Quran burning in Sweden ignites tensions

Sweden gave a permit for a Quran burning protest in Stockholm, and it went about as you would expect. Salwan Momika, a 37-year-old Iraqi immigrant, held the protest outside a mosque on the first day of Eid, causing a public outcry and a slightly singed copy of the Quran, although not before he had doused it with rashers of bacon and stamped on it a few times. Momika’s protest was apparently designed as an exercise of free speech, and to highlight his ‘opinion about the Quran.’ Police gave the go-ahead to the protest, as concerns ‘were not of a nature that could justify, under current laws, a decision to reject the request.’ Momika conducted the protest under the protection of the police, and then, once he was finished, he was promptly arrested… for violating a ban on public fires during a heat wave.