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Looks like there is a lot more than NHL hockey players and tasty meatballs coming out of the Swedish city of Malmo…
It’s especially disturbing to see a country that helped SAVE Jews from the Nazis during the Holocaust now ignorantly comparing the Jewish State to those self-same Nazis. It is very difficult for me to discern where the line is between just good (bad) old-fashioned ant-Semitism that has been with us for eternity, and mere ignorance of the reality on the ground in the Middle East. I guess the naive in me, believing in the inherent good of man, so WANTS to believe that the hatred cannot really run so deep…just give them the facts, and they will see the light!!
Unfortunately, reality does NOT seem to bear this out, at least in my experience…

Sweden: A new hotbed of hatred?


With the repugnantly named – and deliberately so – Israeli Apartheid Week behind us, it feels particularly correct to have taken a commentary pass on the annual hate-fest, since media focus is clearly one of the event’s objectives.

Reprinted from Thestar.com Rosie DiManno

This is always a difficult decision, whether to rise to the bait or leave those inclined to foment venom to their crude business, which is so palpably not as claimed – legitimate discussion of Israel’s policies in the Occupied Territories, some of which are notoriously anti-productive in getting a political resolution back on track. To wit: Last week’s ill-timed, embarrassing and quite harmful announcement, with U.S. Vice-President Joe Biden on the ground to hopefully kick-start “proximity talks,” of new settlement housing plans in contested East Jerusalem.

Yet ignoring the zealous fringe runs the risk of allowing odious cant, unchallenged, to take root in the fertile, manure-enriched low ground where the shoots of anti-Semitism thrive. That’s what has happened widely in Europe, where both the right and left fringe have so contaminated the centre on the issue of Israel that frightened Jews are aghast at the naked anti-Semitism now passing for acceptable criticism of the Jewish state.

This alarming phenomenon has recently been exposed in, of all places, the Swedish city of Malmo, heretofore known mostly as an incubator of NHL hockey players and an urban backdrop in the Kurt Wallander detective novels of Henning Mankell.

Sweden, for the love of God, has a history of offering sanctuary to European Jews during the Holocaust – as it has also, in recent decades, to Muslims fleeing conflict in Arab nations. It is the birthplace of Raoul Wallenberg, who helped save tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews from the Nazis. It has strong laws against Holocaust denial and defamation of minorities.

Yet it is also the country where the largest-circulation newspaper published a scandalously misleading report accusing the Israeli military of killing Palestinians to harvest their human organs – a modern-day repetition of the historical blood libel all too familiar to Jews. It is a country where the vice-chair for the Social Democratic Women in southern Sweden felt free to prattle: “I think Gaza is comparable to the Warsaw Ghetto … I’m surprised that Israel … can do the exact same things the Nazis did.”

Really? The exact same thing?

Here is the left-wing mayor of Malmo, Ilmar Reepalu, well-known for his outspoken pro-Palestinian bias, responding last month to a reporter’s straightforward question about whether he would state clearly that the city does not accept anti-Semitism: “We don’t accept anti-Semitism or Zionism. They (both) are extremists who want to set themselves over other groups and believe those others are worth less.”

Yes, the mayor of the third-largest city in Sweden blithely yoked anti-Semitism and Zionism as equally reprehensible – that would be Zionism, as the movement that brought forth Israel as a state; and Zionism, which the United Nations belatedly apologized for linking with racism by rescinding a shameful 1975 General Assembly resolution to that effect.

Reepalu added that Jews “have the possibility to affect the way they are seen by society” – a patently snide insinuation that Jews are responsible for the violence directed against them in such places as Malmo for their failure to denounce Israeli policies toward Palestinians, as if Jews the world over are to blame and thus rendering themselves targets. Would anybody claim that the diaspora of Muslims is responsible for the seething anti-Semitism of Hamas or Hezbollah and their charters calling for the outright elimination of Israel?

Malmo is a city of nearly 300,000 people. It has a tiny minority of 1,200 Jews. About a quarter of Malmo’s residents are immigrants, roughly 20 per cent of them Muslim, mostly of Arab origin. Hate crimes against Jews have spiked – 80 in 2009 reported to police, with cemeteries and synagogues desecrated, children taunted and at least 30 observant families moving to Israel in the last year to get away from harassment, according to recent stories in The Wall Street Journal and The Sunday Telegraph in London.

“I never thought I would see this hatred again in my lifetime, not in Sweden anyway,” Judith Popinski, a Holocaust survivor who arrived in Malmo 65 years ago, told the Telegraph.

When the issue of Jews now fleeing Malmo was raised with Reepalu, the mayor claimed: “There haven’t been any attacks on Jewish people, and if Jews from the city want to move to Israel, that is not a matter for Malmo.”

Interestingly, and significantly, Malmo’s Jews don’t blame Muslims for their predicament. It is fellow Swedes, not Arab immigrants, who are primarily making them feel unwanted and targeted – just as homegrown Christian and secular Swedes were behind a rock-throwing counter-demonstration against a pro-Israel rally last year, and the quarantining, under city council orders, of a Davis Cup tennis match between Israel and Sweden. A Stop the Match campaign, coalescing around Israel’s action in the Gaza war, successfully forced the best-of-five series (which Israel won) to be held in a near-empty stadium, with thousands of anti-Israel protesters turning violent outside the venue anyway. A Swedish appeals court just upheld the conviction and six-month prison sentence of one of those rioters.

Sweden’s players and the country’s tennis federation were furious at the council, which had banned spectators claiming the city couldn’t guarantee security. “It’s an unfortunate consequence of individual politicians trying to score political points,” said the federation chairman. “We thought the decision (by Malmo) was irresponsible and we still think so.”

Crowed Olof Holmberg, spokesman for Stop the Match: “We concluded that Malmo is Gaza. We were all Palestinians at the stadium.”

Mayor Reepalu made it quite clear he would have preferred if the matches were not played at all, a kind of sports disinvestment.

This is what happens when the demonization of Israel – Israelis, Jews – enters the populist mainstream, an asp at the breast of democracies that uphold, quite properly, the principles of free speech and freedom of assembly.

Righteous hate-mongers claim the win.

It is very obvious to us here, in Israel, that the palestinians are making a concentrated effort to stir things up in the region. They are using Israel’s statement about Jewish heritage to stimulate a conflagration of violence, which they hope will spread throughout the region, leading to war and, ultimately, Israel’s annihilation (they hope). No state-building, no building of infrastructure, no building of institutions, no economic development…Just hatred and violence. They don’t want a state, they want to eliminate the existing state of Israel. that is enough to satisfy palestinian aspirations. They don’ have what it takes to build a nation. Maybe because they are NOT really a nation…just a collection of wandering arabs from the region…THAT is the reality…We have seen this SO many times before, but the world just buys it, lock, stock and barrel. Any excuse for anti-semitism, anti-israel-ism…

ME anger at Israeli ‘escalations’

Clashes between Israeli police and Palestinian protestors over the issue of holy sites have provoked a wave of condemnation in the Arab press for Israel’s behaviour

Reprinted from BBC News

On Sunday several Palestinians were arrested after Israeli security forces entered the Temple Mount in East Jerusalem. The incident followed clashes in the West Bank town of Hebron on Friday over Israel’s decision to list two disputed shrines as heritage sites.

The Palestinian press painted Israel’s actions as a deliberate attempt to escalate conflict in the region. Newspapers in the Middle East condemned what was perceived as a concerted effort to oppress Islamic identity and set back the peace process.

In Israel, one editorial acknowledged that the decision to list the disputed shrines may have been a “tactical mistake”, while another commentator attacked the US response to the issue.

EDITORIAL IN PALESTINIAN AL-QUDS

The fresh Israeli aggression against the sanctity of the al-Aqsa mosque, and the attacks on worshippers by the Israeli security apparatus, represent the latest in a series of Israeli escalations over the past few weeks… they show that [Israel] is determined to escalate and even expand the conflict.

AYMAN ABU-NAHIYAH IN PALESTINIAN FILASTIN

The Judaization of Hebron… is a prelude to the Judaization of the al-Aqsa mosque and the rest of Palestine… this will include the expulsion of Palestinians from their homes and the seizure of their properties.

TALAL AKWAL IN PALESTINIAN AL-AYYAM

The US silence shows that ongoing attempts to resume negotiations have stalled and that those might have to wait until after a new Palestinian intifadah or even war.

EDITORIAL IN EGYPT’S AL-JUMHURIYAH

Israeli plans to Judaize the al-Aqsa mosque and other occupied Islamic places are being implemented without any respect to religious or man-made laws… these extremely racist practices will not halt… until Arab and Islamic countries have the teeth to enforce international law.

EDITORIAL IN SAUDI AL-JAZIRAH

The Israelis are working incessantly to change everything in Palestine and give it a Jewish aspect in a bid to wipe out Arab and Islamic identity… meanwhile, Arabs and Muslims are preoccupied [with their own affairs] while the Palestinians are preparing to fight each other.

EDITORIAL IN IRAN’S AL-VEFAGH

Israel’s plan to swallow Palestine has reached a peak… its project is to wipe Palestine from the map… an escalation rather than a settlement is looming in the region.

EDITORIAL IN SYRIA’S AL-BA’TH

The Israeli occupation of holy sites and the symbols of Palestinian heritage is part of a comprehensive Israeli war to Judaize the Palestinian areas and eliminate their Arab and Islamic identity.

OFIR HAIVRI IN ISRAEL’S YEDIOT AHARANOT

The [US] State Department spokesman Mark Toner has condemned the inclusion of the Cave of the Patriarchs and Rachel’s Tomb in the list of Jewish heritage sites… the State Department did not bother to demand details… the way the matter was dealt with… is not only amateurish but could also have disastrous implications for an explosive region like ours.

EDITORIAL IN ISRAEL’S JERSULALEM POST

The Jewish people’s historic connection to the sites in question does not require cabinet approval to be deemed legitimate… the [national heritage] list could have been left ambiguous… still, if [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu made a tactical mistake, the immediate Palestinian resort to violence was deliberate and inexcusable.