This is very disheartening. It shows how little educated we are and how vulnerable we are to the common populism. The racist idiot Paludan is taking up the whole public attention and treated like a golden goose while the real problems are swept under the carpet. We were in the right to keep Sweden out of NATO but by giving so much voice to the "Quran burning" we're losing our ground. Even in the small city I live, the municipality invited all citizens to the town square to "condemn the despicable(alçakça) act of Sweden's burning of our holy-book" today. They're gonna milk this cow for God knows how long.
I wonder if you did passed by them.
You see, fundamentally i am not against public demonstration for religious or cultural reasons.
It is natural if somebody's religious or cultural feeling is hurt, they should have the right to do so.
However in reality, instead of peaceful, civilized demonstration against very a specific action or incident done by specific actor or institution, it is always turns out be into a big 'US VS THEM' and people in the street start shouting and ranting violent stuffs and burning flags.
because of their lack of proper education, they just couldn't comprehend the simple fact that, it was an individual act, Swedish state nor the Swedes as whole involved in it.
And to make matter worse, Western media intentionally or unintentionally pick it up as a story of the week and show the extreme and heated parts of the demonstration, which makes us as Muslims look like completely fanatic and uncivilized people in the perception of western public.
I was watching a small clip that day, where someone was shouting about burning the Sweden itself as a reaction!
Imagine if you are a Swedes or European how will it look like to you?
And racist bigots like Paludan knows this very well and they love to exploit it to advance their racist agenda.
On top of that, when state started to get involved in these socio cultural matter like the way Mr. Erdogan did, and mix it up with foreign policy the whole thing just couldn't go more wrong.
As you rightfully said, Meantime in the process of all this, the ACTUAL MATTER become somewhat irrelevant and looses its weight.
