Staying Real in Israel
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So Swedish and Norwegian pension funds are just SO moral, SO ethical, that they have decided that they must not taint their hands nor their investment portfolios with investments in a company that builds and installs surveillance systems designed to stop terrorists from killing innocent civilians…REALLY, now!!!…Elbit builds drones and other monitoring gear designed to detect terrorists attempting to cross Israel’s security barrier…an event known to occur pretty much on a daily basis on the border between Israeli and palestinian controlled areas. What is immoral or unethical about PREVENTING terror?
Please feel free to open your humble servant’s eyes on this one…

An Elbit Systems technician pilots a Universal Ground Control Station (UGCS) to operate drones

Swedish pension giant shuns Israeli arms maker


The biggest Swedish pension fund said Monday it had barred Israeli arms maker Elbit Systems from its investment portfolios on ethical grounds.

Reprinted from AFP/Google News

Following the lead of Norway’s state oil fund, Foersta AP-Fonden said it had banned investment in Elbit because it had built and was operating a surveillance system for a controversial barrier between Israel and the West Bank.

“The Ethical Council recommended that Elbit Systems Ltd should be excluded from each portfolio because it deems that the company can be linked to violations of fundamental conventions and norms,” it said in a statement.

Israel says the barrier — a network of walls, fences and closed military roads — is designed to prevent attacks. The Palestinians view it as an “apartheid wall” that carves off key parts of their future state.

Israel has so far completed 413 kilometres (256 miles) of the planned 709-kilometre (435-mile) barrier, according to UN figures.

When completed, 85 percent of the wall will have been built inside the West Bank, taking land from villages like Bilin and Nilin.

The international community has condemned Israel’s decision to construct the barrier.

The Swedish fund, which only had small investments in Elbit according to its ethics council chairwoman Annika Andersson, said that Grupo Ferrovial, PetroChina, Thales and Yahoo had successfully addressed its concerns about ethics violations.

Last September, Norway’s state pension fund, one of the world’s biggest investors, also banned Elbit from its portfolio, prompting the Israeli foreign ministry to summon Norway’s ambassador in protest at the move.

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.

In today’s show, my sights are set on Sweden.

This supposedly neutral country is turning out to be one of the most anti-Israel in all of Europe and Scandinavia.

The Swedish government has decided to grant entry visas to members of the terrorist organization, Hamas, contrary to the policy of most western and European countries.

They have also withdrawn from a planned military exercise due to the presence of the Israeli Air Force in the maneuvers.

How hostile can you get?

Add to this the recent exposure of a plot to attack a Christian Evangelical church in Upsalla, Sweden because of their pro-Israel position, and a very ugly picture begins to emerge of this frigid semi-socialist nation.

I also have a few things to say about Evangelical christian support of Israel in general, and singer MC Hammer, in particular.

Enjoy the show!

Sweden vs. Israel (and Evangelical Christians!): What happened to Neutrality?

Sweden is now the site of attacks on Evangelical Christian churches, as they welcome Hamas with open arms…

Sweden has granted entry visas to members of the terrorist organization Hamas…They say that Hamas is banned, but apparently that has nothing to do with its members…

And…A plot is uncovered to attack an Evangelical Christian church in Sweden…Why?…Because they showed support for Israel…

Sweden also refuses to participate in a European military exercise alongside Israel…Thought they were neutral…

Plus…What’s up with MC Hammer?…
All this and MORE…

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Sweden…

Beautiful NEUTRAL country, right?…

It will be a lot less beautiful after granting entry visas to members of the Hamas terrorist organization…

And it is a lot less neutral after refusing to participate in a military exercise alongside Israel…

His crime?

His “Word of Life” church in Sweden was visited by Israel’s ambassador…

Oh, and they support Israel…

Oh, yeah, they also helped Jews from the former Soviet Union immigrate to Israel…

That’s why his church in Sweden was targeted for attack by an Iranian, a Bosnian and a native Swede…

NOW I get it…

That was him in the “Can’t Touch This” days…

Today, he’s spreading “the Word”…

And supporting Israel, big time…