In an inversion of a famous Supreme Court argument, Swedes seem to ignore the dangers of an actual fire in a crowded theater: Like Muslims last month after a Koran burning at Stockholm, world Jews are irate over a Swedish police decision to allow a Saturday protest centered on a burning of sacred scriptures in front of the Israeli embassy at the Swedish capital. 

The planned burning of a Torah and a bible at the embassy was included in a request by a Swedish man who in applying for a police permit for his act claimed he wants to protect free speech. In his petition, the man reportedly argued his protest is a response to the burning of Koran in front of a Stockholm mosque on the Muslim holiday of Eid el Fitr. 

Jews are indignant. “I condemned the burning of the Quran, sacred to Muslims world over, and I am now heartbroken that the same fate awaits a Jewish Bible,” President Herzog of Israel said in a statement. “Permitting the defacement of sacred texts is not an exercise in freedom of expression, it is blatant incitement and an act of pure hate.”

Similar outrage was heard from Prime Minister Netanyahu and other Jerusalem officials, as well as leaders of Jewish communities in Sweden, other European countries, and America. While Stockholm may consider Jewish protest a small price to pay for protecting what it considers free speech, the response to the Koran burning may have been more serious and could prove harmful to Sweden’s national interests. 

Since the June 28 Koran burning, Arab and Muslim countries from Pakistan to Morocco have summoned Swedish ambassadors for dressings down and the United Nations Human Rights Council condemned it. Most damaging, Turkey used the incident to bolster its objection to Sweden’s request to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. 

While President Erdogan later reversed his resistance to Sweden’s NATO candidacy, the parliament at Ankara is yet to ratify the accession. The Koran burning is sure to be used by Turkish legislators who oppose the decision. No wonder the Swedish premier, Ulf Kristersson, went out of his way to denounce the provocative burning, saying, “Everything that’s legal is not appropriate.”

What, then, is the legal status of burning of scriptures? “The police do not issue permits to burn various religious texts, the police issue permits to hold a public gathering and express an opinion” a Swedish police spokeswoman, Carina Skagerlind, said, adding it was “an important distinction.”

Many Muslims, though, have low tolerance for such distinctions — or for Western notions of free speech altogether. In 2015 two French Muslim men famously opened fire with assault rifles at the offices of Charlie Hebdo after the magazine published a cartoon contest ridiculing Muhammad. Decades after Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against Salman Rushdie, an attacker stabbed and nearly killed the author. 

In 1997 Israeli police arrested at Hebron a 26-year-old cartoon artist and member of Rabbi Meir Kahane’s outlawed Kach party, Tatyana Suskin. Her offense: hanging posters depicting Muhammad as a pig — an animal banned in Islam — at the center of the West Bank’s most devout Muslim city. A Jerusalem court later convicted Suskin for acts of racism and offending religious sensibilities, both of which are illegal in Israeli law. 

Stopping Suskin’s provocation may have been sensible, as her act could have launched deadly riots in an already sensitive area. Yet, would America’s courts, with the First Amendment in mind, be as tough on her as Israel was at the time? Indeed, would our judicial system allow for the burning of Korans or Torahs in front of houses of worship and embassies?

“That would probably cross the line,” a criminal defense and civil liberties lawyer and writer, Harvey Silverglate, tells the Sun. Restrictions on free speech based on what is known in law as time, place, and manner are “one of the few things the Supreme Court has consistently kept for decades,” he says. “You cannot have a political speech using loudspeakers at 3 a.m. in a residential area.”

Mr. Silverglate, who co-wrote a strong defense of free speech in academia — “The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America’s Campuses” — says therefore that while the high court may permit a Koran burning at New York’s Central Park, it is unlikely to allow a similar act in front of a mosque, as in Sweden. 

In 1977 the Supreme Court refused to bar the Nazi party’s demand to march among Holocaust survivors at Skokie, Illinois. Yet, it has placed restrictions on speech for many decades in accordance with the observation, often ascribed to President Lincoln, that “the Constitution is not a suicide pact.” 

“The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic,” Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote in a celebrated 1919 case, Shenck v the United States. Setting fires to sacred texts in front of the most sensitive sites shows that a failure to predict the damage ignited by such cases may be just as harmful as falsely shouting “fire” in a crowded theater.