Rasmus Paludan is the founder and leader of the Stram Kurs (Hard Line) party in Denmark and Sweden. Despite eleven Swedish court rulings affirming Mr. Paludan’s right to hold a public demonstration in which a Koran is burned, the police authority has denied him a permit in every case. The courts instructed the police to grant the permits, but the police ignored them.

The courts ruled not only that the police actions were illegal, but also that they violated the country’s constitution. So Rasmus Paludan has the right to burn Korans, but that makes no difference: in response to his action Muslims get angry, stone the police, and burn vehicles. Therefore Mr. Paludan’s blasphemy must stop, and hang the constitution!

The following report is from Samhällsnytt. Our Swedish correspondent LN has kindly translated it:

Reports: Police break the law to stop Paludan — on orders from the government

by Mats Dagerlind
May 21, 2023

Despite being convicted on at least ten occasions for stopping the freedom demonstrations of Danish-Swedish lawyer, party leader and Islamic critic Rasmus Paludan in violation of the Swedish constitution, the police continued to deny him a permit and even issued a special interim blasphemy law prohibiting the burning of a single book — the Koran. Whether or not Sweden will remain a democracy is now in question — the Court of Appeals will decide.

Paludan’s Koran burning triggered Muslim intifadas in Sweden of a kind previously associated with the Middle East. 200 police officers were stoned and some 20 police vehicles were stolen and/or set on fire.

The Koran riots last April were uncomfortable proof for the multiculturalist political and media establishment that the integration of non-Western migrants is working even worse than feared and that Islam is not compatible with the fundamental democratic values of the West.

Decides to shoot the messenger

But instead of acknowledging their political failure, they chose to shoot the messenger. Paludan was painted as a right-wing extremist for defending constitutional civil liberties against anti-democratic Muslim forces. The police were pressured by the government and opposition parties to stop Paludan’s progress.

With lies and excuses, the authority denied Paludan a permit to demonstrate in one place after another or sabotaged the demonstrations by moving them at the last minute to hidden parking lots where no one could attend.

Appeals to the courts and gets it right — ten times

Paludan, who is a trained lawyer, took the police actions to court and won at least ten rulings in five different courts, where they unequivocally clarified that the police had violated both ordinary laws and the constitution in rejecting Paludan’s applications for a demonstration permit. But, despite this, the police continued to deny Paludan a permit.

When the burning of Korans took on a further uncomfortable dimension for the political establishment by illustrating Sweden’s kowtowing to Turkey’s Islamist semi-dictator Erdogan in order to secure Sweden’s entry into NATO, the police chose to go one step further and issued a general ban on burning Korans. No other books were included in the ban.

Inside sources testify to political pressure

Sources inside the police now confirm the picture of an authority under pressure from the political establishment backed by the media to break the laws instead of enforcing them, and also for political purposes to silence uncomfortable opposition voices, a function that law enforcement often performs in totalitarian countries.

This is a development that the then-Social Democratic government and its supporting parties warned could become a reality if right-wing conservative supposedly “authoritarian” forces such as the Sweden Democrats gained political influence in Sweden. Instead, it is now clear in black and white that it is the left-liberal parties that have pushed Sweden in an authoritarian direction.

The investigation that reveals this has not been conducted by conservative media actors who might be suspected of having an interest in conveying a negative image of the left-liberal parties’ policy of appeasement towards Islam and authoritarian treatment of their political opponents. Instead, it has been carried out by the left-liberal Dagens Nyheter.

Dialogue police on the side of Paludan and democracy

Fredrik Jonsson works as a so-called dialog police officer. This is an often heavily criticized part of the police’s work, which involves grilling sausages, eating pizza, kicking a ball and dancing with thugs. The activities are justified on the grounds that they strengthen confidence in the police and Swedish society among “vulnerable” immigrant groups. Critics argue that the police instead make themselves a laughingstock and lose all respect among gang-bangers when they try to act as social workers.

Jonsson is not inherently fond of Paludan’s tactic of provoking and angering Muslims to show their true anti-democratic and violent face. But he still considers it serious that people think they have the right to act in the name of good when they restrict civil rights and freedoms in order to silence him.

“Paludan’s personality and his inflammatory style means that he obscures the view. Then you don’t see what this is really about, that Swedish freedom of expression is under threat,” he told DN.

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