Third Quran Burned Outside Swedish Parliament, Who’s To Act?

By Staff, Agencies

In a new attack against the Muslim sanctities, some migrants staged another Quran burning in Stockholm on Monday, kicking and stomping on the Muslim holy book before setting some torn-out pages on fire outside the Swedish parliament building.

“I will continue until they ban this book,” Salwan Momika, a Christian refugee who sought political asylum in Sweden in 2018, told Swedish broadcaster SVT.

It was the third Quran burning carried out by Momika and his partner Salwan Najem, both of whom are currently under investigation for hate speech by Swedish authorities. They previously burned the Quran on the Muslim holiday of Eid outside Stockholm’s Grand Mosque. Momika also stomped on the Quran and wiped his shoes with the Iraqi flag outside the Iraqi embassy in Stockholm earlier this month.

The international fallout from the protests has been swift – Iraq cut diplomatic ties with Sweden, multiple Muslim-majority nations have summoned their Swedish ambassadors to complain, and counter-protesters have swarmed Sweden’s embassy in Baghdad twice. Iran’s Supreme Leader His Eminence Imam Sayyed Ali Khamenei warned Stockholm that “those who have insulted the Holy Quran deserve the severest punishment.”

Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson told Swedish news outlet TT last week that the Security Service had information that Sweden was now a target for "terrorism". “We are in the most serious security policy situation since the Second World War,” he warned in an Instagram post on Sunday.

The PM said he was “deeply concerned” that permit applications for further Quran-desecrating protests were flooding in to police headquarters.

A planned burning of the Torah in front of the “Israeli” embassy in Stockholm did not go ahead on Friday after “Israel’s” foreign minister warned his Swedish counterpart it would harm relations between the two sides.

Denmark’s foreign minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen revealed on Sunday that Copenhagen was working on outlawing Quran desecration – or defiling any religion’s holy book – in front of foreign embassies, saying the government was determined to find a solution that did not also curtail freedom of expression.