Will she or won’t she? The question of whether Turkey will greenlight Sweden’s accession to NATO continues to consume diplomatic circles as Ankara accuses Stockholm of failing to adequately address its “terror” concerns — in other words, to not extradite alleged “terrorists” and ban anti-Turkish demonstrations. The drama escalated when an Iraqi immigrant decided to tear out pages from a Quran, then wipe his shoes with some and burn others outside a Stockholm mosque on the first day of the Muslim Feast of Sacrifice, or Eid al-Adha. He then placed a slice of bacon in the sacred book as some 200 people looked on.
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Ankara was incensed at Swedish authorities’ decision to allow the ritual to proceed. Hakan Fidan, Turkey’s freshly minted foreign minister who is scheduled to hold talks with his Swedish and Finnish counterparts in Brussels on July 6 to unlock the deadlock over Sweden’s NATO membership, called the action “vile” and said it was “unacceptable to allow anti-Islam protests in the name of freedom of expression,” as Ezgi Akin reported.
Erdogan chimed in on Thursday. “We will eventually teach Western bastions of arrogance that insulting Muslims is not freedom of thought,” Erdogan told members of his Justice and Development Party via a video message.
