Hamit Coskun is a 50-year-old man who was born in Turkey and served time in a Turkish prison for crimes he claims he did not commit. In England, he was sentenced for another supposed crime: saying mean things and disliking people.
On June 2, Judge John McGarva sentenced and fined Coskun £240 with a statutory surcharge of £96 (roughly $450 USD in total) for setting fire to a Koran outside the Turkish consulate in London while yelling profanity-laden condemnations of Islam like “f*** Islam” and “Islam is [the] religion of terrorism.” Coskun insisted that the demonstration signified opposition to Islam, not Muslims themselves, as well as the current Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, whom Coskun sees as steering the country toward sharia law. Judge McGarva stated that “the burning of the Quran was carried out in a very visible way,” and he ultimately found Coskun guilty of a religiously motivated public order offense under the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 and the Public Order Act 1986.
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