The decision by Sweden’s court of administrative law to overturn a move made by the policing authority to ban Quran-burning protests has infuriated the Turkish government, prompting the country’s foreign minister to compare Sweden to Nazi Germany.
The court’s decision came on Tuesday, April 4th, the same day that Säpo, Sweden’s security services, carried out raids in cities across the country and, in the process, arrested five individuals with “international ties to violent Islamist extremism” who had been plotting terrorist attacks, the Stockholm-based newspaper Expressen reports.
In its decision, the court stated that security risk concerns did not outweigh the Swedish people’s right to demonstrate, with Judge Eva-Lotta Hedin saying that the “police authority did not have sufficient support for its decisions” to ban the protests.
A day later, upon catching wind of the court’s ruling, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu called the decision racist and drew parallels between the recent Quran-burning protests and the book burnings carried out by National Socialist Germany.
“The Nazis started by burning books, then they attacked religious gathering places, and then they gathered people in camps and burned them to achieve their ultimate goals, Çavuşoğlu claimed, adding: “That’s how things like this start.”
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, for his part, also reacted with anger to the court’s ruling, saying: “The attacks against the Koran are a hate crime. Koran burning cannot be allowed within the framework of freedom of speech. Such actions anger two billion Muslims and must be stopped.”
Unlike his foreign minister, however, Erdoğan refrained from directly admonishing the Swedish government as he has often done in the past.
Major Turkish media outlets, the majority of which are controlled or heavily regulated by Erdoğan’s government, also went on the offensive against Sweden, saying that the administrative court that handed down the ruling had done so despite the “global condemnation.”
The pro-government Hürriyet newspaper and the independent Sözscü both ran stories that featured headlines declaring the court’s decision “scandalous.” Furthermore, the pro-government Daily Sabah, which targets international audiences that speak English or Arabic, accused Swedish media of continuing to “feed the terrorists despite all the warnings from Turkey,” claiming that it actively embraces Kurdish groups like the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) and the People’s Defense Units (YPG), both of which the Turkish government has classified as terrorist groups.
The spat comes as Ankara continues to block Sweden’s NATO bid due to, among other things, what it regards as Stockholm’s refusal to clamp down on these Kurdish groups which it regards as terrorists.
