Hello and welcome to the Spike podcast. I'm Fraser Myers. Back with me in the studio as ever we have Spike's editor, Tom Slater.

Hello.

And joining us down the line from Brussels from the Academy of Ideas, it's Jacob Reynolds.

Thanks for me.

We've got loads to talk about today. We'll be discussing the creep of Islamic blasphemy laws into Europe, the betrayal of Ukraine and the release of the

Israeli hostages. Tom, before we get on to that, do you want to tell us a bit about Spike's 25th

anniversary? Yes, so we're celebrating our 25th birthday at the moment, and to celebrate,

we are pushing our donation drive, our anniversary donation drive,

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So if you want to donate to us to make sure we're around for at least another 25 years, do go to spiked hyphenonline.com forward slash donate.

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Help us celebrate.

So are we seeing the creeping spread of Islamic blasphemy laws to Europe and to the UK.

I mean, there's been two cases recently where people have been charged in Britain for burning the Quran, particularly gruesome case recently in London, where someone was actually stabbed at for doing this.

And the victim was also arrested along with the

person allegedly doing the stabbing. Tom, can you unpack this for us? This is really alarming.

I mean, in the space of a couple of weeks, we've seen two arrests, in one case of full-blown

prosecution for the burning of a Quran. There was the case in London, as you've already described, which was outside the Turkish consulate, suggesting that it may have been a kind of political stance as much as anything else. The other one was in Manchester, where a gentleman took to the streets and began burning a Quran whilst live streaming, I believe. And he's actually already pleaded guilty to racial and religiously motivated public order

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