It’s a story that one might expect to come out of Tehran or Lahore. Instead, it comes from Lyon, France. The French-language CNews reported that “a man was sentenced this Wednesday by the Lyon Criminal Court to one year in prison for burning a Quran in front of a mosque in Villeurbanne (Rhône) last June.”
This had been a long time in the offing, and now it’s happening with increasing frequency. For years, Western governments refrained from crossing the line and levying criminal charges against someone for violating Islamic blasphemy laws. Then in Britain in June, a Turkish dissident, Hamit Coskun, was fined for burning a Qur’an. And now this.
