Meet the jihadist offended by a pub sign

The Saracens Head Inn, an historic pub in Amersham, Buckinghamshire, is being taken to court over its supposedly ‘Islamophobic’ name and sign.

Khalid Baqa, the man behind the lawsuit, claims to have been ‘shocked and deeply offended’ when walking past the pub and seeing its name (‘saracen’ was a common term for Arabs and Muslims in the Middle Ages), as well as its signage depicting a ‘brown-skinned bearded Arab / Turk male with a turban’. In his submission to the local county court, he also claims that the pub’s exterior ‘instilled worry and fear in me since it was clearly xenophobic, racist and inciting violence to certain people’. He is demanding £1,800 from the landlord for the offence caused. If successful in court, he plans to sue 30 other British pubs with the same name.

Baqa’s complaint wouldn’t sound out of place coming from a pink-haired students’-union rep, or from a lobbyist from Britain’s racial-grievance industry. But it turns out he is actually a convicted Islamist terrorist. In 2018, he was jailed for four years and eight months for preparing jihadist propaganda. (Speaking to the Sun at the weekend, he insisted: ‘I’ve stopped all the terrorism stuff now.’)

Perhaps this shouldn’t be such a surprise. There is a striking affinity between Islamists and the woke. Both are easily offended and intolerant of any criticism. Both want to punish and cancel those who blaspheme against their dogmas. Both liberally throw around the charge of ‘Islamophobia’, which is usually deployed to silence criticism of Islam, and even Islamist extremism, rather than to challenge anti-Muslim racism.

This unlikely coalition of the oversensitive is strangling our freedom of speech. Here’s hoping this ridiculous case is thrown out.

Fraser Myers is deputy editor at spiked and host of the spiked podcast. Follow him on X: @FraserMyers.