Rioting in Stockholm

The UK and U.S. Embassy have cautioned their nationals about visiting Stockholm and environs because of a of week of riots in ostensibly enlightened Sweden by predominantly Muslim immigrants and their children, attributed alternatively to “police brutality” or bad social conditions.

In 2010, the Simon Wiesenthal Center issued its own “travel advisory” cautioning Jewish travelers from traveling to Sweden’s third largest city, Malmo for its failure to protect its Jewish citizens from serial intimidation and official indifference. A visit by Center Associate Dean Rabbi Abraham Cooper and Dr. Shimon Samuels with city fathers, as well as Sweden’s Justice Minister, confirmed their worst fears. In fact, other minorities they met with including Muslims and Roma echoed the concerns of the tiny Jewish community. The local Swedish authorities didn’t act then and apparently the malaise runs much deeper.
The contrast between two men—diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who risked all to save Hungarian Jews during World War II, and contemporary Malmö Mayor Ilmar Reepalu—demonstrates Sweden’s descent from heroic martyrdom into hateful demagoguery.

Social Democratic Mayor Reepalu made groundless charges that the extreme-right Swedish Democratic Party has infiltrated Malmö Jewish community to spread hatred of Muslims. Despite documented statistics that hate crimes against Jews doubled in his city during 2010 alone, Reepalu denies that there has been an increase. After a group of Swedish Muslims in Malmö shouted “Sieg Heil” and “Hitler, Hitler” and threw rocks at a small group of Jews peacefully demonstrating in support of Israel. Reepalu said that Sweden’s Jews were largely culpable for the violence inflicted on them because they didn’t “ distance” themselves from Israel during the Gaza War.

“It is really to worry about in a democratic society like Sweden that 55 years after the war (Nazis) are showing their ugly faces again,” Posner- Korosi, head of Stockholm’s Jewish community, said in 2000, after a television program profiling young Swedes who volunteered to fight for Hitler during World War II, and a recent poll showing that almost a third of young Swedes doubt that the Holocaust occurred.
Sweden is often criticized for its equivocal neutrality during World War II when it provided refuge to thousands of Danish Jews yet at the same time supplied Nazi Germany with iron ore and ball bearings while allowing the Wehrmacht to use the railway system to transport soldiers. Today, Sweden is worse than neutral in what is a new global war to delegitimate Israel and marginalize Jews everywhere.
Despite some efforts at Holocaust education, and an unenforced law against Denial, the Swedish government remains unwilling to stand up for the victims of anti-Semitism at home and abroad. A European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC) report—which the EU ordered suppressed—documented that cemetery desecrations, threatening phone calls, and violent attacks on Jews have been on the increase across Sweden. The Swedish government in 2002 joined five other EU members in voting for a UNHRC resolution accusing Israel of a long list of human rights violations, but making no mention of suicide bombings of Israeli civilians, and supporting “all available means, including armed struggle” to establish a Palestinian state.

The realm of international sports a good example of the poisoning of Swedish public life by biases that update Nazi Europe’s anti-Semitism. In Malmö, where Muslims makes up a quarter of the city’s 250,000 population, the City Council voted 5 to 4 to hold the scheduled Davis Cup Match between Israel and Sweden behind closed doors. The spectacle of Israeli athletes forced to perform under what amounts to apartheid conditions and Jewish fans barred from attending events to root for them recalled the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

Vilification of Israel and condemnation of European Jews for supporting it is no longer limited to the Neo-Nazi fringe and Muslim extremists. In 2004, a Swedish government conference on preventing genocide was coordinated with a Stockholm museum exhibit, entitled “Snow White and the Madness of Truth,” that glorified an Islamic Jihad homicide bomber who mass murdered 22 Israeli Jews and Arabs at a Haifa café.
Echoing Sweden’s Ahmed Rami, proprietor of virulently anti-Semitic “Radio Islam,” is a large swathe of the Swedish political establishment. “Israel is an apartheid state. I think Gaza is comparable to the Warsaw ghetto . . . . I’m surprised that Israel . . . can do the exact same things the Nazis did,” said Ingalill Bjartén, the vice-Chair for the Social Democratic Women in southern Sweden. “I don’t think Israel is a democracy worthy of the name. It’s a racist apartheid state,” said the Left Party’s Hans Linde, calling for a boycott of Israel. On the right, Carl Bildt, Sweden’s foreign minister, after visiting Gaza blamed Israel for intentionally targeting economic infrastructure and called Israeli policies “neither morally nor politically defensible.”
In 2012 on the hundredth anniversary of Raoul Wallenberg’s birth, Sweden’s largest newspaper, “Aftonbladet,” a revival of the age-old blood libel against the Jews. “They Plunder the Organs of Our Sons,” read the unsubstantiated quote from a Palestinian which served as the headline across a double spread in the Swedish equivalent of “the Style Section” of the “New York Times.”

Regarding Sweden’s treatment of its own minorities, people—unlike pets—ultimately resent being patronized. This is proving true of Swedish Muslims who currently receive “multicultural” tokenism rather than real opportunity to enter society’s mainstream. A foreign policy of pandering to anti-Israel sentiment isn’t saving Sweden from a domestic reckoning.