Op-Ed: Islamicized Sweden Has Declared War on the Jews

Violence dominates the streets and a Jew in Sweden today feels like a Jew in Berlin in the '20s.

Giulio Meotti

The writer, an Italian journalist with Il Foglio, writes a twice-weekly column for Arutz Sheva. He is the author of the book "A New Shoah", that researched the personal stories of Israel's terror victims, published by Encounter. His writing has appeared in publications, such as the Wall Street Journal, Frontpage and Commentary. He is at work on a book about the Vatican and Israel.

In 2003, Azzam Tamimi, a Hamas member from Hevron, delivered a sermon at the Great Mosque in Stockholm, expressing support for suicide attacks against Israeli civilians. Outside the mosque, militants distributed leaflets containing calls to "liquidate the Jews in Palestine in the name of Allah".
Why did the Swedish authorities allow this Arab anti-Semite to deliver a homicidal sermon in their capital's main mosque if not to help foment a new war against the Jewish people?

Ten years later, and Sweden, long famed as a shelter for U.S. draft resisters, Arab immigrants, political refugees and other exiles, has become one of the most anti-Semitic countries in the world.
A recent poll found that 68 percent of Swedes have a negative opinion of Israel. No other nation in the West has a higher anti-Semitic public opinion. Everyone is welcome today in Sweden, except the Jews.

France and the UK registered many more anti-Semitic incidents than Sweden last year, but Sweden, like the Netherlands, is a kind of laboratory of Europe's general trend.

The Jews of Malmö, a community of about 1,500 in a city of 300,000 led by an anti-Semite like Reepalu, is a microcosm of what is happening elsewhere in the West.


In Sweden, which has one of the largest Muslim communities in Europe, the Jewish communities spend 25 per cent of their funds on security measures. It is a ghettoized and dying community.
Violence dominates the streets and a Jew in Sweden today feels like a Jew in Berlin in the '20s.
A Swedish mayor working to stop anti-Israel propaganda from being sold at a municipal cultural center was just phisically assaulted. Mats Green, mayor of Jonkoping, was wounded outside his home by two men who struck him and kicked him. His "guilt"? Trying to stop the sale of T-shirts emblazoned with the slogan “Burn, Israel, burn” at the Book Cafe, a shop operating inside a city-owned cultural center.

Not only is Swedish culture deeply anti-Zionist (Swedish bestselling author Henning Mankell was part of the pro-Hamas Flottilla), but also Sweden's political mainstream is imbued with anti-Semitism.

Omar Mustafa, a member of the Social Democratic Party’s governing board, called Sweden to send fighter planes to bomb Israel. In the same week another politician, Alexander Kieding of the Swedish Democrats party, an alderman in the Stockholm suburb of Jarna, declared that the Holocaust may have never happened and that “Israel inflated the number” of victims.

The European Jewish Congress has warned that the Jewish community living in the Swedish City of Malmo is in grave danger. Police presence is essential to enable Malmo’s Jews to celebrate any ritual in public and in safety. Last year, when the world remembered the infamous Nazi pogrom of Kristallnacht, in Malmö and Helsingborg, the manifestations took place without Jews, since the event had become a playground for gays, Muslims and leftists.

The Swedish government funds anti-Semitic publications without any shame - like the anti-Israel booklet "Colonialism and Apartheid – the Israeli occupation in Palestine", funded by the authorities in the sum of  $104,600, under the guise of "humanitarian aid". The brochure accuses Israel of racism, ethnic cleansing and segregation, and calls for a boycott of the Jewish State.
The national religious authorities promote anti-Israel hate. The Kyrkomötet - the Church Assembly of the Church of Sweden - has just called for a boycott of Israeli products manufactured in Judea and Samaria. Archbishop Karl G. Hammar, heading the Swedish Lutheran Church, was among the first Western Protestant leaders to call for a boycott.

The press too is totally lost to anti-Semitism. Swedish liberal publications are unilaterally imbued with anti-Jewish sentiment, but the conservative Svenska Dagbladet too published articles that invoked the image of Jews as child murderers. We can count an infinite number of anti-Semitic publications in the Swedish press which can challenge the hate of Nazi papers like Der Sturmer or the Soviet Pravda.

Economically, Sweden has passed many boycott initiatives against the Jewish State. A large Swedish pension fund divested from Elbit over the latter’s role in building Israel’s security fence. Meanwhile, the Ethical Council of four Swedish buffer pension funds urged Motorola “to pull out of the Israeli-occupied territories in the West Bank” or face divestment.

Unfortunately, many Swedish Jewish leaders have capitulated to the ghetto mentality as well.
When popular daily Aftonbladet falsely charged the IDF of harvesting Palestinians Arabs' organs and Israel asked the Swedish government to issue a condemnation, Lena Posner, head of the Jewish community in Stockholm and president of the Official Council of Jewish Communities in Sweden, declared: "Israel caused all this mess."

There is something rank and sour in Sweden. You see it from the artistic exhibitions, just as you could during the Nazi era.
The Martin Bryder Gallery in Lund displayed a vile "ash-painting" which used Jewish human remains stolen from the Majdanek Nazi death camp. Jewish cremated ashes for a postmodern artistic exhibition in the Islamicizied Sweden.
Previously, a Swedish Christian Art exhibition depicted Israelis as gun-toting rats devouring the “Holey(sic) Land”.
The Nazis used such dehumanization techniques to lay the groundwork for the physical extermination of those labelled “pests”, the Jews. The same is happening in Sweden.
During the Second intifada, a Swedish museum displayed an artist's work eulogizing the Palestinian suicide bomber Hanadi Jaradat, who killed 20 Israelis at the Maxim restaurant in Haifa, with a small ship carrying a picture of Jaradat, sailing in a rectangular pool filled with red-colored water, and accompanied by a piece of Bach's music.
An Arab waiter at the Maxim restaurant in Haifa brought Jaradat a menu and took her order. The Swedish terrorist 'heroine' ate calmly, watching the Israeli families unaware that they were eating their last meal and taking their last breaths. Then she blew herself up. All that remained of nineteen people—including five children, along with fathers and mothers and grandparents—was a pile of indistinguishable body parts.
If he were looking at his country today, a country which has declared war on the Jewish people, Swedish legend Raoul Wallenberg would say: "If I had a grave, I'd be turning over in it".