European opposition to the death penalty leads to peculiar paradoxes. Can a European country deport a pro-death penalty cleric, who supports killing infidels, gay people, and just about anybody else, to Iraq, which has a death penalty and might employ it on him?
Is that poetic justice or a human rights violation?
That’s the quandary of the week in Swedenistan.
Abu Raad, who works at the al-Rashideen mosque in the city of Gävle, was seized on Wednesday and and placed in a migration detention centre along with his adult son.“We want to know the reason for this. We don’t know anything,” Mohammad al-Najjar, the mosque’s leader, told Sweden’s TT news wire. He said he was hoping to be able to make contact with Raad over the weekend through his lawyer.
Baffling.
Why would a devout Muslim cleric be detained in tolerant Sweden? It’s either Islamophobia or ISISphobia.
According to Doku, which investigates Islamic extremists in Sweden, Raad has inspired many Islamic State sympathisers, has hailed an IS victory in Iraq, and has called for homosexual men to be executed.
But there is a Save Raad campaign underway.
Raad’s relatives on Thursday circulated a petition claiming that he was facing deportation, and would face “a guaranteed death sentence” if he ever returned to Iraq.
And if he remains in Sweden, its population will face “a guaranteed death sentence”.
It’s a matter of choosing who lives and who dies.
Raad or Sweden.