Over in Sweden, a storm has been brewing over the public burnings of the Koran and the Torah.
Sweden is once again caught in the political crosshairs over its decision to greenlight burnings of the Quran and Torah in Stockholm. Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson said this week that far-right figures have filed more requests for Quran-burning protests with the police, and he is “extremely worried” about what could happen as a result.
Sweden, as well as neighboring Denmark, have allowed the protests to take place in recent months, sparking criticism, counterprotests, and diplomatic blowback from several majority-Muslim nations. We’ve curated reporting and insights about the latest developments.
The reason the protests have been allowed to proceed: Sweden “has one of the world’s strongest legal protections for freedom of expression” and cannot ban protests unless they are a threat to public safety, Marten Schultz, law professor at Stockholm University, told the BBC. Experts determined that the burnings targeted a text instead of individuals. The freedom of speech right dates back to 1766 and is seen as a “fundamental value” in Swedish culture, Schultz said.
Swedish officials have condemned the Quran burnings, and said this week that the country is the target of a disinformation campaign led by “Russia-backed actors” trying to imply that Sweden is behind the protests. Sweden’s national security service said the incidents have changed the world’s view of Sweden, “from a tolerant country to a country hostile to Islam and Muslims.” — The Guardian
Sweden also recently approved a request for a 50-year-old woman to burn a copy of the Torah, the sacred Jewish text, outside the Israeli embassy in Stockholm. Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen said he warned his Swedish counterpart that the demonstration could worsen the two countries’ relationship. Jewish community leaders in Israel said the burning shouldn’t qualify for freedom of expression protections. — The Times of Israel
One wonders if there is going to be an escalation of this, with the sacred texts of many religions going up in smoke as each side retaliates..
I am not a fan of burning any book, religious or otherwise, but would not be up in arms over it. since such gestures are usually futile and have only a transient effect. But for some religious people, defense of their texts is seen as a duty that can only be satisfied with violence.
I always wonder why such people do not leave it up to their gods to take appropriate retaliatory action. If the gods are deeply offended by the burning of the books they supposedly gave to their followers, surely they would not just stand by hoping that some of their worshippers would rise up on their behalf. The fact that they never do anything seems to me that they do not care either.
Or maybe they do not exist.
Gods have notoriously poor aim when retaliating. The next earthquake, cyclone, volcanic eruption or this that or the other might be identified as the divine reprisal, almost no matter where in the world it occurs. Take that, Haiti!
For my part, I am wondering why the person even needs permission from the government to burn a book, in front of an embassy or not. So long as it is clear that there is no attempt to cause other damage by the burning, I’m not sure where the law steps in. Perhaps setting things on fire is considered a public health risk? Very understandable if the burning was taking place in an Australian summer, but I doubt northern Europe has quite the same risk.
If you burn a book, you have to buy it first. Seems counterproductive.
Who owns the books? (a) The people burning them, or (b) are they someone else’s property?
Are they (a) mass produced books you can buy anywhere, or (b) irreplaceable and 200 years old?
If the answer is (a) to both questions, it’s nobody’s business what someone does with them.
A local paper over here published an opinion piece that suggested banning *all* book burnings. I can understand why. Reading the relevant Wikipedia article is pretty depressing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_burning
I just learned a new word: biblioclasm.
Lassi Hippeläinen @4
Thanks. I learned another word, too. Libricide.
Is this about burning printed texts or hand-written scrolls? The latter are works of art. Burning an item with strong symbolic value to a group is often perceived as a stand in for violence towards members of said group, especially when there is a history where such burnings were in fact a prelude to physical persecution of that group.
Yep, @6 anat has the only reasonable objection: often you start burning books, then the burning of people begins. And those “protests” are staged by hard-right swivel-eyed idiots, whose ideologies have previous form in people-burning. For that reason this is not good.
Also, there’s lots of believers who are not fanatics or zealots in any way but could be genuinely upset by this rude, useless mockery of free speech. Why offend people this way, it does not make much sense. But to those fascist pricks it does, of course.
Any other objection well… if the gods are so powerful, they won’t mind some unbelievers messing around. But the thing about gods is, they tend to behave like pissy little prats don’t they, godliness notwithstanding.
This is a case of “copycats”, people who wants attention
It started with far-right nonentity Rasmus Paludan and when he made it into the news others followed. Very few of them have genuine concerns about the conditions in islamic countries.
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The muslims in my home town Umeå denied Paludan the reaction he craved. When he pulled out a koran he intended to burn, they demonstratively turned their backs on him and walked away.
I suggest ridiculing the practice of book burning until it is no longer ‘cool’.
Old copies of Readers Digest are so goddamn boring they deserve burning, preferably on April 1st.
“Finnegan’s Wake ” introduced “stream of consciousness”, the process by which Trump and Boris Johnson randomly arrived to policy decisions. We should obviously stand outside the Irish embassy and burn MAGA stuff on April 1st.
And people who take “tradition” seriously should burn a wicker man, not some goddamn books. Wicker librarians?
Zeus, I miss Ed Brayton. The commentariat at his blog were world champions of sarcasm, they would have come up with much better ways to ridicule book burnings than I can.
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-march to Washington state to demonstrate outside the department of education, burning math books because of the unpatriotic arabic numerals?
-burn books containing violence and rape, like the Bible? (It features darkies from the levant, need I say more?)
-Pretty much all 18-century English literature that was force-fed to us unwilling students. This has nothing to do with religion, it just rubs me the wrong way.
I think people who act like the reaction is simply an irrational reaction to violation of Muslim religious or cultural taboos are ignoring the obvious.
These acts are hate speech, pure and simple. There is a lot of contempt for Islam and Muslims in Europe, just like in the US, plus simple racism against anyone who looks like they might be from a muslim country, and I’m sure that’s true in Scandinavia just like everywhere else. These acts simply make blatant the hatred that anyone who looks middle-eastern is confronted with on a daily basis.
It reminds me of the “Muhammad cartoons” controversy from about 20 years ago. I looked at the cartoons, and a lot were blatant hate speech, which was ignored in vocal defense of the principle of “free speech,” and local muslims who criticized them were portrayed as being sympathetic to Islamic terrorists.
There’s also the long history of European colonialist domination of the Middle East and other Muslim-majority areas (which has not ended, BTW), and it would be hard for someone from those areas not to see this as a symbolic continuation of that domination. The local politicians are of couse exploiting this (as they do in every country), but it wouldn’t have the traction that it has if the people there weren’t repeatedly experiencing European interference and exploitation. The European right-wingers are of course delighted in the reaction in those countries, because they can then claim, “see, they’re all barbarian fanatics who are trying to destroy our democracy and our civilization.”
I suspect that there would be a lot less tolerance of the public burning of (Christian) Bibles. For that matter, I recall how Sinead O’Conner’s career was derailed when she simply tore up a picture of the Pope. The right-wingers are doing this as a dog-whistle to the racists in the country and in Europe overall.
birgerjohansson @10:
Swift, Defoe, Pope, Johnson, Fielding, Gray, etc?
Here’s a thought: burn all Swedish literature first. Well, maybe except Strindberg. The world would hardly notice.
Just joking!
Allison has it right: “These acts are hate speech, pure and simple.”
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There was speculation about (and motive for!) Russia, say, giving money and support for people who would do that, since Turkey is now functionally Islamic and Mustafa Ataturk’s vision of a secular country is now deprecated.
(Though it’s still ostensibly secular)
#11 Allison
A person could easily burn more books alongside the Koran, such as a Bible and Veda. This more clearly makes the point that religious sensibilities in general are not law, without singling any particular group out (though it is still wasteful).
In looking up the Muhammad cartoons, did you note also some were added by the Muslims themselves in order to drum up additional anger?
Holms, you’re entirely missing the point.
The sentiment is simple: “We hate you, we know doing this will upset you, so we will do this”.
(Religious sensibilities? Try dissing a typical teenager’s mother and see how they react. Try putting up a poster of Adolf Hitler in the local workplace and see how religious the reaction is)
Hate? That’s your estimation of the motive behind the burning. It may be right in some cases, and wrong in others. Another motive might be to make the point that religious feelings are not special.
Religious feelings are feelings, Holms.
No feelings are any more special than any others; same category.
(Swastikas evoke feelings too, right?)
Criticising Islam is a bit more complex since it is the intersection of religion and relatively recent immigrants.
One subset of koran burners are xenophobes, pure and simple.
But one subset of muslim leaders are claiming *all* criticism of their religion is racism.
And the strong reactions in some muslim countries are distractions from domestic issues.
BTW the first one to burn korans was caliph Uthman, destroying versions that he felt did not fit his agenda.
And early islam was big on burning entire libraries, a habit they might have caught from christians.
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Rob Grigjanis @ 12
A big amount of our literary canon was written before authors figured out how to get it right, so, yes. 😊
The books ghostwritten for various American candidates (DeSantis is the most recent example) can stay, as they are good for treating insomnia.
About respect for scriptures.
The University of Cairo decided to standardise on the version of the koran written down by Hafs.
This was as recent as 1924, and it became the most common current variant.
How did they deal with the 30-odd other koran variants? These respectful muslims threw them in the Nile.
Who the fuck cares, it’s just a book.
The people rioting over it are the problem.
#17 John
Some feelings are accorded special status depending on their provenance, with feelings originating from religious belief being an obvious example. It’s the specialness that needs to be poked.
Holms, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Quran_desecration_in_Sweden
If that’s supposed to demonstrate how religious feelings are special, it instead demonstrates how book-burners’ feelings about religious people’s feelings are supposed to be special. Notably, were it supposed to actually be about religious feelings, why no Babble burnt?
(Can you really not see that?)
Your criticism is that the burners aren’t burning a wide enough range of book, but this is not relevant to the question of whether there is an inherent problem with burning a copy of a religious text. I have already stated that I would be fine with the same happening to any other holy book, provided it is done safely, with my only real criticism being that it is wasteful. When talking about whether something is a breach of freedom of speech rights, the fact that anger arises from religious loyalty to the book should hold no special weight. Restricting behaviour via law needs justification beyond someone’s feelings being religious in nature.
Holms, it’s interesting how you try to justify the action.
What? No, the specific book burnt is not the thing, it’s the sentiment behind the performance. It’s about the feelings expressed about the feelings others have about the book. It’s about provocation.
Mmmhmm.
“Salwan Momika is a 37-year-old Aramean man who moved to Sweden in 2018 after having fled Iraq as a refugee. Of Christian heritage, he now identifies as an atheist and has called for a ban on the Quran in Sweden.[3] On 28 June, he appeared behind a line of police officers outside the Stockholm Mosque, holding two Swedish flags while the Du gamla, du fria, the de facto national anthem of Sweden, played over loudspeakers. He tore apart the Quran and set it on fire, while also placing a strip of bacon on it. One protester attempted to throw something at him and was arrested.[4] The event occurred during Eid al-Adha, a major holiday in Islam.[5]”
(From my link above)
Not that much point putting a strip of bacon on a Babble, is there?
Where ‘the book’ is a metonym for ‘Islam’.
You’re going into the weeds.
Issue at hand is that I concur with Allison about it being hate speech and that you imagined it was about pointing out how special religious feelings are.
No hate there, no siree! Heaven forfend!
Now, that’s your opinion, fine. But it’s bloody obvious to others what it is about, no less obvious than painting swastikas on a synagogue. An expression of hate.
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Anyway. Geopolitics. NATO. Turkey. Sweden. Russia.
(Hybrid war; information space)
Something I have specifically not done. I have found banning the act to be unjustified, which is not the same thing as justifying the act.
Holms,
Hm, technically true.
Still: “That’s your estimation of the motive behind the burning. It may be right in some cases, and wrong in others. Another motive might be to make the point that religious feelings are not special.”
and
“It’s the specialness that needs to be poked.”
Sometimes it’s the right motive, sometimes it’s the wrong motive, and other times it’s the other motive.
But you’re dancing about the issue: is this just political action to show how religious feelings are not special, or is it a form of hate speech?
Presumably you think it’s the right motive when it’s about poking specialness, maybe not-so-much when it’s about hating on them.
(Alas, not mutually exclusive, are those motivations)
@Allison, 11:
The truth is rarely pure, and never simple.
What I think you may be seeing here is an example of https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NWordPrivileges . If some white-as-the-ace-of-Tippex Swedish skinhead with swastika tattoos had rocked up outside a mosque and done this, yes -- hate speech. But as a white person I have to at least entertain the possibility that in this case there’s something more complicated and potentially justifiable going on, and that weighing in on it with the blunt instrument of a pronouncement of “hate speech” is racist and arrogant.
I do love these little elisions when quoting.
PS
Special rules for white people, right?
Way to not to be racist!
(But sure — white man’s burden and all that guff)
I have been focusing specifically on the act rather than the sentiment behind it as I don’t think that is as important. A person can either do X or they can’t; the things a person is thinking of while doing it should not bear on the matter. Consider, a person punches another in the face. Does it matter that the person did so out of hatred for the religion of the other? No, the act is forbidden regardless. Or consider a person saying “I hate you” to another. An explicit statement of hatred! And yet it is legal, despite that clarity of motive.
Hatred of whatever might come into sentencing, but the act must be considered a crime in the first place to even get to that. If it were otherwise -- if personal sentiment mattered in weighing whether something is permitted or not -- then boundaries become a lot less clear.
Hate speech is an act. Hate speech laws apply to actions.
The act under discussion is burning a book.
“According to the Committee of Ministers, hate speech is understood as all types of expression that incite, promote, spread or justify violence, hatred or discrimination against a person or group of persons, or that denigrates them, by reason of their real or attributed personal characteristics or status such as “race”, …”
(https://www.coe.int/en/web/freedom-expression/hate-speech)
Sweden is a member of Council of Europe, book-burning is type of expression.
And my position is that the basic act itself should first be a crime before intent is considered as a factor making it a hate crime.
This was supposed to be about poking religion, not about hate speech. Right?
But sure, your position is that something is a hate crime if and only if it is a crime, much as if the hate aspect were about intent rather than about effect.
Thing is, different jurisdictions, different criminal criteria.
Point is Allison wrote “These acts are hate speech, pure and simple.”
Notice? “acts”, not “motives”.
I concur with that determination.
Doesn’t mean they’re not political acts, though, but they’re sure pretty specific about which religion is being targeted.
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Anyway. I think Mano’s OP focuses on the religious aspect, but that Allison pointed out another aspect.
Consider this claim from the OP, my emphasis:
“The reason the protests have been allowed to proceed: Sweden “has one of the world’s strongest legal protections for freedom of expression” and cannot ban protests unless they are a threat to public safety, Marten Schultz, law professor at Stockholm University, told the BBC. Experts determined that the burnings targeted a text instead of individuals.”
Lots of room in that little clause for politicians to do their political thing.
I was laying out my position, not stating this to be law. Allison by contrast made the sweeping declaration.
Well, Holms, here’s your initial position:
“For my part, I am wondering why the person even needs permission from the government to burn a book, in front of an embassy or not. So long as it is clear that there is no attempt to cause other damage by the burning, I’m not sure where the law steps in.”
Are you still wondering?
PS https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/28/turkey-rebuke-of-quran-burning-poses-risk-to-sweden-nato-application
I am, Allison’s case was not strong and you added little to it.
All very mysterious for you, Holms. I get it.
You need to understand that arguments can be understood yet rejected.
“I am wondering why the person even needs permission” and “I’m not sure where the law steps in” are hardly a rejection, rather they are expressions of lack of understanding.
That you imagine your uncertain wondering about something is a rejection of that something is informative.
I expressed the absence of a good reason to need legal permission, phrased to invite discussion. You can claim uncertainty if you like, but I can correct you as to my own mind.
It’s the law in Sweden.
https://polisen.se/en/the-swedish-police/demonstrations—questions-and-answers/
“Is a demonstration permit necessary?
Yes, as a general rule, a permit is necessary for a demonstration in a public place. For other places that are located in land-use zones, notification must be provided.
When processing the permit, the Police can facilitate the demonstration by agreeing on rules and setting the time and place of the event. This helps to reduce the risk of public disturbances or the risk of the demonstration clashing with other demonstrations or events.”
PS
“You can claim uncertainty if you like”
Me: “Are you still wondering?”
You: “I am”
Wondering is a form of uncertainty.
It’s also the law in Sweden that burning a book is permitted speech, yet the person asked for permission. Remember the OP? Though perhaps he was just checking out of prudence.
And ‘wondering’ is also an expression of curiosity; good reasons have yet to be supplied. And when we disagree about my thoughts, you are of course wrong.
Because it was a demonstration in a public place.
I quote yet again:
“On 28 June, he appeared behind a line of police officers outside the Stockholm Mosque, holding two Swedish flags while the Du gamla, du fria, the de facto national anthem of Sweden, played over loudspeakers. He tore apart the Quran and set it on fire, while also placing a strip of bacon on it. One protester attempted to throw something at him and was arrested.”
I think having a line of police officers in front of you to protect you from counter-protesters is not a bad reason to get permission. 🙂
In the news:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/aug/06/russia-spreading-false-claims-about-quran-burnings-to-harm-nato-bid-says-sweden
It was a single person doing a thing known to be permitted in a public space. And note the referred-to request for permission in the OP was to burn a Torah in front of the Israeli Embassy, not a Quran in front of a mosque.
Good to see you have dropped the attempt to tell me my own thoughts though.
In the news: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/aug/17/sweden-raises-terrorist-threat-level-after-quran-burnings