Philippe Sulmont, an octogenarian French priest, has been fined just under $1,000 for remarks that French authorities have deemed anti-Muslim. The report comes from AFP via Al-Jazeera, with thanks to Susan:
A French priest has been fined 800 euros ($990) for describing the Quran as a handbook for the devil.
Philippe Sulmont, 82, was found guilty of “provoking discrimination, hatred or violence” for comments he made in a letter to his parishioners in the northern town of Domqueur at the end of 2002.
“The Asiatics proliferate and invade our land, bringing with them an ideology that threatens the whole world,” he wrote.
“Indeed I would add there is no such thing as ‘moderate’ Islam. All the populations infected by the Muslim religion are indoctrinated by the Quran – a holy book which is the manual for the extension of the kingdom of the devil at the expense of the kingdom of Christ,” he said.
Sulmont was also ordered to give a symbolic one euro in damages to the League of Human Rights, which brought the case, and to pay for the judgement to be published in two local newspapers.
The remarks about the kingdom of the devil and the kingdom of Christ are, obviously, religious. Muslim imams have on many occasions preached that Christianity represents the kingdom of the devil as opposed to the House of Islam, in line with verses like this one from the Qur’an: “The Christians call Christ the son of Allah. That is a saying from their mouth; (in this) they but imitate what the unbelievers of old used to say. Allah’s curse be on them. . .” (Sura 9:30). The Saudi Sheikh Marzouq Salem Al-Ghamdi recently preached in a mosque in Mecca that “Christians are infidels, enemies of Allah, his Messenger, and the believers. They deny and curse Allah and his Messenger . . . How can we draw near to these infidels?” I document many similar statements in Onward Muslim Soldiers.
If the French want to fine the priest, very well, but I trust they understand that in doing so they have effectively made traditional Christianity illegal. I trust also that they will be closely monitoring their local imams for similar speech (although if they do, they will be rendering traditional Islam illegal as well). If not, that will be more evidence that they are now well along the road to dhimmitude, despite the hijab hoo-ha.
Also, the leap from the priest’s words to incitement to violence is larger than it may seem at first. I don’t have the full text of his remarks, but I would doubt that he called upon his hearers to victimize any Muslims “” in contrast to the open incitements to violence that come routinely from Muslim religious leaders. Just today there is news that Mullah Krekar ordered bombings in Iraq from his Norwegian redoubt. And I could provide thousands of other examples.
Finally, while the priest’s term “Asiatics” is unfortunate, as Muslims are of all races, his observation that they are “bringing with them an ideology that threatens the whole world” is hardly unfounded. After all, a Hamas official recently proclaimed that “the march of resistance will continue until the Islamic flag is raised, not only on the minarets of Jerusalem, but over the whole universe.” See Onward Muslim Soldiers for numerous other examples of the universalism of jihad ideology. A place that labels those who point this out guilty of “hate speech” will soon see how serious those proclamations of a universal mission really are.