In Sweden, concern grows over anti-Muslim hate incidents

Of note and a reminder that hate is happening to both Jews and Muslims:

On the night of Tuesday, May 28, a car parked in front of the Skövde mosque, which opened in 2023, just outside the town between Gothenburg and Stockholm. The driver threw the corpse of a wild boar against the building, which is in a small wood, before driving off, unaware that the surveillance cameras installed by the Bosnian Islamic Association had filmed the action. “Unfortunately, we’re used to this sort of thing,” said Mirza Babovic, 66, an employee of the association. He reeled off incidents such as Islamophobic tags painted outside the former prayer hall, the remains of a pig dumped on the building site and the windows of a container smashed.

This time, Imam Smajo Sahat, who reported it, decided not to publicize the incident, “so as not to give publicity to its perpetrator, nor to give ideas to others.” He did not want to worry his followers either. But local journalists got wind of it and before long, the national media began to report it, “no doubt because it happened just a few days before the European elections,” said the imam, still dismayed by the violence of the discourse against Islam and Muslims during the campaign.

In November 2023, far-right leader Jimmie Akesson – whose Sweden Democrats party has been allied with the right-wing coalition government since October 2022 – declared that he wanted to destroy mosques, ban the construction of new buildings and wiretap Muslim religious communities in order to combat “Islamism.” His right-hand man, Richard Jomshof, president of the parliamentary legal affairs committee, followed suit, calling for a ban on all symbols of Islam in public spaces, which he likened to “the swastika.”

Shocking remarks

On social media, party officials have constantly denounced the “Islamization of Sweden,” claiming that “Swedes are on the verge of becoming a minority in their own country.” This rhetoric is not new. Back in 2009, a year before his party entered parliament, Akesson asserted that Muslims were “the biggest threat to Sweden.”

Source: In Sweden, concern grows over anti-Muslim hate incidents