Progressive city councilperson Sveinbjörg Birna Sveinbjörnsdóttir says she will not fight against a mosque in Reykjavík, and that Islamophobes who voted for her “bet on the wrong horse”.
“I find this really distressing,” Sveinbjörg told Rás 2 listeners yesterday morning, DV reports. “[The Progressives] were not trying to buy votes. [Opposition to a mosque] was not a campaign issue of the Progressive Party in Reykjavík, nor the Progressive Party as a whole. This is not in the Progressive Party platform. This was just something I said in half-carelessness. I’m not excusing myself, I’m just explaining how it was,” adding that she was only meaning to question whether Reykjavík had the authority to give religious groups free plots of land.
For the record, Sveinbjörg’s actual remarks on the matter, made one week before municipal elections, were the following: “As long as we have a national church, we should not grant plots of land for buildings such as mosques or for Greek Orthodox churches. … I lived in Saudi Arabia for about a year. My opinion is not based on prejudice, but on experience. I have, for example, just returned from one of the biggest mosques in the world, in Abu Dhabi. There are no churches there. I respect the values of other countries, and think this is a given.”
It is a measure of the disorientation produced by the current wave of Islamophobia, and the accompanying assault on multiculturalism, that a liberal newspaper like the Guardian can publish an article lauding a notorious racist.