Outpour of Support for Swedish Muslims
“Each time there has been an attack, the same mosque has then received a kind of 'love bomb' where people have shown their support and sympathy,” Omar Mustafa, chairman of the Islamic Association in Sweden, told the Swedish news agency TT.
“A large part of the population is strongly against this type of attacks and tomorrow we will gather these good forces.”
Ahead of yesterday’s Friday prayer, Uppsala mosque was “lovebombed” with colorful paper hearts and messages of support that covered the building entrance.
The nice gesture from the society followed an earlier attack last Thursday on mosque when a man threw a burning object at the Muslims’ worshipping house.
Moreover, the main door of the mosque which was emblazoned with the insulting slogan against Muslims.
Mosques in Sweden have been subject to growing number of attacks in recent months.
Thursday’s attack came just three days after a late night blaze at a mosque in Esloev in southern Sweden which police suspect as arson.
On Christmas day, five people were hurt in another fire at a mosque in Eskilstuna in central Sweden.
According to the anti-racism magazine Expo, there have been at least a dozen confirmed attacks on mosques in Sweden in the last year and a far larger number are believed to have gone unreported.
Muslims make up between 450,000 and 500,000 of Sweden’s nine million people, according to the US State Department report in 2011.
In 2013, around 300 hate crimes against Muslims were reported in Sweden.
Such incidents are on the rise according to the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention.
