Being a liberal democracy is an odd old business. You’ve laboriously constructed a society with rights and responsibilities for its inhabitants and an effective government. Then, a small number of people abuse those liberties in a way that offends a sizable portion of society, and foreign authorities launch a campaign of hatred against you to distract the focus of their own citizens.
That is what is happening to Sweden, whose NATO application has become the focus of a diabolical proxy war that has little to do with NATO and a lot to do with autocrats like Iran’s top leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The combination of unhappiness also runs the potential of affecting other liberal democracies. Some have already been impacted, in fact. Following the publication of cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad in the Danish newspaper Jyllandsposten in 2005, demonstrators assaulted churches as well as Danish and other Western embassies. Additionally, Islamist terrorists attacked the offices of the French magazine Charlie Hebdo, which had previously published the cartoons, in January 2015, killing 12 people and injuring 11.
“The Swedish government should know that supporting criminals against the world of Islam is equivalent to going into battle-array for war,” Khamenei declared in a statement last Saturday, in an echo of the language his predecessor used in a fatwa against the novelist Salman Rushdie more than three decades ago.
Given that women and some men are conducting remarkably widespread and tenacious protests against Khamenei’s dictatorship, one might have assumed that Iran’s supreme leader would be preoccupied attempting to determine how his own country should govern itself. Not so. In fact, the two provocateurs—the Iraqi immigrant Salwan Momika and the Danish Swedish professional demagogue Rasmus Paludan—who burnt the Quran in Sweden have given the Iranian president a chance to divert attention from his domestic problems, and he has zealously grasped it.
The Iraqi administration appears keen to bring up Sweden as it battles citizen discontent over food prices. On July 20, an Iraqi mob broke into the Swedish embassy in Baghdad and set it on fire in preparation for another Quran burning that Momika had promised. However, the Iraqi government has reportedly removed Sweden’s ambassador and cancelled work permits for the telecom corporation Ericsson in the nation, refusing to apologise for its incompetence to secure foreign embassies on Iraqi land. There was a need to leave the embassy.
Egypt and Saudi Arabia both complained. The Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) agreed to hold an emergency meeting at the request of the foreign ministries of Iran and Iraq to “discuss the repercussions of insulting the Holy Quran and confront the phenomenon of Islamophobia around the world.” Hassan Nasrallah, the head of Hezbollah, intervened from Beirut and demanded that the ambassador of Sweden to Lebanon be expelled. They didn’t care that the Swedish police had twice refused permission for demonstrations that culminated in the burning of Qurans and twice had their denials of permission overturned by the courts. (In the end, Momika kicked the Quran instead of burning it, as was the case with the destruction of the book in July.)
The hatred that is currently being expressed towards Sweden is not a result of careless fact-checking; rather, it is the result of a planned disinformation effort.
The fact that the foreign leaders and figures inciting hatred and violence against Sweden are disseminating false information also doesn’t appear to concern them. Police in Sweden don’t give permits for Quran burnings; instead, they do so for protests, and citizens there are free to participate in them, unlike in Iran, where security forces beat and shoot protesters.
But the hatred that is currently being expressed towards Sweden is not a result of careless fact-checking; rather, it is the result of a planned disinformation effort. The Swedish Psychological Defence Agency has recorded almost 1 million published pieces regarding Sweden and the Quran burnings since the end of June alone, which is a remarkable number.
The organisation also notes that headlines on the articles frequently falsely claim that Sweden permits Quran burnings.
“These acts are often reported in a completely inaccurate way, with the objective of harming Sweden and Swedish interests and sometimes with the direct call to do so,” Swedish Civil Defense Minister Carl-Oskar Bohlin noted in a press briefing on July 26.
Additionally, the campaign features individuals from outside the Middle East. In fact, supporting the campaign is a quick and effective way for Russia to undermine NATO and its allies. Anger is being raised towards Sweden at a time when the world’s attention should be on Russia’s ongoing atrocities in Ukraine.
It is all the more surprising that Middle Eastern authorities have developed a sudden hatred for Sweden given that Sweden has provided asylum to tens of thousands of Middle Eastern nationals over the past few decades. Some were opponents of the regime, but many were only trying to escape the horrors the Islamic State was committing. Some of the government representatives who are currently assaulting Stockholm have even benefitted.
In 2019, it was revealed that Najah al-Shammari, the former defence minister of Iraq, had previously applied for asylum in Sweden under a false name and been given citizenship; Swedish media also claimed that he had allegedly continued to receive welfare benefits while holding office. Additionally, Sweden’s government gave Iraq more than $26 million in development aid in only 2022.
In fact, the turmoil surrounding Sweden’s NATO membership has changed into an outside force using Sweden as a handy target after Paludan responded with a Quran burning that was ostensibly done to infuriate Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
The Iraqi individual who arrived in Sweden in 2018 and requested refuge was mostly unknown until June. However, a France24 investigation has revealed that Momika isn’t just any asylum seeker: He belonged to a Christian group inside the Iranian-affiliated Brigades of Imam Ali in Iraq. In a video that France24 has confirmed, Momika does indeed identify as the militia’s head. After a conflict with another Christian group, he departed Iraq, according to France24. Whatever Momika’s intentions, his provocations in Sweden have provided the governments of Iran and Iraq with a useful chance to divert public ire away from themselves and onto Sweden. Erdogan is another option.
The recent outburst of exaggerated rage directed towards Sweden is merely the most recent episode in a protracted campaign against it that started in late 2021 and was only stopped when Russia invaded Ukraine. The most effective disinformation campaign against Sweden in recent memory spread the maliciously false assertions that Swedish social workers abducted children from Muslim households. It was so compelling, in fact, that Muslim citizens of Sweden showed up to
Being a liberal democracy is challenging and frustrating at times, especially when nefarious forces take advantage of your privileges while you are powerless to stop them. And it’s insulting that the new outrage campaign has ties to Sweden’s remarkably simple NATO application. Thankfully, Erdogan has stated he will submit the application for ratification to the Turkish parliament in October. NATO members and other partners of Turkey will come to the conclusion that he cannot be trusted if he backs out or continues to throw Sweden and NATO curveballs.
However, Sweden is not the only country in suffering. The nation was only chosen as a convenient target, and the following time, a different nation will be the target. In fact, on July 24, after a man burnt a Quran in Denmark, protests broke out in Iran and Iraq, forcing the staff of the Danish embassy in Baghdad to evacuate the city. Counter-attackers and book-burners are feeding a cycle of hatred. Liberal democracies need to demonstrate to the world how those who are currently criticising Sweden take advantage of the West when it’s convenient for them. I’m interested in finding out, for instance, how many of them purchase Western consumer items or own real estate in the Western nations they claim to despise.
