Laurence Fox exposes Britain’s de facto Islamic blasphemy laws

I wrote earlier this month about a June debate the venerable Oxford Union Society (“OUS”) held to determine whether “This House believes the West is right to be suspicious of Islam.” That post revolved around Aisha Khan Aziz, who spoke against the motion, and thought she had scored a point by saying that the only reason Tommy Robinson was allowed to speak was that the OUS’s primarily Third World leadership protected him from the mob. It was telling, to say the least.

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Another video clip from the debate has turned up, this one of actor Laurence Fox’s appearance. He reveals that, while Britain may no longer have blasphemy laws on the books, Islamic blasphemy laws have now become integrated into British society, including at Oxford itself—which, it should be noted, is an institution founded over 900 years ago to advance Christianity in England.

Up to a certain point, the video speaks for itself, but there are a few things that need explanation:

And picking up where the text left off:

…a procedural issue.

Finally, he reveals the image. It is a satirical cartoon about something else entirely. The audience breathes a sigh of relief.

In doing so, they prove his point for him:

Islam is incompatible with free speech.

Islam responds with violence.

And all the clever arguments are merely there to distract from what everyone knows.

The OUS can congratulate itself that “all’s well that ends well” because Fox was eventually allowed to open the envelope to show a picture that was not Mohammed. (It was Jacob Rees-Mogg, a conservative who spoke against the motion. That is, he pish-toshed the risk Islam poses in the UK.)  However, the reality is that the clip is a disastrous statement about today’s United Kingdom, and even Laurence Fox proved that point by putting the lie to his self-declared bravery.

The one thing that must be corrected is Fox’s claim that almost 90% of British Muslims believe that all British publications should be censored to prevent them from showing pictures of Mohammed. He exaggerates, but only slightly.

It’s probable that Fox was speaking of an April 2026 poll conducted among Muslims in heavily populated areas (e.g., where the most fervent live). It found that only 19% opposed criminalizing such images. Meanwhile, 52% supported criminalizing the images and another 36% strongly supported doing so. In other words, 81% of Britain’s loudest, most active, most densely populated Muslim areas want blasphemy laws in Britain—Islamic blasphemy laws.

And yes, it’s true that Britain, which is still an officially Christian country, did have blasphemy laws, both common and statutory, going back to the 17th century. The basis for the laws was that Christianity was regarded as an integral part of English law, meaning that blasphemy undermined one of England’s foundations. These laws were decidedly Christian, punishing those who:

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• denied any person of the Holy Trinity to be God;
• asserted that there was more than one God;
• denied that the Christian religion was true; or
• denied the divine authority of the Old or New Testament.

By 1967, Parliament repealed the Blasphemy Act of 1697, and in 2008, it abolished the common law crime, which had boiled down to extremely rare prosecutions of particularly scurrilous ridicule of the Christian faith. Notably, no one had ever been successfully prosecuted during the Blasphemy Act’s long history. Almost from the start, it was mostly a dead letter.

This contrasts starkly with Islamic blasphemy laws, which routinely lead to official criminal prosecutions, mob violence, or selective murders and other attacks. Thus, Pakistan, Iran, and Nigeria commonly execute blasphemers, while it’s still a capital offense in Afghanistan, Mauritania, Somalia, Yemen, Brunei, and our ally Saudi Arabia. are common. And of course, Salman Rushdie was still a target over three decades after Khomeini’s 1989 Fatwa against him for blasphemy.

Separate from that background, two things stand out in the video. The first is what the Muslim OUS president had to say when Fox indicated that he would show a picture of Mohammed:

Is it not enough that half the team that invited you to this debate were Muslim women who wanted to hear out your expression and your arguments? Is it not enough that I, as a Muslim president, have invited you to this chamber to give your arguments? Is that not enough justification and evidence for you to believe that we do believe in free speech? I would not become the president of a free-speech society if not for that.

Contrary to her summing up of her own point, the message is clear, and it’s not that Fox, or any other person in Britain, has free speech. Instead, it’s that the British people have only as much free speech as Muslims grant them. In other words, “free” speech is not an inherent right; it’s a privilege that British Muslims can give and, usually through violence, can take away again.

The second point is that, in fact, Fox was not brave and did bow down to blasphemy. Why? Because he didn’t show a picture of Mohammed.

He chose not to risk the fate of the staff at Charlie Hebdo in Paris, and others who have paid a price for their “blasphemy” in countries that had no laws prohibiting images of Mohammed. When he opened the envelope, one could see that he had chickened out and showed another image entirely.

So, when Fox claimed, “I will not submit; I will not bow down,” he lied—and frankly, were I in a country without any Second Amendment rights, I’d probably lie, too. And that’s how the bully-boys (and girls) of Islam take over.

There will always be a land mass that once was England. I doubt that there will always be an England.

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X screen grab.