Summary
A Stockholm court convicted Salwan Najem of incitement against an ethnic group for his role in Qur’an burnings in 2023, sentencing him to a fine and suspended sentence.
His co-defendant, Salwan Momika, was shot dead last week, sparking concerns of foreign involvement.
The protests strained Sweden’s relations with Muslim countries and fueled debate over free speech limits.
The government had considered banning Qur’an burnings but is no longer planning immediate action. Sweden joined NATO in March 2024, partly fearing diplomatic fallout over the burnings could affect its bid.
The best response to a quran burning free speech troll is to copy their free speech, burn a bible etc. who cares? It’s all nonsense anyways, and people need to get over it. There’s no need for violence or bloodshed
The US has a lot of beliefs about free speech that have been shown by actual history to not be accurate.
The US has an extremely broad definition of free speech. Even hate speech is legal. In fact, you can actually openly run for high office on an explicit campaign of literal genocide. You could run for president openly promising as a campaign platform that you are going to open up death camps and kill millions of people. US free speech laws are so broad that unless you are threatening to commit an act of violence outside of the state apparatus, you are completely free to do so.
The theory behind this is always some hand wringing about, “well, if we ban hate speech, who is to define what hate speech is?” Yet, history has shown that this is a slippery slope fallacy. Plenty of advanced democracies, (the US is a primitive democracy), have shown that these fears are unfounded. The same hand wringing that applies to restrictions on hate speech could be applied to any number of crimes we already outlaw. You could equally lament that we can’t possibly fairly define fraud, false advertising, harassment, or any number of crimes that involve a speech component.
The correct response to Koran burning is not simply to burn Bibles, because the Nazis burning Korans clearly know that you’re just trolling them. They’re doing it as an actual attempt at hate and intimidation; you are just doing it for the luls. No one is going to seriously fear that you’re going to start rounding up and putting Christians in camps. But burning Korans is intended to send just that message.
Is it possible that Nazis, if they get power, will wield anti hate speech laws against their adversaries? Sure. But they don’t need anti hate speech laws to do that. Our current Nazi president is already gaining control of the media. For those outlets and platforms he and his allies don’t own outright, he’s getting numerous press outfits to settle spurious lawsuits with no legal basis behind them. Trump, our Nazi president, is already restricting free speech. He didn’t need anti-hate speech laws to do so. Because ultimately Nazis do not care about laws. They’ll simply use threats, intimidation, and blatantly corrupt courts to enact their will regardless of law.
Anti-hate speech laws do not give Nazis any abilities they wouldn’t already possess once in power. Anti-hate speech laws can however greatly assist in preventing Nazis from gaining power in the first place. There is a reason the German constitution, a constitution written by Americans themselves, has anti-hate speech provisions within it.