Hundreds of protesters stormed the Swedish embassy in Baghdad in the early hours of Thursday morning and set it on fire, a source familiar with the matter and a Reuters witness said, in a protest against the expected burning of a Koran in Sweden.
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.
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.
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.
