The Grotesque Irony of Salwan Momika’s Persecution

Salwan Momika, who was murdered on Wednesday 29^th January in a Sharia-style execution in his own home, deserved better. His final days were consumed by anxious anticipation: he was set to be handed a verdict in his ongoing trial for ‘incitement to racial hatred’ in Sweden. His crime? Burning a Quran in protest against Islam in Stockholm in 2023. Momika was born a Syriac Catholic in Iraq who knew all too well the persecution faced by non-Muslims in the Middle East, having been subjected to years of persecution before and during the Iraqi Civil War. He was among the best-placed people in Europe to protest against the horrors of Islamic jihad. But in August 2023, the Swedish government responded to his protest with a criminal charge of ‘agitation against an ethnic group’, despite the glaring facts that Momika himself was ethnically Iraqi, Islam is not an ethnicity, and his ‘agitation’ against the scriptural basis of a terroristic regime – ISIS – was an act of resistance. After seeking asylum in Norway in 2024, having been persecuted by the Swedish regime, Momika was arrested and deported back to Sweden. The entire situation is worse than Kafkaesque.

There are few cases of asylum-seeking which strike me as more valid than that of Momika. But, while being hunted by Islamists for his outspoken apostasy, Momika was punished rather than protected by the same Western states which boast liberal asylum programs for the supposedly persecuted. Now he is dead, and the Swedish government are avoiding any sense of responsibility by invoking ‘foreign powers’ which may or may not have been officially involved in Momika’s death. Meanwhile, Sweden bears witness to historic highs in violent crime perpetrated by gangs, overwhelmingly consisting of the children of recent migrants, in its capital. Sweden’s detainment of Momika, like Norway’s swift arrest and deportation when he attempted to flee Sweden, reveal that there is the capacity to remove unwanted people from Western shores. The horrific irony is that there is no political will to deport the migrants who hold Western freedoms in contempt – instead, the ‘Islamophobes’ are targeted.

Momika’s activism follows decades of ethnic cleansing and anti-Christian persecution in the Middle East, where a once-rich Christian heritage has been razed to the ground and entire communities have been driven out of several regions. In Iraq, home of some of the oldest Christian churches in the world, Christians are ‘close to extinction’. 1 in 7 Christians are persecuted worldwide as of 2024, compared to 1 in 8 in 2021; a century ago, 20% of people in the Middle East were Christian, compared to about 3% today, evidencing a long-term exodus from the region thanks to religious persecution. Western states, obsessed with countering ‘Islamophobia’ thanks to the default minority status of Muslims in Europe, have been unforgivably impotent in the face of this persecution. To call the situation in Gaza a ‘genocide’, despite steady population growth in the region, while failing to mention the actual genocides against Christians in Africa and the Middle East and ongoing exoduses from regions like Azerbaijan, is a central hypocrisy of Western progressivism. It starkly reveals that Western states are driven not by the brutal facts of present-day reality but by a neurotic loathing of their own historic relation to Christianity. Muslims who themselves have left their warring home nations for Western civilization are happy to weaponize misleading terms like ‘Islamophobia’. Meanwhile, there is no sanctuary for Middle Eastern Christians who speak out.

After Momika burned a Quran outside Stockholm Mosque on 28^th June 2023, harming no-one, the inevitable happened: mass violent protests swept the Islamic world. And, thanks to recent demographic upheaval in Europe, violent protests were staged across Denmark for good measure. Islamist arsonists stormed the Swedish embassy in Baghdad; rallies proliferated in Pakistan; the Iranian militia Ashab al-Kahf called for its followers to target ‘every Swede’ with violence on the social network Telegram (which is crawling with terrorists, not that the anti-Musk media cares). That a symbolic act of opposition to a religious creed – which should not be immune to criticism in any world, but particularly not in the free West – promises the threat of murderous violence proves the very need for the freedom to criticise Islam. Following the riots in Denmark, the Danish government should have taken a hard look at its immigration policy; instead, it instituted blasphemy laws criminalizing the ‘inappropriate treatment’ of religious texts. Of course, such laws will never be used to prosecute those who desecrate Bibles: the bill is widely known in Denmark as the ‘Quran law’. This is, in effect, a legal implementation of Sharia by a Western state.

In the Anglophone world, which is characterized by wilful ignorance of the Islamic persecution of Christians and the creeping Da’wah of Muslim diasporas, the response has been equally predictable. Ilhan Omar issued the conventional statement that ‘Islamophobia is on the rise’. Days ago, a man in Manchester, UK was arrested for an inspired Quran-burning on suspicion of a ‘racially aggravated public order offence’; it is now a widespread error in Western legal systems to protect a world religion from criticism on the grounds that the majority of its followers are not white. Meanwhile, noted ethno-narcissist Bushra Shaikh, British-Pakistani commentator for Channel 4, implicitly justified the execution, writing ‘Some of you may disagree but the public desecration of any holy book should be viewed as a hate crime and the offender should face consequences’.

What such comments blatantly ignore is that there is no systematic violence when Bibles are desecrated or Christian prophets lampooned by journalists; there is no Christian equivalent to Charlie Hebdo. Every time a critic of Islam stages a public protest, the fallout – in this case, the vengeful murder of an Iraqi Christian asylum-seeker – proves the validity and courage of that very protest. It serves as a sharp reminder that the religion, and its surrounding culture, which poses a major global threat to the peace and safety of nonbelievers or believers of other faiths is not the Christianity of the Holy Bible or the Judaism of the Torah. It is the Islam of the Quran. ISIS, which displaced over 125,000 Iraqi Christians, does not justify its jihad with reference to any ‘holy book’. Take their word for it. Surah 9:5: ‘Then kill the disbelievers (non-Muslims) wherever you find them, capture them and besiege them, and lie in wait for them in each and every ambush’.

Do not forget the name of Salwan Momika. Like that of Theo van Gogh, his story is emblematic of Western compliance with the Islamic persecution of Christians and the Sharia-led norms being adopted by progressive language and laws. The grotesque, topsy-turvy order of priorities adopted by Western nations in response to asylum-seekers from the developing world led to his murder. Sweden is compliant is in its own destruction. In his own words:

‘Sweden and Norway have identified me as a threat to their security. Yes, I am a threat to the Islamization project of the West, which is being pursued by your leftist communist government that is deceiving the citizens and making the country Islamic. So I have come to awaken the people and thwart the Islamization project of the West, and I will not be afraid of you.’

We must not let his legacy die.