A far-right Danish-Swedish politician has been sentenced to prison on charges of incitement against an ethnic group for burning copies of the Qur’an and making offensive statements about Muslims.

Rasmus Paludan was the first person to go on trial in Sweden – and is now the first to be sentenced – for burning the Qur’an during an organised demonstration.

The leader of the Danish political party Stram Kurs (Hard Line) was on Tuesday sentenced to four months in prison at Malmö district court for two cases of incitement against an ethnic group and one case of insult in 2022. He was also ordered to pay damages and fees of 80,800 kroner (£5,822).

After Paludan’s trial last month, the chair of the court, Nicklas Söderberg, said: “It is permitted to publicly make critical statements about, for example, Islam and also about Muslims, but the disrespect of a group of people must not clearly cross the line for a factual and valid discussion.

“In these cases, there was no question of any such discussion. The statements instead only amounted to insulting and smearing Muslims.”

Paludan was sentenced to prison because he had been previously convicted of similar crimes by a Danish court, the Swedish court said.

The judgment said: “Rasmus Paludan has expressed disrespect for a people group or other such group of people with allusions to creed, national origin or ethnic origin by putting bacon in and around a Qur’an and then setting fire to, kicking and spitting on the Qur’an.”

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Europe has slid down the slippery slope of ‘hate’ speech, ‘offensive’ speech, pejoratively calling people ‘far-right’ much further than USA. I hope and believe Trump will keep his word on protecting American free-speech. Besides wooly-headed leftists and dim-witted Eurocrats, most serious thinkers can clearly see that speech restrictions for any reason should not be written into law. Those who do want speech proscriptions written into law invariably have something to hide, no matter how they couch their arguments. Buddhists will recall that there is a long tradition in Buddhism of denying the scaredness of even the Dharma itself, the teachings of the Buddha. There are multiple stories of monks spitting on statues of the Buddha to illustrate that nothing is so holy we cannot stand our own ground before it. The Buddha himself said once you have used the raft to cross the stream, you do not need the raft anymore and should abandon it. So from an American point of view and also a Buddhist point of view, I disagree strongly with all laws designed to control speech or define what is ‘hateful’ or ‘offensive’. Legally, logically, rationally and Buddhistically, it is a spiritual and civilizational dead end to punish speech, including ‘defaming’ so-called ‘sacred’ materials. ABN