If anyone had thought that the slaughter of four Jews in a Paris supermarket -- for the reason that they were Jews -- would have caused the Swedish mainstream press and the government to explain who is behind Europe's growing anti-Semitism and anti-Jewish violence, he would be sadly mistaken. With the exception of one television program, the connection between anti-Semitism, Islam and Muslim mass immigration remains a mental no-go area in Sweden.
Sweden's history when it comes to Jews is not a pretty one. It was not until 1870 that Jews were permitted to settle wherever they wanted in the country. Sweden was behind the proposal to stamp a big "J" in the passports of German Jews, to prevent Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany from entering. And now the Swedish authorities close their eyes to the new Jew-hatred that is imported in the wake Muslim immigration.
Unfortunately, one of the worst offenders trying to hide the truth is a Jewish organization, the Swedish Committee Against Anti-Semitism [SKMA].
J for Jew
By the end of the 1930s, there was a growing stream of Jewish refugees from Germany to other European countries. Few countries wanted them, but how might one determine who were Jews and who were not? In 1938, Sweden and Switzerland approached Germany with the proposal to furnish Jews with special passports, and on October 5 that year the Germans complied. All passports belonging to Jews were declared null and void, and Jews who wanted to travel had to get new ones -- stamped with a big red "J" on the first page.
In 1943, when is became clear that Hitler would lose the war, Sweden hurried to restore some of its reputation. In Nazi-occupied Denmark, about 8,000 Jews had escaped deportation to Nazi concentration camps because they were under the protection of the Danish government, and were never forced to wear the yellow Star of David.
But on August 23, 1943, all cooperation between the Danish government and the occupation authorities broke down. The government resigned and the Germans imposed a state of emergency. After that, Danish Jews had no other protection than the Danish resistance, including remnants of the state administration and a largely sympathetic population. As Denmark's former Chief Rabbi Bent Melchior told Danish television some years ago, not a single Jew knocked on the door of his gentile neighbor without getting help.
The flight of the Jews
The Danish resistance got wind that the Germans planned to round up all 8,000 Danish Jews in the night between October 1 and 2, 1943, to deport them to German camps. In no time, the resistance, with the aid of a great many civilians, managed to thwart the operation. Fishing boats were mobilized to smuggle more than 7,000 Jews across the Øresund Sound to Sweden. Others were able to hide in Denmark. The 1500 German soldiers that took part in the operation only managed to catch 284 Jews on the night of the round-up. Unfortunately, more were apprehended later; altogether 474 Danish Jews ended up in the German concentration camp Theresienstadt, which was not an extermination camp. Most of them returned to Denmark after the liberation, but 53 died in German captivity, most of them old or sick.
The Danish Jews and a number of Danish resistance fighters were housed in Swedish boarding houses, youth hostels, hotels and private homes. (Among the resistance fighters was a gentleman, Leif Larsen, who had taken part in a shoot-out in Copenhagen. He found refuge in the home of one of the authors of this piece, the grandmother of Ingrid Carlqvist, and eventually married her aunt Solveig.)
Sweden's new self-image
After war's end, most of the Jews in Sweden returned to Denmark, but Sweden's self-image was forever changed. Finally, Sweden had something to be proud of after its highly dubious behavior at the time when it appeared that Hitler was on a winning streak.
Unfortunately, the Swedes drew an erroneous conclusion from their rescue of the Jews. Many Swedes are now firmly convinced that everyone seeking shelter in Sweden is in the same desperate predicament as the Jews were in 1943. One reason Swedes are more welcoming to asylum seekers than the inhabitants of most other European countries, is that they are distancing themselves from their despicable treatment of Jews before World War II, until 1943.
But this is precisely what has paved the way for a new Jew-hatred in Sweden. Swedes know nothing of the Jew-hatred in the Koran and the hadiths, so they just don't understand why Muslims attack Jews. If they even manage to hear about the attacks (the Swedish media seldom write about them), they will believe it has something to do with the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. Maybe the Arabs have a reason to be angry at Jews? And since the influential Jewish organization SKMA keeps saying that Jew-hatred and "Islamophobia" are birds of a feather, why should ordinary Swedes think anything else?
Swedes now tend to view all immigrants as victims of totalitarianism and refuse to acknowledge that not all immigrants think like Swedes. They cannot comprehend that people would flee unless they were hated and threatened.
Swedes have a minimal knowledge of the Jew-hatred that is part and parcel of Islam, and the authorities and politicians refuse to acknowledge that Jews are now fleeing the southern city of Malmö due to its steadily growing Muslim population. Quite simply, most Swedes have never realized that one minority group may expose another minority group to violence and intimidation.
There are other reasons Malmö's politicians turn a blind eye to Jew-hatred. Malmö is Sweden's third-largest city and probably has the greatest proportion of Muslims. (It is hard to give exact figures because Swedish law forbids registration based on religion.) It is normally assumed that approximately one-third of Malmö's 300,000 inhabitants have a foreign background and that their number is steadily increasing. Currently, most refugees come from Syria and Somalia, and most are Muslims.
Malmö's Socialist-Muslim connection
Malmö has nearly always been governed by Social Democrats -- a party that has every reason to keep on the good side of Muslims. In municipal elections, the Social Democrats can normally count on 30% of the general vote, and on 70% of the Muslim vote.
This circumstance was undoubtedly the most important reason the city's former Social Democratic Mayor, Ilmar Reepalu, refused to do anything about rampant Jew-hatred. He surely must have been aware that the perpetrators of anti-Semitic excesses were his own voters.
For many years, Malmö's Jews have reported a growing number of hate crimes against their synagogue and themselves, but nobody has taken their complaints seriously. Eventually, a journalist by the name of Andreas Lovén from the local newspaper Skånska Dagbladet wrote in a series of articles that Jew-hatred was causing more and more Jews to move to other Swedish cities or to Israel.
For the first time, it was openly said who was behind the anti-Semitism -- the city's Muslim population. Many Jews told the paper that they dared not let their children grow up in Malmö -- the town where, on January 25, 2009, a Muslim mob was allowed to pelt a peaceful Jewish demonstration in support of Israel with bottles, eggs and smoke bombs (see video).
Instead of breaking up the anti-Israel demonstration, which took place without a police permission and which seriously threatened the Jews and friends of Israel assembled at Malmö's Great Square (Stortorget), the police chose to revoke the Jews' right to assemble.
This decision was harshly criticized by Parliament's judicial ombudsman, who wrote: "To permit counter-demonstrators to more or less systematically prevent their opponents from voicing their opinions at public gatherings is unacceptable in a democracy."
Obama sends his envoy
Despite criticism by the judicial ombudsman, very little has happened. Not one of the many complaints to the police by the city's Jews has led to indictments, not to speak of convictions. Eventually, the situation got so bad that in April 2012, President Barack Obama sent his special envoy and head of the Office to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism, Hannah Rosenthal, to Malmö to read the riot act to Mayor Ilmar Reepalu. She pointed out that the problem is not only the many hate attacks on Jews but also the fact that the mayor has exacerbated the situation by statements such as: "Jews have themselves to blame as long as they don't distance themselves from Israel's abuse of Palestinians."
Last month, Swedish television aired a program on Jew-hatred in Malmö, which clearly documented that the hate emanates from the city's Muslim population. The reporter had donned a Jewish skullcap and a Star of David and went around town to see what happened. He was immediately met with verbal abuse and was spat on.
A later program dealt with the claim of anti-Muslim hatred in Sweden. A female reporter walked the streets of Södertälje with a veil. Most of the town's immigrants are Christian Syrians and Assyrians, with Muslims in a clear minority, and she was not accosted a single time.
So far, the team behind the program has been unable to motivate other mainstream media to look into Muslim Jew-hatred. It simple does not fit into their picture that all immigrants are victims.
Attacking the messenger
Regrettably, Sweden's biggest Jewish organizations are as blind as the media when it comes to the origins of Jew-hatred. The SKMA (Swedish Committee Against Anti-Semitism), equates Jew-hatred with hatred of Muslims, and attacks everyone who will speak out about the true genesis of "Swedish" anti-Semitism. The SKMA refuses to talk about Muslim Jew-hatred, and gladly walks side by side with imams to protest against "growing xenophobia". Whether they do this out of fear of the growing Muslim population or from sheer ignorance is hard to tell.
In December 2013, the SKMA criticized the Coordination Forum for Countering Antisemitism, an Israeli organization, for having "in articles dealing with anti-Semitism in Sweden spread Islamophobic messages" and thus "given legitimacy to the Swedish Muslim-hater Ingrid Carlqvist." SKMA accuses Carlqvist of equating Muslims with Nazis, which is a lie. What Carlqvist has written many times is that Islam, that is the ideology, can be compared to Nazism with its Jew-hatred, supremacist ideology and hunger for world domination.
The SKMA wrote:
"Carlqvist says that the media during several years refused to write about the anti-Semitism, and when they finally did they refused 'to write about the real problem – the big Muslim group in Malmö.' That led to people in other parts of Sweden 'got the impression that blond Swedes were behind the harassment of the Jews', Carlqvist explains."
Carlqvist, the SKMA claimed, likes to "pose as an opponent of anti-Semitism when it serves her political agenda."
What actually seems to have upset the supporters of the SKMA was that Carlqvist, writing in Dispatch International, compared them to the Verband nationaldeutscher Juden [Organization of German Nationalist Jews] who, in the 1930s, supported Hitler and claimed that Jews were treated fairly in Nazi Germany.
The question is how Swedish Jews will fare in an increasingly Islamic Sweden, when not even their own organizations will point out where the Jew-hatred comes from, but would rather attack Swedes who speak the truth about why Sweden went from a safe haven for Jews to a country Jews are fleeing from. As long as the SKMA refuses to acknowledge that the vast majority of the Swedish Jew-hatred comes from Muslim immigrants, how can one expect ordinary Swedes to understand what kind of threat the Islamization of Sweden is to all of us who live here?
The first to go down the road of extermination are the Saturday People; then come the Sunday People.
While Gatestone Institute stands by the articles written for it to date by Ingrid Carlqvist, Gatestone is no longer affiliated with her in any way.
