Boycott the Jews. In Sweden.

When blood-libels about organ-harvesting don’t work, it’s time to dust off that other weapon that has served racists so well for centuries: the boycott.

Not just any boycott.

A boycott solely against people of one single faith.

People who refuse to betray their own country.

And not just any people either. Academics. The leading thinkers of any democratic society, the progressives who embrace free thought as part and parcel of their pursuit of expertise.

No, we’re not talking about Egypt, whose Muslim majority routinely violate the human rights of the country’s 3 million Coptic Christians.

Neither are we talking about the Shia Muslims of Iraq who slaughter the Sunni Muslims of Iraq in the name of Islam. And vice versa.

Nor are we talking about the Muslim Palestinian Authority in the West Bank (the Jewish provinces of Judea and Samaria where the Palestinian Arabs want to create a second Palestinian state alongside Jordan). In the West Bank, Christian Arabs living in the cradle of Christianity are so relentlessly pursued by their Muslim neighbours that their population in Bethlehem has dwindled to one-third its size in just one generation.

And of course we are not talking about the Gaza Strip, where ethnic cleansing got a head start with the removal of every single Jew, dead and alive, before the territory was handed over to the Gazans as a first step in the establishment of peace and a new nation. What the Muslim-majority Gazans did instead was to turn on the Christian minority, which has since been decimated.

When it comes to use of the boycott as a weapon against people of a single faith, we are, in fact, talking not about any of the above, but about Sweden.

KTH, the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, is organizing a “seminar to discuss the case for boycotting Israel”. Presenting the case for a boycott will be such leading lights of democracy and fidelity as Dror Feiler, a communist who renounced his Israeli citizenship and now campaigns in Sweden on behalf of terrorist organizations such as Hamas. He is regarded in many circles as a traitor. He is also President of European Jews for a Just Peace, an organization numbering almost a hundred people. He does not represent more than a handful of Jews in Sweden but is given widespread coverage by a media enchanted with the Palestinian narrative and deaf to any other.

At the KTH event, Associate Prof Jan-Erik Gustafsson will “report about the Birzeit group for international academic boycott”.

So it’s going to be a balanced, fair and above all representative exchange of views, then.

Interestingly, not a word is mentioned by these champions of human rights on the subject of China, which has occupied and annexed Tibet these past fifty years. Or Turkey, which committed unspeakable atrocities against the Armenians and still occupies Armenia. Neither is Russia mentioned, despite its continued occupation of Chechnya. The Kurds still do not have a country of their own and have been hounded over the centuries – yet another subject that KTH chooses not to highlight.

And that’s before we even mention that other paragon of democracy and enlightenment, Iran, which continues to trumpet its determination to erase Israel from the map and is pursuing the development of nuclear technology for that purpose.

The boycott supporters at KTH prefer not to delve into the legion human rights abuses occurring every day in the Palestinian territories – honour killings, systematized rapes of Christian women, the illegal incarceration of the one sole Jew still (hopefully) alive in Gaza – Gilad Schalit who was kidnapped from sovereign Israel three years ago and still held without access to the Red Cross, his family, legal representation (not that he is accused of anything apart from Judaism, a crime in Gaza), the summary executions of political opponents. None of this matters.

There is a considerable risk to constantly crying “anti-Semitism” every time something of a tacit anti-Semitic nature takes place. The term and its meaning risk being diluted.

There is however an even greater risk to ignoring anti-Semitic attacks when they occur in countries that are ostensibly democracies. Because it sets society on the slippery path to indifference. And we know where that leads. Ask the people of Cambodia, Darfur, Bosnia, Tibet, Armenia, Kurdistan. And the decimated Jews of Europe.

Interestingly enough, one of the participants at the KTH seminar is the Egyptian propaganda ministry. That may of course explain the utter silence on the plight of Egypt’s Coptic Christians.

It also raises interesting questions about how one of Sweden’s foremost educational establishments has been infiltrated by a foreign governmental agency with a murky agenda.

For an insight into how Egypt is perceived today, read this article by former Israeli ambassador to Egypt Mr Zvi Mazel.

And for an insight into how Sweden is perceived today, read this interview by Dr Manfred Gerstenfeld.

With Egyptian state infiltration into Swedish academia, Swedish state funding of various anti-Israel NGOs, and the total infiltration of UNRWA by various Palestinian Arab terrorist and criminal gangs, it is time to step back and ponder where we are headed in the Middle East.

Because constellations such as the Sweden/Egypt/Hamas/media/academia axis seem to be working cohesively outside the established policy structures.

The lack of transparency is worrying. Like now at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, which demands that Jewish Israeli academics betray their country if they wish to be treated as equals.

It’s an echo of what Ilmar Reepalu, the mayor of Malmö in southern Sweden said recently: that only Swedish Jews who renounced all affiliations with Israel could reasonably be expected to live in peace and security in Sweden.

He made no corresponding demand on Swedish Muslims.
 
Malmö mayor Ilmar Reepalu may well be an honorary member of the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.

They certainly speak and act in sync.


Interesting link:
CAMERA reports that government-funded anti-Israel NGOs have been operating for many years.

Hear the Israeli position from two Israeli ambassadors

Tired of Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt's silence?

Here are two Foreign Ministry officials who do speak out. They are both from Israel.

Carl Bildt caused a major rift between his country and Israel after ordering that Sweden's ambassador to Israel withdraw her remarks from the embassy website. There she expressed dismay over a highly inflammatory anti-Semitic article by left-wing tabloid Aftonbladet.

Israel did not want the Swedish government to curtail the newspaper's writing - freedom of expression is as entrenched in the Israeli mindset as it is in the Swedish constitution. What it wanted was an expression of sympathy after Israel was accused in Sweden of systematic organ harvesting from Arabs.

Neither did Israel want an apology from the Swedish government - an apology can only be issued by the newspaper itself. It is not the Swedish government that is anti-Semitic, it is large swathes of the Swedish media that are adopting an increasingly troublesome stance.

However, Carl Bildt's abrupt removal of the Swedish ambassador’s sympathetic remarks was seen as an act of insurmountable arrogance and ill-will consistent with past behaviour – part of a very troublesome pattern. Israel now wants the Swedish government to make its position clear. It does not expect or advocate curtailment of freedom of expression, but simply for the Swedish government to make good use of that freedom itself, to express its regret that Israel was so grossly insulted.

On Saturday you could see here the current Israeli ambassador to Sweden, Benny Dagan, in a TV interview in which he presented Israel’s views on the current crisis. Mr Dagan was a textbook example of cool, articulate forthrightness. He did an excellent job of putting Israel’s case and highlighting the ethical shortcomings in the Swedish media’s dealings with Israel. Not least by asking them whether they were now, in light of the disgraceful allegations of organ harvesting, going to pursue research into other classic anti-Semitic blood-libels such as the Jewish conspiracy that blew up the World Trade Centre, the baking of unleavened bread using the blood of Christian children, the spread of AIDS in the Arab world and so on.

Today Sunday you can see an interview with one of Israel’s former ambassadors to Sweden, Zvi Mazel, today a Fellow of the Jerusalem Centre for Public Affairs.

Mr Mazel provides a wide historical perspective and a first-hand view of the situation in Sweden. This interview too is compelling viewing, revealing interesting insights and explaining the background to Sweden’s increasingly strident position on Israel.

Both interviews are in English, although the interview with Mr Dagan also features some background commentary in Swedish.

Ambassador Zvi Mazel sums up Sweden in a nutshell

It was highly interesting to read former Ambassador Zvi Mazel’s concise assessment of Israel’s status in the “Israel Advocacy” area. Living in Sweden and working with hasbara for 25 years, it saddens me to say Ambassador Mazel is entirely correct. The people at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs do a remarkable job under impossible conditions, and they deserve nothing but the highest praise for their accomplishments.

The problem is not with the highly motivated but vastly overworked staff there, but with the failures of their political masters who in the run up to and the wake of the Oslo debacle decided that the world understood Israel’s position, and that therefore no further information effort was needed.

Those of us who live outside Israel but work with Israel advocacy are in the front line of the information war. It is we who have our fingers on the pulse, long before Israeli politicians absorbed in the heat of domestic and foreign politics are ever aware of changes in the making. It is we who first see the signs of the shift in tone in our various countries as the relentless Arab propaganda onslaught gathers momentum while Israel’s own information efforts are cut back; not least, it is our children who are often the first to feel the brunt of the shift in pro-Arab, anti-Israel sentiment, because it is usually first expressed in the form of anti-Semitism – with our kids being the easiest target.

Israeli politicians who for perhaps very understandable short-term financial reasons authorise cutbacks in the country’s information effort need to pay closer attention to experts like Mr Mazel – and to those abroad who work in tandem with the likes of the ambassador and the excellent team at the MFA: a pro-active information drive is not a negotiable expense that can be cut in the face of other pressing needs; rather, it is a strategic investment designed to put Israel on equal footing with her enemies on a very real battleground, where the war is fought with words and under the media spotlight.

The staff at the MFA need far more backing than they have had this past decade. Israel’s failings in the information war are not the fault of MFA staff working against impossible odds to carry out their orders, it is the fault of their political masters who for a decade have simply had no orders to give them.

Ambassador Mazel is right: we need to re-dedicate ourselves to the information effort. That decision can only come from the very highest level within the government – whatever its political colour.

Our future depends on it.

The art of terror, Swedish style

January this year saw a controversial work of art exhibited in Stockholm. “Snow White” depicted a smiling female Palestinian terrorist sailing in a pool of blood-red water. Israel’s Ambassador to Sweden Zvi Mazel added a touch of unexpected action to the exhibit by disconnecting the lights and throwing a tripod into the pool.

Mr. Mazel’s actions sparked strong protests from both the Swedish cultural elite and the country’s media, whose herd instinct on anything relating to the Middle East is legendary. The media have maintained a largely negative stance on the ambassador’s actions – echoing their attitude to the country he represents – while Swedish public opinion, assaulted by repeated footage of the carnage in Israel caused by Palestinian suicide bombings, tend to side with the beleaguered ambassador.

Media catching up to reality
Now it seems the Swedish media are beginning to catch up with public opinion. On 21 September, Thomas Lunderquist, commenting on cultural issues in Sweden’s foremost daily Svenska Dagbladet, wrote that art “must remain free in a decent society ... For that reason, ambassador Zvi Mazel’s action was wrong. But let’s keep a healthy sense of perspective in all this. What is most worthy of our indignation? To set off a bomb in an Israeli-Arab restaurant and kill 21 civilians and injure another 50 or so people, or to disconnect the power socket from a lamp and then chuck the lamp into a pool of water? … (This reaction) was an expression of desperation in the face of Sweden’s inability or unwillingness to understand Israel and its citizens’ struggle for a fundamental human right – survival.”

By remarkable coincidence, Lunderquist’s article came shortly after Reuters’ global managing editor David A. Schlesinger confirmed that he instructs his reporters not to use terms like “terrorism” in reports from the Arab world because “my goal is to protect our reporters”. Reporting the news apparently isn’t a foremost concern at Reuters. One might well ask what else Reuters are denying the public.

Censorship thrives
Many of the international stories that monopoly Swedish news agency TT allows through to its readers come from Reuters. Consequently, the views of Swedish journalists are prejudiced already at source, even before the public get their TT-sanitised version of events. With this aggressive culture brewing within the media, it is scarcely surprising that Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter described Ambassador Mazel’s actions as that of “a vengeful Old-Testament God” – an anti-Semitic statement equally worthy of hard-line Muslim clerics and other implacable Jew-baiters and Israel-haters.

The political Left in Sweden – securely embedded within the media – vilify Israel while glorifying Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the PFLP and other “heroic freedom fighters”. Here, Palestinian Jihadists who kill Israeli civilians are “militants” expressing their sense of desperation.

Financing terror in Sweden
Other Jihadists, however, created a watershed in Swedish perceptions. The Beslan atrocity in early September predictably had some Swedish papers rushing to defend the perpetrators, explaining that the militants were simply venting their desperation. But this time the reasoning did not go down well with the Swedish public, the images of the young victims proving too powerful for the media to overcome. The Beslan outrage was followed by a Swedish Communist Party Youth Wing conference in Gothenburg in support of Hamas and the PFLP – both branded as terror organisations by the EU, of which Sweden is a member. The intended keynote speaker was PFLP terrorist and airline hijacker Leila Khaled. Swedish Greens Party MP Gustav Fridolin – expelled earlier this year from Israel – was also due to address the conference. Public outrage persuaded both to cancel.

Sweden is a society that accommodates terrorists, nurtures terrorism apologists and gives a free rein to news agencies that routinely censor the news. It’s a society that reacts with horror to the slaughter of children in Beslan, but has been conditioned by its media to ignore a proportionately higher death toll when the victims are Jewish kids in Israel. It’s a frightening society where people look the other way while 6 Muslim youngsters throw a Jewish boy off a bus because he “has no right to breathe the same air as real people”, and where passersby ignore a Jewish school student as a gang of 9 Muslim youths advance on him in broad daylight with the ominous words “Don’t you know it’s dangerous to be a Jew in Sweden? We’ll show you just how dangerous it is.”

And yet it would appear that the highly unorthodox words and actions of Ambassador Mazel back in January are actually bearing fruit. Sweden now has an increasing number of journalists who dare do something that is un-Swedish in its very nature: they beg to differ, they highlight the truth. The truth about Muslim anti-Semitism, media blindness to an issue the public encounters every day, and media animosity to the existence of Israel.

Debate as an art form
Nine months after the event, Sweden is debating terror as an art form. Today there is open debate on the Swedish Church’s Boycott-Israel campaign, for which church donations are being used. There is debate about the millions donated by the EU and Swedish aid agency SIDA to various Palestinian causes – including anti-Semitic propaganda and sponsorship of the outlawed PFLP’s conference in Sweden. And the spotlight is finally being trained on the media’s knee-jerk refusal to criticise a corrupt Palestinian leadership that financially straitened Swedish taxpayers are being forced to bankroll through SIDA.

Debate too is an art form, an art form whose words are every bit as powerful as weapons are. Swedish society is gradually adjusting to an art form where public discourse may finally get the recognition it deserves, thanks to some forthright words – and actions – by an Israeli diplomat.