Swedish Political Commentator Interrogated by Police over Sharia Law Satire Facebook Post

Swedish political commentator Jan Sjunnesson was interrogated by police after a well-known “anti-hate group” reported him for sharing a satirical book cover mocking Islamic sharia law on Facebook.

Mr. Sjunnesson was interrogated by police late last week after he posted a photo on Facebook depicting two fictional book covers that satirised elements of sharia law. One of the fake book covers depicted two Muslim men whipping another man, a punishment prescribed under sharia, with the title “With grandfather at work”.

 

Sjunnesson, who formerly worked as an editor for the populist Sweden Democrats magazine Samtiden, told Breitbart London that he did not create the image but that it was a play on recent children’s books. One of which, he said, was entitled Grandfather Has Four Wives.

According to the former magazine editor, the notorious Näthatsgranskaren online social justice “anti-hate” group was behind reporting his Facebook post to the police.

Näthatsgranskaren, Swedish for “Network Examiner”, has been credited with a huge surge in hate speech prosecutions as it persistently looks for material it deems to be hateful across the Swedish social media landscape.

The group, which was founded by ex-police officer Tomas Åberg, has not been without controversy as Åberg even publicly admitted that most of the people reported for hate speech to the police have been elderly women.

One of the women reported by the group, a 65-year-old who posted that mass migration would lower the general Swedish IQ, described being harassed by police on multiple occasions during their investigation and that the anti-hate group had been keeping tabs on her online posts since 2016.

Hate speech has become a major topic, along with so-called fake news, in Sweden ahead of this year’s national election with the government giving millions to fund various programmes including those involving the mainstream media.

Sjunnesson added that the case was officially closed by police on Tuesday but said he feared that despite the activist group seeing very few of their reports go to court, the tarnishment of a person’s reputation from being called into a police interrogation could stop others from speaking out.