![]() Meanwhile, the clash between Nordic values on free speech and Islamic ones on blasphemy goes back to the Mohammed cartoons controversy of some 20 years ago, when Muslim leaders also vied with each other to defend the prophet's honour. Kremlin media also claim Sweden is "unsafe" for refugees and Swedish people.Īnd even though Russian stories have "very little credibility" among Swedish audiences, Östlund said, their main targets are anyway Muslims in Turkey and north Africa, where Putin is using the crisis to provoke anti-Western feeling. It began when Putin hugged a Koran at a mosque in Dagestan, Russia, on 29 June and "falsely claimed that Sweden was hostile to Muslims", Östlund said. "It's a new phenomenon," said Mikael Östlund, a spokesman for the Swedish Psychological Defence Agency, whose 55 staff monitor foreign interference. One reason might be because Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is now keeping quiet after having agreed to ratify Sweden's Nato accession in October.īut at the same time, Kremlin spin doctors have jumped on the bandwagon, adding another element of volatility. It hasn't been a week yet, but it's nowhere near the reactions after 21 January and 28 June," an SI expert noted. "However, dishonouring of the Koran on 31 July got relatively little attention compared to the earlier events. Most of the anti-Swedish content was "geo-located" in Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Iraq, India, Pakistan, and Indonesia, the SI said. The same intensity was seen after the Stockholm-mosque incident, when Arabic sources were the most active. There were "well over one million" media and social media posts about the Turkish-embassy event, mostly by Turkish, English, and Arabic language sources, according to the Swedish Institute (SI), a government body which monitors the country's image abroad. ![]() Monday's burning next to parliament took place "without serious disturbances" in the city, Stockholm police told EUobserver, even though the vast majority of Swedish imams say such events should be banned.īut previous media activity shows how even a beach incident could go viral globally - and there's no legal way to stop other Swedish copycats from burning any number of Korans in future. ![]()
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