Free the 'lyrical terrorist'!

- FREE THE ‘LYRICAL TERRORIST’! As Samina Malik awaited a sentence for writing poems about jihad, the Manifesto Club put in a word for free speech. Read the statement below from Josie Appleton; see the Facebook group, Thoughtcrime is not crime.

‘Samina Malik made no attempt to commit a terrorist act. She was convicted for ideas alone – for writing poetry, possessing computer printouts, for her scribbles on the back of WH Smith till receipts, and using the online username “lyrical terrorist”. This is not a conviction for terrorism; it is a conviction for thoughtcrime, which should worry all free-thinking citizens.

Malik was tried under the Terrorism Act 2000 for possessing articles “likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism”, including the Al-Qaeda Manual. These documents are freely available on the internet, and are read by thousands of people for thousands of reasons. When I was researching Islamic fundamentalism, I had printouts of these documents in my bedroom too.

It is worrying that Malik has so few defenders. When somebody is convicted for writing poetry, we all lose the realm of the free imagination - where we can all explore ideas that are confrontational, controversial, or just plain silly.

Certainly, Malik may have been silly. She says she wrote her fatuous poems about about beheadings and martyrdom to be “cool”. But she was left to give the court a lesson in basic liberal principles: “To partake in something and to write about something are two different things”. She also pointed out that a computer username is just a username: "You have taken it too literally and out of context”.

No reasonable man or woman could claim that Malik was a danger to society. This is state security as farce. The authorities should know the difference between a hardened terrorist and a harmless fantasist; between somebody building a bomb, and somebody scribbling about violence on the back of a till receipt.

After Malik was convicted, the judge described her as a “complete enigma to me”. But it is not an offence to be an enigma to a judge, or act or think in ways that he himself would not. What is criminal is not Malik but the Terrorism Act that allowed her to be sentenced. We should abolish the Terrorism Act, and free the “lyrical terrorist”.'