Today, January 27, is Holocaust Remembrance Day, an international day to honor the memory of the people who fell victim to the Holocaust.
The Jewish Central Council (JC) is an association of the Jewish congregations in Stockholm, Gothenburg, Malmö and Northwest Scania. In a post, which the organization has published on Facebookthe council calls for democracy instead of hatred – and compares Koran burnings to Nazi Germany’s book burnings.
– They started burning words and books, and ended up burning people. We know what can happen and therefore we have to raise our voices, says chairman Lena Posner Körösi.
Means that attacks have been normalized
The statement, which is made in collaboration with a Malmö-based Jewish-Muslim cooperation project called Amanah, is not only about Rasmus Paludan’s Koran burning outside the Turkish embassy, but about a development that the Jewish Central Council “feels very concerned about”.
– Permission must not be given outside, in this case, the Turkish embassy. It is pure provocation, says Posner Körösi.
“Attacks on minorities, such as Jews and Muslims, have increased and become normalized in recent years,” JC also writes in the post.
“It is with deep concern that we once again see Islamophobic manifestations of hatred on Swedish streets. Once again, racists and extremists are allowed to abuse democracy and freedom of expression to normalize hatred against one of Sweden’s religious minorities by burning the Koran.”
“Naivety and lack of understanding”
This week, a 34-year-old Swedish-Egyptian man has applied for a police permit to burn the Jewish scripture Torah outside the Israeli embassy and a Bible on Sergels Square. According to Today’s news he is said to have been dissuaded from carrying out the actions by representatives from the Islamic League in Stockholm’s mosque.
The Jewish Central Council stands up for freedom of expression, but Lena Posner Körösi believes that there may be reasons to review the hate crime legislation and how it is used.
– There is a naivety and a lack of understanding of what kind of reactions this type of action arouses.