Telegraph | News | Preachers of hate could be charged with treason

That's right: Scotland Yard and the Crown Prosecution Service are considering measures to draw a clear line between free speech and treason.

At issue are three particularly brazen Muslim clerics who variously have exhorted their followers to refuse to lay information with the Yard about the London Incidents and even declared that they owed no allegiance to Her Majesty's Government. "I am a Muslim first, second, and last!" cried one. Another said, "We are not afraid of you any more. The banner of jihad has now been raised inside the UK!"

Friends, the hardest thing for a free society to determine is what constitutes treason. My favorite definition is that contained in the Constitution of the United States: committing an act of war against your country, or adhering to, aiding, and comforting its enemies. By that definition, any declaration that you owe no allegiance to your country of citizenship, subjecthood, or lawful residency, constitutes treason. And surely anything that comes out of your mouth or pen, that would differ little from the steady stream of insults that came from Lord Haw-haw or Tokyo Rose during World War Two would also be tantamount to treason. Evidently the British are finally concluding that such a strict demarcation between permissible dissent and treason is necessary.

Neither are the British the only ones to consider this. The French recently deported 12 Muslim clerics for just such offenses, and even stripped some of them of their French citizenship. (The French official who ordered this action is French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy. Some have suggested that he might be the best hope for a salvage of Franco-American relations.)

Some will no doubt suggest that the French and the British are specifically outlawing the practice of Islam. This is not correct. Any country could go that far, after holding a series of hearings into the nature of Islam and why serious devotion to that faith is incompatible with being a good citizen or lawful resident in any country other than a Muslim one. No country has ever held such hearings. Instead they have declared that certain types of speech, specifically incitements to sabotage, mass murder, or treason, will be prosecuted either as treason or under the admittedly nebulous category of "hate speech." It's easier to legislate that sort of measure, even in the United States, where Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once famously said that the First Amendment literally does not allow you to yell "FIRE!" in a crowded theater.

In any event, I'll put the Bible against the Koran any day. The worst that anyone claiming--and I emphasize claiming--to be a Christian has ever done was to blow up an abortion mill and kill the night watchman in the process. (He also apparently lit off a bomb at the Atlanta Olympics, and I still haven't figured out his motive for that outrage.) Scripture gives absolutely no warrant for any such action. Instead, Scripture says, "Let every soul be subject to the powers-that-be that govern, for no power [Greek exousia, from ek out of and eimi I am] exist that God did not put in place." [Romans 13:1-2ff.] St. Paul said that during the Julio-Claudian dynasty, when Roman law was often very harsh against Christians. So that's our example of martyrdom (literally, "testimony"). The Muslim example is to take other people with you to the next life, and to fight against any government that does not work the way Muhammad said it should. So, no--I'm not afraid of any of these new laws. Nor do I mean that anyone ought to be, unless, again paraphrasing Paul, one wishes ill toward his fellow citizen or lawful resident.