Summary
Salwan Momika, the Iraqi man who staged several Quran burnings in Sweden in 2023, was shot and killed in Sodertalje, near Stockholm.
His actions had sparked international outrage, riots, and diplomatic tensions. Swedish police confirmed a murder investigation is underway, and several arrests have been made.
Momika, who sought asylum in Sweden in 2018, faced charges of incitement to hatred, with a verdict scheduled for the day after his death.
His protests were permitted under free speech laws but led to legal action against him.
Fuck it, now I kind of want to burn a Quran or Bible for funsies.
momika did it specifically to spark outrage among immigrants. don’t do that.
Nah fuck that, If muslims cant handle it they should look the other way like they do when women are stoned to death for showing their hair.
Thanks for generalizing 1.5bn people, Ben Affleck
Wasn’t that Sam Harris who was being islamophobic and Affleck was defending them?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zsecVLjabzY
Just a stupid joke and I mixed up Ben Affleck with Ethan Hawke
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Oh, so not a small minority. Good to have that cleared up. Show me a liberal, free muslim country, then i can show you all of them that are not.
I don’t understand the point of your comment.
No, i guess that would be too much to ask.
Care to elaborate? You’re just kind of asking a loaded question, but you don’t make any actual argument.
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Care to elaborate? They’re just kind of asking a loaded question, but don’t make any actual argument.
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he wasn’t allowed to before either. we have laws against that.
the man wanted to incite hatred, show him middlefinger by doing the opposite
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Just because you are allowed to do something doesnt mean you should.
How do we know he wanted that?
I see the post that says he was being charged with inciting hatred, but also says his act was protected under free speech.
I think it’s dumb to be burning books as the only people who are going to be pissed are the fundamentalists and they’re always pissed off anyway, but I respect his right to free expression.
so, momika has been in sweden a few years. he converted to christianity in his home country, started shouting loudly about freedom of speech there, got told to stop, then filed for asylum in sweden. once here he kept doing the same thing, which of course jeopardises his asylum claim. only he wasn’t first. rasmus paludan has been burning qurans here for a while, always doing it in neighbourhoods with a majority muslim population. as a demonstration of the problem with religion, it’s effective. once. but both of them did it for years, and the things they have been saying during their book burning made it clear that it was not actually about freedom of speech, but about hatred of muslims. not islam, muslims. and they were both in court for the crime of hets mot folkgrupp (“incitement of hatred against a population group”). they clearly overstepped the law of the country they were in.
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what do you mean?
They’re just being an ass about your writing.
i thought it would be about run-on sentences, but i can’t find one. there should probably be a line break though.
Great way to admit you didn’t read it. You are just looking for a way to ignore what they said. I’d recommend you actually take a look at it.
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What other possible reason would someone have to burn a book that is to some more important than their life. Either people dont care about it or become enraged. And just because you have right to do something doesnt mean you should. His actions have caused a lot of harm, also most likely his own death too.
For argument’s sake, lets assume he had some positive reason for his actions. Has there been a single positive thing that has come from this? If you want to do good you need to think the consequences through and if you dont then you shouldnt do anything at all.
This is such a bullshit take with some not so subtle apoligism and blame shifting.
If burning a book causes a lot of harm in any way besides burn damage, the burner is hardly to blame but something else is fundamentally wrong, and he tried to make that very obvious to everyone with his own life at risk.
It’s not just paper. It’s a symbol. If you can’t understand that then there’s no hope for you in this world. You have a fundamentally flawed view of humanity if you can’t see humans ascribe meaning to object, religious or not. It’s the same reason burning a flag gets people upset.
You can argue it’s irrational, because it obviously is, but humans are not rational creatures.
Now, go only do objective rational things somewhere else. You’re words aren’t worth anything. You’re wasting your effort writing them.
Its not about the PHYSICAL book. Go ask any muslim if there is ANY situation where they would find it acceptable to burn their holy book in such way that guy did. And if he did it to “make it obvious there is something fundamendally wrong” why didnt he then MAKE IT OBVIOUS WHAT IS WRONG? Lets say that was his goal, then he failed so spectacularly words fail me.
I truly dont know what else to say about this if you still dont see what I mean.
And its not nice trying to frame what I said as apoligism or blame shifting. But if you TRULY think so then maybe you should back your arguments with facts instead of throwing words and hoping they stick. I know I can make mistakes and how else can I learn from them than if other people correct me. But i’m pretty sure i’m not wrong about this, but its not good to be blinded by your own surety.
You know that the Nazis in Germany burned a lot of books?
Your general statement would absolve them from their actions and intentions and instead shifts the blame onto the people who got persecuted by having their books burnt. Which later escalated to more than “just” burning books.
You cannot reduce it to the action itself and ignore all the context around it, especially not the intentions of the perpetrators.
And “other people shouldn’t get offended if i insult and attack them constantly” is hardly acceptable in any other social context. E.g. i hope you would oppose insulting LGBTQ, Women, Ethnic minorities, disabled people…
And it should be obvious from these examples, that “it is just a joke” or “it is just an insult and i should be allowed to insult, because muuh free speech” is not a sincere argument, by the people spreading the hate. And their intention is never to keep the hate at verbal abuse, but to escalate it to physical violence.
He did it to incite hate. No sane person care about the paper.
I guess if you burn the american flag in Texas, screaming and complaining loudly about"freedom of speech", people will get annoyed, but 20 years ago it was illegal to do so.
So how long have you sided with the Nazis and fundamentalist Christians?
Because now you’re excusing their book burning.
What a take.
You see the difference of an individual burning a book that he owns and leaving your books alone and the state burning all the books and forbidding you from accessing them… right?
…what does the state have to do with it? Fundamentalist Christians in the US burned books without state power. Nazis regularly encourage book burning and they haven’t had state power in a few decades.
This Nazi, for instance, did not have state power behind him. Just a group of sycophants encouraging his antics.
If you’re on the side of a book burning Nazi nut job, you’re the bad guy.
The scale makes all the difference here.
Yes, it’s so much better when one group of bigots burn books than a larger group of bigots burn more books.
I guess this is the lesser evil you guys keep voting for, just a little book burning and hate speech, as a compromise.
Just a pro tip, if you are ever on the side of people burning books, you’re in the wrong.
Isn’t that basically like burning newspaper? Both would work I guess
THEY CAN’T KILL US ALL
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Obviously I am not talking about the ME.
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Thanks, while we’re at it let’s burn some books by Jewish authors too.
See what I did there? Burning books is never a good look on you.
not sure what you think the bible is
Basically fanfic commissioned by King James VI/I
Your point being?
There’s burning all the copies of a book from the local library so no one has a chance to read them, and there’s burning one copy of a book which as an estimated 100 million copies printed per year as a protest.
To some the Quran is as hateful as Mein Kampf, and you know what people say about tolerance of intolerance. You may not agree, and you may think books should never be burned. I am on the fence on that. But I do know people who burn books shouldn’t be assassinated. And people shouldn’t live in fear of reprisals for speaking out against any religion and its teachings.
Yeah I have read both the Quran and some exempts from Mein Kampf. Cannot recommend the latter.
My favorite part from Mein Kampf was the one about the fox, the goose and the tiger who are all assumed to be hostile towards each other. Because of this „Arians“ shouldn’t mingle with Jews. If you’re troubled with following the soundness of the argument that’s because there is none.
Let’s ignore for a second that it’s just outright offensive to compare the books of any world religion to Mein Kampf. Even if you don’t believe in the whole God thing, then the Quran would still be a brilliant collection of verses spoken by some illiterate orphan without any education somewhere in the Arabian desert. And I can tell you that because I‘m a native speaker and even the hardcore atheist Arabs agree with me on that.
I think no one should be assassinated and capital punishment shouldn’t exist. And believe me when I tell you that I want freedom of speech. But there’s freedom of speech and hate speech. I don’t want freedom of hate speech and I don’t care who it is targeting.
I still don’t think anyone deserves capital punishment for anything, but to use this to generalize against all Muslims and our religious books is rightfully being called out as what it is, Islamophobia. Say the exact same things you said just about burning the Torah and we wouldn’t even have to argue about that being antisemitic.
To some the Quran is as hateful as _Mein Kampf
I am atheist/agnostic but it is downright offensive to compare any major religious work from a major world religion (let’s arbitrarily define that as more than 1 billion followers I don’t intend this as a category of judgement just size) to that shitbook from a genocidal maniac.
The Bible, the Quran, Hindu texts like the Vegas or Upanishads… to say I know more than a passing knowledge about these works would be a lie but I know enough to understand there is real good in those books mixed up with problematic aspects, subject to a constant conversation and study by practicioners that attempts to reconcile and interpret the best parts of those things into a way forward.
Even if you are a staunch atheist there is real meat on the bone in the religious texts I listed above to read critically and consider.
Mein Kampf is just hateful trash, it isn’t worth reading, just go read The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann (Woods translation) or listen to the superb audio book, it came out of Germany at basically the same moment and it is vastly superior in every respect as a work of intellectual and political introspection and it is actually fun.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magic_Mountain
https://campuspress.yale.edu/modernismlab/the-magic-mountain/
I haven’t read the Quran or Mein Kampf, but even the old testament is plenty hateful.
Your kid makes fun of some bald dude? Death penalty, mauled by bear.
Add to that (I’ve heard second hand, correct me if I’m wrong) that there is some pedofilia/child marriage in the Quran, so I see how someone could have strong feelings about it.
The amount of people liking a book shouldn’t be an argument to judge its hatrfulness.
I am an atheist/agnostic, I won’t be caught dead saying these books aren’t deeply problematic, that wasn’t my point, my point is that despite all that there is also some good to these books and exploration however fraught of morals and philosophy.
Mein Kampf is just pathetic, lame trash and as I said before it is an insult to those religious works to compare them with a document solely designed to rationalize genocide and hate.
For some context, when one scratches a bit the back-story of this guy, some interesting facts pop up:
Momika came from Qaraqosh, a town in the Al-Hamdaniya district in the northern Iraqi province of Nineveh[5]. He was an ethnic Assyrian and raised as a Syriac Catholic.[6][7] During the Iraqi civil war, when Christians became persecuted by the Islamic State of Iraq (the precursor of ISIS), Momika joined the Assyrian Patriotic Party and worked as a security guard for the party’s headquarters in Mosul. According to Iraqi government sources, Momika fled his hometown in 2012 after the local court found him guilty of causing a wrongful death during a car accident and sentenced him to three years of imprisonment in Badush.[8][9]
After the fall of Mosul to ISIS militants in June 2014, Momika joined the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) to fight against ISIS.[10] Specifically, he has appeared in videos in military uniform, as a part of the Christian unit “Spirit of God Jesus Son of Mary Battalion” (Kataib Rouh Allah Issa Ibn Miriam) brandishing firearms and pledging allegiance to the Imam Ali Brigades (to which the Christian unit is a part of), which are a PMF faction and part of the Islamic Movement of Iraq.[11] The Imam Ali Brigades are known to have close connections to Iran and is considered to be an Iranian proxy.[12] The brigades were also accused of committing war crimes and engaging in sectarian violence.[13] It’s said that Momika was also affiliated with the Syriac Assembly Movement, a political party that received support from the Government of the Kurdistan Region.[14]
Momika also founded the Syriac Democratic Union and the Falcons of the Syriac Forces in 2014, an armed militia which was affiliated with the Christian militia Babylon Brigade, the armed wing of the Babylon Movement.[12] In 2017, Momika was involved in an internal power struggle with fellow Babylon Movement leader Rayan al-Kildani, which he lost. He fled the country as a result.[15]
In 2017, Momika fled to Germany with a Schengen visa, where he announced his atheism and apostasy from Christianity.
The rest of the article also describes multiple instances of him behaving erratically (e.g. threatening someone with a knife etc).
So before we go to the standard «western right wing troll» stereotyping, we must acknowledge that this is a veteran of the fight against ISIS who experienced persecution of his community during the Iraqi civil war and who probably was suffering from all sorts of trauma.
Does this excuse his behaviour, no. But it does explain it, way better than simplistic caricatures putting him in some «western racist» pigeonhole. He definitely did not deserve to die and he probably had some very legitimate reasons to hate Islam, a religion that he personally experienced in a really fucked up and extreme form in an extremely fucked up and extreme situation. Sadness all around.
Quite a lose-lose situation indeed. People who hate each others guts. I hope they can find the perpetrators soon.
He was being charged for doing this? I had completely missed that. Was Sweden always like this?
No, people haven’t been killed over a religious text for a very, very long time. Then we imported the religious issue.
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Chill there baby.
There is a murder investigation. So yes they are. Unless you’re one of the troglodytes that wants to grab a pitchfork; i much prefer to let the police do their job.
Just because your American police is a joke, doesn’t mean ours is.
You can burn as many books as you want, thats not why salwan was under investigation.
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There are no such laws. you bought it, you burn it.
There are laws about religious, racial or ethnical discrimination though.
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Because you can try someone for a crime if the prosecutor finds a reason to do so.
I don’t pretend to know exactly what his indigtment was, but i recon i could ask for the papers since its public. What I do know is that he had to ask permission from the police to have his demonstrations and all except one was granted. The one that wasn’t allowed was because of the security issue due to muslim protestors. Don’t remember exactly how many allowed demonstrations there was. So i guess the answer is, people don’t know what they are talking about when they say what he was doing was “illegal”.
killed? someone who’s runover by a train is killed, the guy in this article was murdered for someone else’s invisible friend.
it’s murder.
raised anger and criticism in several Muslim nations
I don’t think there are many non-Muslims who were onboard with this stupid shit either, to be fair. Besides the spittle-flecked gammon who were already bigots to begin with, of course.
The only Quran burning I’d support would be if Elon Musk did it as part of his whole white identitarian shtick. I’d send ISIS the airfare myself.
I have mixed thoughts on it really, like you should be allowed to do it but its just pointless and stupid so why the fuck would you?
To me, it’s more about the goal he was trying to achieve. He clearly did it to taunt and insult. In that context, I can see how this should be a punishable offense (not death though).
It would be a similar thing if you had learned that the prime minister of Sweden likes to create art at home. Then buying one of his art pieces and burn it in front of his house. Sure, burning art is not a punishable offense, but the goal of intimidating someone with such a symbol could/should be.
Its doing so outside of their house that could be intimidation at that point though. So if you burnt the art in your own home surely it would be fine? Essentially the burning isn’t the problem.
A more reasonable response is Muslims call the guy a cunt and move on.
I agree on the “reasonable response” aspect.
I think for the first question it should revolve around “public” or “private”. if you do something at home and record it to share the video on the internet, it is still public, with the goal to be public.
So in regards to incitement or hate speech it is also different if your racist uncle spurts his ideas at the family reunion, or if he broadcasts them on twitter.
I wasn’t so much thinking of public/private, but doing it outside someones house has a bit of an “I know where you live” vibe to it.
RIP
Guess he didn’t read the crowd.
This isn’t justification for what happened but people should know he was a part of a brigade in Iraq that killed people.
Oh and also, he’s an Israeli supporter who called Palestinians “rats”
As I understand, he was part of a brigade that killed people in the context of a civil war where his brigade was fighting against ISIS
Quite an important footnote.
As I understand, he was part of a brigade that killed unarmed civillians in the context of a civil war where his brigade was fighting against ISIS
His brigade also killed innocent people who had nothing to do with that.
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Who is that?
Liberals really hate Nazis.
Unless the Nazi is being Nazi against Muslims instead of Jews. Then they love free speech.
As the saying goes, the only good Nazi
Burning a religious book in protest =/= Nazi behaviour
Burning religious books is Nazi behavior. Nazis burnt plenty of religious books. What is next KKK rallies being protests?
There is a difference between book burning as censorship and book burning as protest
Notably the scale and ability to acquire the book afterwards
Indeed. This person burned books to incite hate. Like the Nazis.
Can a person also commit Elon salutes in public because “they do not hurt anyone”?
You choose to believe in your stupid religion. You don’t choose to be a race or sexual orientation so you’re making a false equivalency
Indeed. This person burned books to incite hate.
We can’t say that because we didn’t get the verdict
Nazis also drank water and breathed air
Guess you’re a Nazi if you do those things
The reason something is done is important
So wanting freedom from religious persecution is the same as being a Nazi now?
Interesting, I did not know that
He was free from religious persecution. Turns out he was the person who was doing the religious persecution and wanted to keep doing it.
How exactly was an Iraqi immigrant in Sweden persecuting anyone? Are we using the word persecution to mean whatever the fuck we like now?
He was inciting hate against a population and advocating for their persecution. How severely disconnected and racist are people to not even see this obvious link?
Is that what he was doing? Or was he protesting what in his own lived experience as a veteran of the war against ISIS was a religion that led to the persecution of his own people (Iraqi Christians)?
This is not an easy case, there are many intersecting threads and it defies easy hot takes.
To find out whether it is a difficult topic, change out the ethnic group being discriminated against.
Lets say a Palestinian flees to Sweden, starts waving around Swastikas and burning Torahs. How do we feel now?
If a black person shoots someone they do not get to join the KKK either.
Just because this person was persecuted by a fringe extremist group, created from the US overthrowing a country, which the overwhelming majority of Muslims denounce, does not give him the right to start misrepresenting and discriminating an entire group.
“Get to”? “The right to”? What do you think I’m talking about? Oppression credits that can be used to buy a pass for shitty behaviour?
I’m asking for humanity and empathy, in the case of a guy who got fucking shot, by trying to make the case that this isn’t some cut and dry of some fascist getting their due, but a complicated and sad story.
Inciting hate isn’t a crime. It’s free speech. He’s not persecuting anyone, just protesting against the religious who want to persecute others by banning people from blasphemy.
If I could I’d have ever parebt who takes a kid to a religious service arrested for child abuse. That’s persecution.
It is not free speech. He is protesting to persecute an entire religious group who had nothing to do with his persecution.
Anyone who thinks ISIS represents Muslims needs to stay off the 24/7 news cycle.
?
He was murdered. I’m assuming for a second that it’s because of his actions prior, and with that assumption he will literally have been religiously persecuted.
Turns out you’re full of it
His Twitter profile background was a flag of Israel. Was he persecuted by Palestinians?
Calling people stupid isn’t persecuting them.
He wasn’t a nazi.
Are you saying his killing was justified?
No? He’s saying it triggers plenty of Islamophobia. If you actually follow the logic, it sounds more like he’s adding more arguments against this kind of killing.
Yeah tbh as a Muslim it’s pretty tiring and offensive to read all of that shit when most of us are just busy living our lives like everyone else. And we’re here on the supposedly progressive and liberal Lemmy…
It’s also super tiring to read all the ahmadullilah comments under the TRT post on YouTube about this. Kind of offensive too, you know.
I’m with you 100% combatting islamophobia everywhere, but I don’t see much in terms of combatting …islamic-supremacy(?), see I don’t even know what to call it. We don’t even name it. It’s not “Islamism” because that means anything and nothing, it’s not “Islamic extremism” because that’s like the maniacs. What do we call the low key thing? The one that feeds into the culture war on the muslim side?
People with different views will say similar things. People were happy about what Luigi did, or at least unsympathetic to the CEO. Many here, espoused how they wished the trump assassination was successful. The point is, people can still disagree about the action but be happy that someone they didn’t like died.
Plus, he was a part of a brigade that killed people in Iraq and a zionist who called Palestinians rats.
Idk man YouTube, TikTok, Meta, doesn’t matter all social media platforms are anyway just feeding on rage bait and I’m pretty sure they have significantly radicalized millions if not hundreds of millions at this point.
To them it doesn’t matter if you’re cheering for ISIS or Hitler or Israel, they just care about more engagement so that some product teams can show some engagement & add KPIs going up during performance review season.
Idk I think some kind of supremacy is accurate here indeed? Some seek white supremacy, other ethnic supremacy, religious supremacy, it’s all the same poison to me.
Well said. ✌️
Wait, are you suggesting that its a bad idea to generalize what a billion plus people living in vastly different places and situations believe? /s
