Press spokesman for the Swedish police Ola Osterling was quoted by local media as saying that “Sweden’s constitutional laws give strong protection and you need to judge that the value of being able to demonstrate and freedom of expression is extremely important”, while Foreign Minister Tobias Billstrom said that it would be “extremely improper” of him to stop people from burning the Quran. These official statements confirm that Islamophobic hate speech is integral to Western values.
Sweden is regarded by most Westerners as perfectly embodying the putatively “democratic” and “humanitarian” values proselytized across the world by the US-led West’s Golden Billion, yet officials from that Nordic country just discredited this de facto New Cold War bloc’s entire soft power. They disgustingly defended burning the Quran as an integral expression of free speech, declaring that they’ll stand by as an infamous Islamophobe does precisely that outside the Turkish Embassy on Saturday.
Press spokesman for the Swedish police Ola Osterling was quoted by local media as saying that “Sweden’s constitutional laws give strong protection and you need to judge that the value of being able to demonstrate and freedom of expression is extremely important”, while Foreign Minister Tobias Billstrom said that it would be “extremely improper” of him to stop people from burning the Quran. These official statements confirm that Islamophobic hate speech is integral to Western values.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, by contrast, is completely against this twisted post-modern manipulation of “free speech”. Here’s what he said during a press conference in December 2021: “But why offend the Prophet Muhammad? Is this an act of artistic freedom? I do not think so. This is a violation of the freedom of worship, which offends the rights of the people who practice Islam, which leads to other, even more radical and extremist manifestations.”
The contrast between Russia’s stance towards those who publicly disrespect Islam and Sweden’s exposes the fallacy of the West’s putatively “democratic” and “humanitarian” values. The first-mentioned rightly regards all such acts without exception as Islamophobic hate speech and prosecutes anyone who dares to offend Muslims in such provocative ways while the second disgustingly defends these actions and actually believes that it would be “extremely improper” for anyone to stop them.
It's therefore not without reason that majority-Muslim societies across the world view their Western counterparts with suspicion, at the very least and to put it mildly, while embracing Russia despite unprecedented pressure from the US to distance themselves from it. Not a single one of them joined the Golden Billion’s anti-Russian sanctions regime, and a few like Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkiye, and the UAE are so close to Moscow nowadays that they function as the pillars of its “Ummah Pivot”.
No sincere Muslim could ever support a society that praises the burning of the Quran as an integral expression of their so-called “values”, the same as no sincere Jew for instance could ever support the burning of the Torah. In fact, it’s unthinkable to imagine that any official in Sweden or any Western society for that matter would declare that it’s “extremely improper” to anyone to stop the burning of that Jewish Holy Book, yet they proudly say so about the Quran since they’re all deeply Islamophobic.
The takeaway is that the Golden Billion only protects the human rights of certain groups while others like Muslims’ are systemically violated with impunity as the latest scandal in Sweden shows. No decent person should ever defend those who burn the Quran or any religious book for that matter, let alone attack those who are against it for their so-called “extremely improper” behavior in condemning this hate speech. The West is Islamophobic to the core, hence why many Muslims rightly detest it.
It would also be interesting to see how the "defenders of free speech" would react if I was waving a Russian flag in front of the Ukrainian embassy in Stockholm, cursing Zelensky. I can't see Billstrom rushing to my defense when the cops dragged me away.
We need freedom from religion. Not freedom of religion.