group of Muslims who stood up in a city centre and said stuff about ‘repercussions’ or ‘defending x’ then they’d be swept up by the police extremely quickly. The case of the Lady of Heaven movie and the demonstrations against it show us how far cowardly rot and appeasement of Islam has set into our society. These demonstrators should have been told to fuck off as any of us would have been told and with police backing if necessary. If we non Muslims demonstrated in this manner or demanded this or that artwork removed then the response from both police and state would be considerably different. This case also shows what many of us have complained about for many years and that is how we have turned into a two tier society with two tier legal and policing systems with different results depending on what group you profess membership of or support of.

It’s a shameful decision for Cineworld to cave into these demonstrators and even more shameful that the state just stood by and let this happen.