Swedish News (in English): Following a storm of media criticism, officials at the Kulturhuset library in Stockholm have reversed their decision to remove Tintin comic books from its shelves, saying the move happened “too fast”.
“The decision happened too fast,” Kulturhuset head Eric Sjöström and the organization’s artistic director, Behrang Miri, said in a statement released late Tuesday morning.
The reversal comes after a report in Tuesday’s Dagens Nyheter (DN) newspaper in which Miri said the library planned to remove Tintin comics from its shelves.
“The image the Tintin books give of Africans is Afro-phobic, for example. Africans are a bit dumb, while Arabs sit on flying carpets and Turks smoke water pipes,” he told the paper.
But after criticism of the move erupted in Swedish media on Monday morning, Miri changed his stance.
“I wanted to highlight an opinion piece about issues of discrimination, but realize now that it’s wrong to ban books,” Miri said in a statement.
However, Kulturhuset head Sjöström applauded Miri for prompting a discussion about discrimination.
“The issues of discrimination, equality and norms continue to be debated and discussed,” Sjöström said in a statement.
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