Freedom of speech must include the freedom to ridicule Islam.
SIKED April 23, 2022: Right now, in Europe, mobs of people are rioting. They’re hurling rocks and stones at police officers and setting fire to cars. Several cities have been shaken to their core by this riotous fury. A police chief says they are the most violent street disturbances he has ever known. Worse, this is an entirely regressive riot.
It is not an angry uprising for democracy or liberty, but its polar opposite – it’s a screech of religious rage against the expression of certain ‘blasphemous’ ideas; it’s a fiery effort to suppress ‘offensive’ speech. Some of the worst riots in a country’s living memory, all to the end of defending archaic religious beliefs from challenge or criticism… why aren’t we talking about this?
This is happening in Sweden. It’s been happening for four days now. On Friday there were riots in the city of Orebro. The violence spread to the city of Norrkoping, which is around a hundred miles south-west of Stockholm, and to Linkoping. Then there was street violence in an actual Stockholm suburb: Rinkeby. On Saturday violence rocked the southern city of Malmo.
In some cities the violence continued on Sunday and Monday. Scores of police officers have been injured and dozens of rioters arrested. According to the BBC, Sweden’s national police chief, Anders Thornberg, says he has ‘never seen such violent riots’. He says the rioters ‘tried to kill police officers’.
The spark for all this? Blasphemy. Specifically, blasphemy carried out by a far-right Danish-Swedish politician by the name of Rasmus Paludan. Mr Paludan leads an anti-immigration, anti-Islam outfit called Stram Kurs (Hard Line).
He has a penchant for burning copies of the Koran. And he’s been doing it in Sweden in recent days, travelling from city to city to take part in anti-Islam rallies that involve desecrating copies of Islam’s holy book.
The rioting has tended to follow this weird Koran-burning tour by an undoubtedly bigoted politician. For example, Paludan burnt a Koran in Malmo on Saturday and violence erupted soon after. There was vast destruction, including the burning of a school. You burn our holy book, we burn your schools – is that it?