How Sweden Became Public Enemy No. 1

It’s a funny old business, being a liberal democracy. You’ve painstakingly built a well-functioning society where the government works efficiently and citizens have rights and responsibilities. Then a few individuals misuse those rights in a way that offends large numbers of people, and to divert their own citizens’ attention, foreign rulers embark on a hate campaign against you.

That’s what’s happening to Sweden, whose application to NATO has become the target of a sinister proxy conflict that has nothing to do with NATO but a great deal with autocrats such as Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. And it’s mixture of misery that risks hitting other liberal democracies, too. Indeed, some have already been hit. After the Danish newspaper Jyllandsposten published cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in 2005, protesters attacked Danish and other Western embassies abroad, and even targeted churches. And in January 2015, Islamist terrorists killed 12 people and injured 11 at the offices of the French magazine Charlie Hebdo, which had also published the cartoons.

“The Swedish government should know that supporting criminals against the world of Islam is equivalent to going into battle-array for war,” Khamenei declared in a statement last Saturday, in an echo of the language his predecessor used in a fatwa against the novelist Salman Rushdie more than three decades ago.

One might have thought that Iran’s supreme leader would be busy trying to discern how his own country should govern itself, seeing that women and some men are conducting surprisingly widespread and tenacious protests against Khamenei’s regime. Not so. Indeed, the two provocateurs (Danish Swedish career demagogue Rasmus Paludan and an Iraqi refugee named Salwan Momika) who have burned the Quran in Sweden have presented the Iranian leader with an opportunity to deflect attention from his domestic woes, and he has energetically seized it.

“The duty of that [Swedish] government is to hand over the perpetrator to the judicial systems of Islamic countries,” the Iranian leader said. The perpetrator referred to by Khamenei appears to be Momika, who burned a Quran in Stockholm last month.

In Iraq, the government—battling citizen unhappiness over food prices—also seems eager to turn the attention to Sweden. On July 20, in anticipation of another Quran burning announced by Momika, an Iraqi mob stormed Sweden’s Baghdad embassy and set it alight. But instead of apologizing for its inability to protect foreign embassies on Iraqi soil, the Iraqi government expelled Sweden’s ambassador and is reported to have revoked work permits for the telecom company Ericsson in the country. The embassy had to be evacuated.

Saudi Arabia and Egypt issued complaints. The Iranian and Iraqi foreign ministries then tried to get other Muslim countries to convene an emergency meeting of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) to “discuss the repercussions of insulting the Holy Quran and confronting the phenomenon of Islamophobia around the world”—and the OIC agreed to do so. Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, weighed in from Beirut, calling for the expulsion of Sweden’s ambassador to Lebanon. It didn’t matter to them that the Swedish police have twice denied permission for protests that ended up featuring Quran burnings and twice had the decision overturned by the courts. (In the end, the July Quran desecration, also carried out by Momika, didn’t involve the book being burned; instead, he kicked it.)

The odium now being directed against Sweden is not an accident based on sloppy fact-checking—it’s an organized disinformation campaign.

It also doesn’t seem to matter to the foreign leaders and personalities stirring up anger and violence against Sweden that they’re spreading disinformation. The Swedish police don’t issue permits for Quran burnings: They issue permits for demonstrations, and residents of Sweden have the right to engage in such protests—unlike in Iran, where security forces shoot and beat demonstrators.

But the odium now being directed against Sweden is not an accident based on sloppy fact-checking—it’s an organized disinformation campaign. Since the end of June alone, the Swedish Psychological Defence Agency has documented around 1 million items published about Sweden and the Quran burnings—an extraordinary number. The agency also reports that the items often carry headlines incorrectly alleging that Sweden grants permissions for Quran burnings. “These acts are often reported in a completely inaccurate way, with the objective of harming Sweden and Swedish interests and sometimes with the direct call to do so,” Swedish Civil Defense Minister Carl-Oskar Bohlin noted in a press briefing on July 26.

And the campaign doesn’t just involve Middle Eastern personalities. “Actors supported by Russia are actively amplifying incorrect statements alleging that the Swedish state is behind the desecration of holy books,” Bohlin explained in the press briefing, adding that the allegations “are made with the objective of causing division and weakening Sweden’s international position.” Indeed, helping to fuel the campaign is a cheap and efficient way for Russia to weaken NATO and its partners. At a time when global attention should be focused on Russia’s continuing brutalities in Ukraine, anger is being whipped up against Sweden.

Middle Eastern leaders’ sudden antipathy toward Sweden is all the more remarkable given that Sweden has, over the past few decades, given refuge to tens of thousands of Middle Eastern citizens. Some were regime critics, but many were simply fleeing the atrocities committed by the Islamic State. Some officials from the governments now attacking Stockholm have even benefited themselves.

In 2019, it emerged that Iraq’s then-defense minister, Najah al-Shammari, had previously received asylum in Sweden using a false name and subsequently been granted Swedish citizenship; Swedish media also reported that he had allegedly continued claiming Swedish welfare benefits while serving as a minister. And in 2022 alone, the Swedish government provided Iraq with more than $26 million in development assistance.

Indeed, Sweden’s NATO accession—to which Paludan reacted with a Quran burning apparently designed to enrage Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and thus to get global attention—has morphed into a drama where outside forces are using Sweden as a convenient target. “The Iranian regime is being challenged by women, so jumping on Sweden is a perfect opportunity for Khamenei,” said Magnus Ranstorp, a senior advisor at the Swedish Defence University’s Centre for Societal Security. “It’s in the interest of the Iranian government and the Iraqi government, and in Erdogan’s interest, to pour oil on this fire, and Momika apparently thinks it’s in his interest to keep desecrating Qurans.”

Until June, very little was known about the Iraqi national, who arrived in Sweden in 2018 and applied for asylum. An investigation by France24 has, however, established that Momika isn’t just any asylum-seeker: In Iraq, he belonged to a Christian militia within the Brigades of Imam Ali, a militant organization linked to Iran. Indeed, in one video verified by France24, Momika calls himself the leader of the militia. He left Iraq after a power struggle with another Christian militia, France24 found. Whatever Momika’s motivations, his provocations in Sweden are giving the regimes in Iran and Iraq an expedient opportunity to redirect citizen frustration away from themselves, toward Sweden. And then there’s Erdogan. “The Quran burnings, and his strong reaction to them, make him the protector of Islam,” Ranstorp said.

The disproportionate anger toward Sweden is just the latest installment in a long-standing campaign against the country that exploded in late 2021 and stalled only when Russia invaded Ukraine. The disinformation campaign, which consistently spread malicious false claims that Swedish social services kidnapped Muslim families’ children, was the most successful waged against Sweden in recent memory. In fact, it was so compelling that Muslim residents in Sweden turned up for protests against the supposed kidnappings. (I wrote about it for Foreign Policy last year.)

“That disinformation campaign has taken off again now but with a new focus saying Sweden is waging war against Islam,” Ranstorp said. “And one of the superspreaders in the child-kidnap campaign [Mustafa El-Sharqawy] is active in the current campaign as well. He sees as his main mission to convince young people not to become enamored with the West. What we’re seeing is a massive collision between Western values and the values represented by some Middle Eastern countries.” Like that campaign, the new campaign is being spread not just on social media but by traditional media in some Middle Eastern countries, too.

Being a liberal democracy is hard work and sometimes infuriating, including during those times when forces that wish you ill exploit your liberties and there’s nothing you can do about it. And it’s galling that the new anger campaign has hitched itself to Sweden’s entirely straightforward NATO application. Thankfully, Erdogan has said he’ll forward the application to the Turkish parliament for ratification in October. If he reneges or throws Sweden and NATO more curveballs, Turkey’s NATO allies and other partners will conclude he can’t be trusted.

But Sweden’s misery is not just about Sweden. The country just happened to be a convenient target, and next time another country will be the target. Indeed, on July 24, demonstrations unfolded in Iran and Iraq after a man burned a Quran in Denmark, which prompted Denmark’s Baghdad embassy staff to leave the city. A circle of hate is being fueled by book-burners and counter-attackers. It’s time for liberal democracies to show the world how those now denouncing Sweden avail themselves of the West when it suits them. I would be curious to see, for example, how many of them buy Western consumer goods or own properties in the Western countries they profess to hate.