Sweden, the Koran will be burned outside a mosque with the ok of the police

The Swedish police have authorized the request for a demonstration “on the Koran” for this afternoon in front of the main mosque in Stockholm, packed with faithful on the occasion of the beginning of the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha, because “the security risks” associated with burning of the Koran “are not of such a nature” for “a refusal”, reads the decision of the authorities. And all this just a few days before the NATO summit in Vilnius on 11 and 12 July, where Sweden’s entry into NATO, blocked by the veto of Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, is one of the issues on the table.
The request for the meeting in the Medborgarplatsen comes from a thirty-year-old man from Järna who, to motivate his choice, writes: “I want to express my opinion on the book of the Koran, I will tear up the Koran and burn it”, reports the Swedish l’Expressen. According to Swedish state television SVT, there is a fire ban in the area so it is not clear whether a Koran will actually be burned on Södermalm, as happened in similar demonstrations in the past. Certainly the intention is threatening and the authorities are not entirely calm if, as reported by TV4 Nytherna, the police are calling for reinforcements from all over the country to handle any unrest that could follow the event.
To understand the story of the Swedish police authorization we need to take a step back. Similar requests had previously been denied, for example in front of the Turkish and Iraqi embassies, citing the threat of a terrorist attack as the reason. These security-related arguments had been criticized. In particular, a similar request had been challenged before the administrative court of Stockholm and reached the Court of Appeal, which had recognized the admissibility of this type of demonstrations, with the justification that the security risks as a basis for refusal of a gathering must be directly related to the scheduled event. This is therefore the first demonstration after the ruling by the Court of Appeal.
The organizer described the event as “aimed at criticizing the Koran and Sharia, a threat to democracy”, which has nothing to do with Sweden’s NATO entry process. In reality, from a political point of view, the opposite is true: some time ago the Turkish president Erdogan declared that Sweden’s accession to NATO could not even be taken into consideration as long as the burning of the Koran in Sweden is allowed.