Brain fart...?

Editorializing on a recent story about how three foreign workers in Dubai were detained and fined $136,000 each for the "crime" of insulting Islam, Robert Spencer wrote:

A glimpse into the future of the West. Right now, insulting Islam will only get you deplatformed, vilified, and suspended from your job. Fines and detention are still in the future.

Huh?  No , Spencer is clearly incorrect about this.  Fines and detention are not "still in the future" -- they've already happened in the past.  I can think of three examples off the top of my head:

Elisabeth Sabbaditsch-Wolffe in Austria

Paul Weston in the UK

and

Brigitte Bardot in France.

In Elisabeth Sabbaditsch-Wolffe's case, she has in fact been fined -- for the "crime" of insulting Islam's Prophet Muhammad.  So Spencer is just flat wrong.  And she has had to spend years trying to appeal her case; only to learn recently the cruel fact that the Austrian state -- her own Western, supposedly liberal democratic country -- insists on punishing her with the fine anyway.

Then we have the case of Paul Weston.  I wrote about it back in 2016 on my old blog, The Hesperado, where I noted that:

...he was arrested for speaking the words of Winston Churchill [against Islam] in England -- more specifically, with a megaphone on the steps in front of Winchester Guildhall in Winchester, a borough a little less than 70 miles southwest of London. Initially, his thought crime (amplified by megaphone) was "racially aggravated crime under section 4 of the Public Order act" (the charge was later dropped and by bail he was set free...).

Again: Spencer is just flat wrong.

And last (but no doubt there have been many, many more cases like these throughout the West), we have the former sexpot of the 60s, Brigitte Bardot, who had realized what, unfortunately, not enough of her fellow Frenchmen do -- namely, that her love of France entails a rational hatred of all things Islamic.  And for the "crime" of expressing this in a book she wrote, she has been fined by her own country of France.  Robert Spencer's Jihad Watch has had numerous postings about Bardot over the years, including one in 2004 with this headline:

Brigitte Bardot fined for inciting racial hatred 

[bold emphasis added by me]

Yet again: Spencer is just flat wrong when just the other day he wrote (as we noted at the beginning):

Right now, insulting Islam will only get you deplatformed, vilified, and suspended from your job. Fines and detention are still in the future.

Spencer knows about the cases of all three, and likely has personally spoken with (and shared podiums with) the first two over the years. So why would he slip up so egregiously?