Ben Lowry: Free speech advocates hold an important summit in Belfast amid attacks on open expression

(Read Ben Lowry on on the DUP edging back towards Stormont )

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​The pastor of Whitewell Metropolitan Tabernacle was put on trial accused of making 'grossly offensive' comments about Muslims in sermon.

I covered the court hearings, which happened in late 2015 and early 2016, and I watched the full video of Pastor McConnell’s 2014 controversial sermon, in which he described Islam as “satanic”.

The reason that I say Pastor McConnell struck a blow for free speech is that he could have avoided a trial by accepting the Public Prosecution Service offer of an informed warning. He was right, albeit brave, to reject such an offer because it would have suggested that his words had reached the criminal threshold (Pastor McConnell was charged under the Communications Act 2003).

As it happens I think that Pastor McConnell’s comments in that 2014 sermon were “silly”, as an atheist group would describe them when later defending his right to preach freely.

Pastor McConnell also had support in court from a Muslim scholar Dr Muhammad Al-Hussaini, who said that he felt “love and concern” for the pastor when he was being grilled in the trial, and a Catholic priest, and Father Patrick McCafferty, who said that it was “shameful” to see him in the witness box.

A lot of us who were in court felt similarly as we watched the elderly pastor floundering in the dock, confused and contradictory as to what he had meant in the original sermon.

The trial was quite bad enough, but the context made it even worse.

The man who reported Pastor McConnell was Dr Raied Al-Wazzan, an immigrant to Northern Ireland who is prominent in the Muslim community. In 2015, he told BBC Radio Ulster: “Look at what’s happened in Mosul now – it was attacked for the last 11 years, people were murdered just because they had the wrong name and were persecuted for a long time”.

Dr Al-Wazzan added: “Since the Islamic State took over, it has become the most peaceful city in the world.”

Islamic State, or Isis, were the mass murderers who, among countless atrocities in Europe and the Middle East, massacred almost 100 young people at a rock concert in the Bataclan theatre in Paris. In territories which they have controlled an Isis specialty is cutting off people’s heads slowly, with knives.

They are one of the most evil movements in modern history.

While Dr Al-Wazzan subsequently contacted the BBC to say that he did not support Islamic State and condemned all forms of violence, his comments were utterly contemptible. In fact, if you substituted the words Hitler for Islamic State and Warsaw for Mosul, and praised the peace brought about by the Nazis in that Polish city you would have a good chance of having your collar felt.

Instead, Dr Al-Wazzan’s vile remarks met little challenge outside this newspaper. His role in the saga that led to Pastor McConnell being put in the dock likewise.

There was a wonderful moment in the McConnell trial when the court burst into laughter when it was recounted that Martin McGuinness had called for Pastor McConnell to be investigated for hate speech. The audience could see at once the absurdity of a man who knew a thing or two about hate acts, up to an including murder, not just mere speech – hate crimes for which he never faced trial – getting on his high horse about an ill-advised sermon.

I recap on all this because the Free Speech Union held a ‘summit’ in Belfast last night that I was able to attend only briefly, because I was trying to get this newspaper to print. Owen Polley will write a report on it in Monday’s paper.

The union describes itself as a non-partisan body that stands up for speech rights. The speakers were Stella O’Malley, a psychotherapist and writer, David Quinn, an Irish columnist and Catholic advocate, Jeffrey Dudgeon, the gay rights activist and ex Ulster Unionist councillor, Ella Whelan, a journalist, and the solicitor Simon Chambers, who has worked on legal cases including people being refused service in a bar for holding gender critical views.

Mr Young said the attack on free speech was a worldwide phenomenon, often via emerging hate speech laws.

This is an important topic which the News Letter, which has been helping to advance free speech for almost 300 years as the world’s oldest English language daily, will continue to cover closely.

• Ben Lowry (@BenLowry2) is News Letter editor