December 15, 2015

Sweden Must Get on the Right Track

By Michael Curtis

Once upon a time Sweden produced both charm and righteousness. It graced the world with Garbo, Ingrid Bergman, Ingmar Bergman with his Smiles of a Summer Night, ABBA, the pop group, and the courageous Raoul Wallenberg who as a diplomat saved thousands of Hungarian Jews in Budapest from the Holocaust by providing them with “protective passports.”

Today, Sweden does not exemplify either charm or political wisdom. In most recent years it has had a high rate of anti-Semitism, the highest rate in Europe, and been the scene of violence and discrimination against Jews. Swedish towns have witnessed attacks on Jewish youth centers and synagogues, death threats, anti-Semitic graffiti on Jewish property, and use of Molotov cocktails against Jewish funeral parlors.

Most notorious is the town of Malmo, a city now half an hour train ride away from Copenhagen via the Oresund Bridge, which now has a considerable number of Muslim inhabitants. In that city, attacks on Jews tripled, with 60 incidents, between 2010 and 2012. Its streets have been full, as any tourist including this writer could witness, of anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli graffiti put up by its Muslim population. As a result, part of its Jewish population has left, leaving only 760 people with a 35-year-old rabbi.

The discrimination against Jews was compounded by the indifference, and even hostility, of the long-time mayor of Malmo, Ilmar Reepalu, 1994-2013.  Instead of condemning the attacks on Jews he excused them by saying, “We accept neither Zionism nor anti-Semitism. They are extremes that put themselves above other groups, and believe they have a lower value.” Indeed, he blamed the victims, interrelating anti-Semitism with criticism of Israel. Using the usual irrelevant anti-Israeli rhetoric, he said, “I would wish for the Jewish community (in Malmo) to denounce Israeli violations against the civilian population in Gaza. Instead, it decides to hold a pro-Israeli demonstration in the Grand Square of Malmo which could send the wrong signals.”

It was Reepalu who sent the wrong signals by denying that attacks on Jewish people had occurred. His comment was that if Jews from the city want to move to Israel that is not a matter for Malmo. In perverse fashion, he contended that any criticism of him was a “product of pro-Israeli lobbyism.” At least he did not mention a vast Jewish conspiracy against him.

The political blindness of Swedish officials continues. More pearls of wisdom came from the Swedish Foreign Minister Margot Wallstrom in her explanation of the Islamist terrorist attacks in Paris on November 15, 2015. She explained the attacks were rooted in the frustrations of Muslims in the Middle East. Like other anti-Israeli utterances, she connected the terror attacks in Paris with the complex relation of Israel and Palestinians.

Wallstrom accepted the absurd and irresponsible Palestinian Narrative of Victimhood, foolishly saying she said that “to counteract the radicalization we must go back to the situation such as the one in the Middle East, one in which the Palestinians see there is no future, and conclude we must either accept a desperate situation or resort to violence.”

After her irresponsible remarks were criticized, she did condemn the Paris “despicable” attacks and stated that terrorism must be opposed. Nevertheless, she still spoke of the need to tackle “the underlying causes of terrorism.” Seemingly, she still does not understand that the only cause of terrorism is Islamist terrorists.

Sweden has an ambiguous record during World War II. It did allow immigration of 900 Norwegian Jews and 8,000 Danish Jews. But, apart from Wallenberg, only eight other Swedes have been recognized by Yad Vashem as “Righteous among the Nations.” Sweden provided Nazi Germany with high-grade iron ore and ball bearings, used for the German armaments industry and indeed keeping it running, traded foodstuffs, paper and wood, allowed the transfer of 38 tons of gold from the Nazis, who had stolen it from Belgium and the Netherlands, to the Riksbank, the Swedish central bank, and allowed Nazi transit troops and supplies to use its facilities. Some Swedes fought for Hitler, even becoming members of the Waffen SS.

Sweden has shown a constant bias towards Israel. And yet regarding current politics, Sweden, on October 30, 2014, was the first Western European nation to recognize formally the “state” of Palestine.

Sweden has been delinquent in tackling its own problems, most of which result from the Muslim invasion that began in the 1970s. Islam is now the second largest official religion in the country. Estimates suggest there are between 400,000 and 500,000 Muslims, mostly Sunni, more than 5 per cent of the total population, and the number is increasing expeditiously.

Sweden prides itself on being a humanitarian country, and one that has been neutral and avoided military conflict. Now it is, according to the British think tank Quilliam, more tolerant than any other country to allow extremist Muslim preachers to enter the country. The king, Carl XVI Gustaf, is said to be considering letting Syrian refugees stay in some of his 18 unused palaces, though not in the official Drottningham Palace.

Muslims now have a political party, the Political Islamic Union, PIS, and have 3 representatives in the Swedish parliament. There are now said to be more than 50 areas in the country that Muslims control. Some estimates suggest that in less than twenty years, Sweden will have a Muslim majority.

The Muslim invasion has led to serious problems: the increase in rape, the increase in crime and unemployment, and the increasing number of “exclusion” areas, suburbs where Muslims live.

Sweden can take no pride in being referred to as the Rape Capital of Europe. There are few punishments in the country for the perpetrators of rape. The Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention has indicated that Muslims from North Africa were 23 times more likely to commit rape than other men in Sweden. The number of rapes has increased from 421 in 1975 to 6,620 in 2014.

The major response to the Muslim invasion has come from the Sweden Democratic Party. Founded in 1988, it is conservative, populist, nationalist, and above all, anti-immigration. Akin to similar parties in Europe, the Freedom Party in Austria, the Finns in Finland, the FN in France, and the UKIP in UK, it obtained in the 2014 election 12.9 per cent of the vote and 49 of the 349 seats in parliament. The current polls show it is the leading party in the country, with 26.7 per cent, ahead of the Social Democrats and the Moderate Party.

At the moment, unless the now declining mainstream political parties change their attitude, the Sweden Democratic Party is the only bastion concerned with the increasing Muslim invasion and possible Islamist terrorism. It is the only force attempting to prevent Swedes from being a minority in their own country.