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Protesters storm Swedish embassy in Baghdad, set it on fire over planned Koran burning
(www.france24.com)
this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2023
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The burning is in Sweden, not Iraq. These poor people only know about it because they're informed and agitated by religious leaders profiting from this violence. Mobs in Iraq cannot and should not determine the law in Sweden, I think we can all agree on that.
Muslims in Sweden probably don't love this move either.
Should Swedes also support demonstrations, where Muslim Swedes burn Bibles, Torahs, LGBTIQ+ flags etc, as long as they cite "freedom of speech" and or wanting to do a "social experiment" as their primary motivation?
It's not about supporting. Swedish officials have been condemning these acts. It's about allowing it or not and if not, on which basis? Geopolitics is not the rule of the land... and shouldn't be. People manipulating mobs against Sweden know all this and still do it, they're the ones at fault here.
I'm not saying that this demonstration should be banned, because people in Iraq got aggressive.
I'm saying that this demonstration should be banned, because this demonstration goes against modern Swedish values and laws. Being openly hostile towards certain religious minorities and ethnicities is not something Swedish authorities should protect.
Burning a Quran is a message of hate towards Muslims, that's simply it.
Sorry, but if we're going to be that strict about hate speech then we also must ban the quran itself, where racial violence, ethnic hate and slavery are promoted and justified. If we allow the quran we must allow people to hate the quran as well.
Swedish law guarantees freedom of religion. You can criticise the Quran, you can hate it, you can promote alternative humanist interpretations of the Quran, but the Quran itself will always be the symbolic representation of Muslims. This is simply reality.
Every ancient religious text has passages that did not age well, that is still not a reason to spread hate tho.
I know enough about the religious texts to know that's a huge simplification. And while the old testament does have horrible things in it, the quran goes far beyond. This is something we should be able to discuss freely.
Arguing which religious scripture is worse is a useless excercise imo.
I don't argue against criticism of the Quran. Even in Iraq, there are many people, that publicly do this.
Burning the Quran is not a critique and is not an invitation of a civil discussion. It is a declaration of extreme hate. Assuming anything different is just being overly charitable to a bunch of literal neo-Nazis.
And assuming that the sensitivies of people burning embassies should be accounted for is being overly charitable to a bunch of literal religious-nazis. These are 2 very different degrees of violence. It's not the same burning a book and burning an embassy (luckily no one died, but not that the mob cared).
These Iraqis are not Swedish citizens. The book burning is happening in Sweden. I don't agree with the violent response by these hooligans in Iraq and they should be held responsible. There is no rule of law in Iraq, so no idea how Iraqi authorities will respond.
But the book burning should not have happened in the first place, not because of the reaction in Iraq, but because it is not something a civilised society should condone.
I will not comment on this any further. These are my thoughts on this topic.
I didn't intend to reply but turns out that an important piece of information has been very discreetly mentioned by the press:
How does person A burning a book influence person B's freedom to exercise a religion exactly? Your religion binds you, not everybody else.
Every single religious person in the world needs to come to terms with the fact that the majority of other people in the world does not believe their religion to be true and does not believe their holy book to be holy. That's part of living in a connected world.