Drevet går

EUs utrikesrepresentant Catherine Ashton besökte nyligen Gazaremsan och plottrade ner sina intryck i en förvirrande artikel som publicerades i New York Times.

Hennes artikel hade titeln ”Lessons From a Gaza Trip”, alltså lärdomar från en resa till Gazaremsan.

Om artikeln är ett bevis för Ashtons färdigheter under skolåren säger det en hel del om det EU som betalar henne ur våra gemensamma skattemedel.

För Catherine Ashton, sin dyra resa till Gazaremsan till trots, har inte dragit lärdom om någonting. Tvärtom, hennes artikel ger prov på banal idioti utan like.

Catherine Ashton har en vision för fred i Mellanöstern som inbegriper att araberna delar den israeliska huvudstaden Jerusalem med israelerna, men inte att de delar Hebron med israelerna. På det politiska planet har Hebron historiskt varit huvudstad i den judiska staten, och på det religiösa planet är det alltjämt den viktigaste samlingspunkten för judendomen jämte Jerusalem och Västra muren.

Men Hebron omfattas inte av Ashtons enögda vision om hur ena sidan ska ge medan andra sidan förlänger listan på vad de vill ha i utbyte mot – ja i utbyte mot absolut ingenting.

Ville Catherine Ashton verkligen åstadkomma något rejält istället för att prata om vilka politiska höjdare hon har träffat från Moskva till Washington till London till Damaskus, kunde hon istället ha villkorat sitt besök till israelen Gilad Schalits omedelbara och villkorslösa frisläppandet från den snart 4-åriga olagliga fångenskapen.

Då hade hon tagits på allvar i Israel, hon hade uppfattats som någon som verkligen vill åstadkomma något rejält istället för att agera som offentligt finansierad propagandist.

Som det nu är har hon bekräftat bilden av sig själv som välbetald part i målet.

För att få en bild av hur EU missbrukar offentliga skattemedel för att undergräva den suveräna staten Israel, titta på följande länk som går till NGO Monitor.

Och för att riktigt förstå hur sabotaget mot judiskt självbestämmande drivs inte bara av regeringar utan även – eller i all synnerhet – på universitet och andra läroanstalter, läs följande artikel på Arutz 7 samt titta på videofilmen i artikeln. Det ger skrämmande bevis för hur drevet går mot judar och israeler. Året är 2010, inte 1939.
 
I grannlandet Finland rapporterar bloggaren Tundra Tabloids om hur Aftonbladets lögner har nu adopterats av självaste FN i en rapport som upprepar lögnen om judisk och israelisk organtrafficking. Man storknar.
 
Också från Finland rapporterar bloggaren Daniel i Israelnyheter om hur Kyrkans utlandshjälp övervakar finska pro-israeler och idkar åsiktsregistrering samt uppmuntrar uppvigling till hat och våld.
 
Här hemma i Sverige är effekterna minst lika kännbara. Det är inte enbart Ilmar Reepalu och hans gelikar, inte enbart Lars Ohly bärande en halsduk med en karta där hela Israel är raderat och ersatt av ett muslimskt Palestina, inte enbart Per Gahrton som skriker ut sitt ohämmade hat mot den judiska staten som sätter dagordningen. Det talas i skolor, på gator och torg, och i kommunhus om bojkott mot den judiska staten. Nu senast är drevet igång i Karlstads kommun, där man överväger ett förslag som missgynnar stadens egna medborgare i det ädla syftet att bestraffa judar i Israel.
 
Varför är ovanstående redogörelse relevant? Jo, därför att det hänger på var och en av oss - varenda en - att motverka drevet. Innan snaran dras åt för hårt för att göra något åt det. Demokrati, frihet - ja, våra liv hänger på vårt engagemang och vår beslutsamhet. Drevet ska motverkas. Alternativet tål inte att tänkas på, för oss som har färska minnen av förra gången snaran drogs åt.
 
Så skriv, ring och diskutera. En insändare på tre rader är bra. 10 insändare på tre rader var är ännu bättre. Debattklimatet håller på att bli farligt enformigt. Vi minns resultatet från förra gången enformighet och likgiltighet ramade in ett helt samhälle och ett helt tankesätt.
 
 
Intressanta länkar:
Läs om hur offentliga medel missbrukas för att sabotera den judiska staten Israel, med officiellt godkännande från olika stater. NGO Lawfare.
Läs om hur offentliga medel användes för att propagera mot Israel under Hizbollahs anfallskrig mot den judiska staten 2006.
CAMERA avslöjar hur olika officiella organisationer använder statliga medel för att sabotera Israel.
Svenska medier fokuserar enbart på Israel, ignorerar resten av Mellanöstern och resten av världen. Läs här vad medierna inte skriver om: Indien, mord och massmord utförda av muslimer mot muslimer, diskriminering, hedersmord.
Läs mer om Catherine Ashton, EU och FN, med många användbara länkar (på engelska)
 

The EU goes to school and learns nothing

Catherine Ashton is high representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and vice president of the European Commission.

At considerable public expense (she and her extensive retinue are funded by European taxpayers), she recently traveled to the Gaza Strip on what she termed was a mission “to see whether European assistance money has an effect on the ground”. Her conclusion? “It does.”

Returning from the Islamist-controlled Gaza Strip – the Hamas terrorist organisation seized control of the territory in an illegal and particularly brutal coup – she jotted down her impressions in an article in the New York Times entitled “Lessons from a Gaza Trip”.

It has to be said straight off: if this is how Catherine Ashton learns lessons, it’s a wonder she ever graduated from junior school.

She went to the Gaza Strip and learned nothing. Least of all the fundamental concept of “cause and effect”. She recorded that upon leaving the modern and vibrant Jewish nation of Israel and entering Gaza you emerge “like a time-traveler transported backwards, on a dirt track. This is where the industrial center of Gaza used to be. Now, people with donkeys and carts carry stones from the rubble”. She failed to learn, let alone explain, that the reason why the industrial center of Gaza (which used to give employment to hundreds of Gaza residents) is a pile of rubble is because the Hamas rulers consistently bombarded it in order to force its closure – and then employ gullible useful idiots like Ashton to claim that there are no jobs for Gazans because of Israel.

Among the more remarkable claims this paragon of Euro-intelligence and foreign policy blundering makes is that European financial assistance has a positive effect on the ground. She is right, in a way. Because whatever financial assistance is provided on the ground frees up corresponding funding below ground for the tunnels that are used for the purchase, import, engineering and firing of missiles at Israeli civilians – most recently with one fatality last week. It is a remarkably simple lesson in elementary mathematics and logic that Lady Catherine Ashton appears not to have learned.

To find out more about how continued EU and other foreign meddling funding extends the conflict, read the following report by NGO Monitor.

Even more remarkably, Ashton traveled to the Gaza Strip and failed to undertake the most basic and most effective steps to assure Israel that she is truly non-partisan. All she had to do was state that her planned visit would go ahead subject to the immediate and unconditional release of Gilad Schalit, the only Jew alive in an otherwise Jew-free, ethnically cleansed Gaza Strip. Schalit was kidnapped from Israel while in his teens and has been illegally held by Gaza’s Hamas rulers ever since, almost four years now. In contravention of a whole raft of international agreements, not least the Geneva Conventions, he has not been granted visitation rights by his parents, legal representation (not that he is accused of anything other than being a Jew), he has been denied visits by the Red Cross (although to be fair the Red Cross have never demanded to visit him) and as Hamas proudly boasts the young man has not seen daylight for his entire 4-year captivity.

All Ashton had to do to convince Israel of her impartiality was to demand Schalit’s release as a precondition for her high-profile visit and the continued pumping in of massive foreign aid.

But such a step was unthinkable to Lady Catherine Ashton and her EU backers.

All she could do was to feed continued Arab and Islamist intransigence with statements such as “A way must be found to resolve the status of Jerusalem as the future capital of both Israel and Palestine.” Really? Why is this so important, yet the release of Gilad Schalit is not? And why is this so important but there is no urgent need to find a way to resolve the status of Hebron as a city that is as important to many Israelis as Jerusalem itself is? Hebron used to be the political capital of the Jewish nation and to this day is of vital significance as a religious centre. Neither Jerusalem nor Hebron has ever been of the slightest importance to any Arab or Muslim community, except insofar as they are important to the Jews which automatically means they are claimed by the entire Arab and Muslim world with the subservient assistance of dhimmi (servile) European and US administrations. Visit the ME Forum and read this article to find out what dhimmitude has in store for the West.
 
“Lessons from a Gaza Trip”? The EU’s foreign-policy and security head really needs lessons in how to do her homework. She has learned nothing.


Useful links:
Read about how foreign NGOs exploit public funding – that’s taxpayers’ hard-earned dollars – to undermine Israel, a UN member state. They do so with European government acquiescence: NGO Lawfare

Read about how foreign NGOs played a vital part in the concerted propaganda war against Israel following Hizbollah’s attack on the Jewish state in 2006: NGO campaigns in the 2006 Hizbollah war on Israel

CAMERA comments on Catherine Ashton's Gaza visit: EUobserver's Misobservation on Palestinian Civilian Casualties
CAMERA exposes media duplicity and public funding of anti-Israel NGO activity
CAMERA on the lessons that the media - and the EU's Catherine Ashton - fail to learn: official Palestinian Authority anti-Semitism. Meantime, the PA and other Palestinian organisations continue to receive EU and other foreign funding.
CAMERA on continued Church bias against the Jewish state, in parallel with continued funding of Islamist intransigence

Read the Tundra Tabloids for an analysis of what dhimmitude brings to Western society.

Read more from this blog about Gilad Schalit and his incarceration. Gilad Schalit was kidnapped from Israel while he was still a teenager and his captors are currently engaged in the illegal and primitive practice of human trafficking, auctioning his life in exchange for various rewards.
In Sweden silence is golden
Ban Ki-moon's strange silence
Out with the old, in with the new - maybe
The drip effect

The European Parliament has taken a stance on behalf of Gilad Schalit
ECR group calls for release of Gilad Schalit:
Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs calls on European governments to work for Gilad Schalit’s freedom:
For an insightful analysis of the war that continued foreign meddling is going to bring to the Middle East, read the following article by Daniel Pipes

The drip effect

The tactic is well-known. The constant drip designed to gradually erode all resistance.

It’s the tactic that the world’s collective of anti-Semites and assorted other racists are employing against the Jewish state.

The most recent outbreak of this epidemic is IAW, Israel Apartheid Week, whose purpose is to “educate people about the nature of Israel as an apartheid system”. Bafflingly, the organisation then retracts, saying that Israel “is obviously not the exact same thing as Apartheid South Africa” but goes on to maintain that as long as the offensive likeness can be used as a bludgeon against the Jewish state, it will be put to good use.

Visit the CAMERA website to find out how the IAW's Boycott, Divestment and Sanction (BDS) strategy is a publicly funded weapon designed specifially to prevent any prospects for peace in the Middle East.

NGO Monitor underlines the fact that organisations such as IAW and Sweden’s Alternative Information Center are actually government-funded. Individual European states and the EU as a bloc provide most of the funding for these subversive activities against a UN member state, the aim of which is to delegitimise that state.

IAW demands an end to “colonization of all Arab lands” and “full equality for Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel,” while also demanding the removal of the security fence that Israel has built where it provides most security against Palestinian Arab terrorism – which occasionally means those Jewish provinces that Palestinian Arabs want for a future state but without the niceties of having to negotiate over their acquisition. IAW also demands what it terms the “right of return for Palestinian refugees”. Inexplicably, not a return to the Arab state of Palestine, but to the Jewish state of Israel.

IAW, like legion other anti-Israel organisations, never works to better the lot of Palestinian Arabs – it does not help set up trade missions to boost Palestinian Arab commerce, industry, banking or agriculture. It does not support joint ventures to increase Palestinian Arab trade abroad. It does not work to place Palestinian Arab products on supermarket shelves. Instead, IAW, like others of its ilk, has just one item on its agenda: the deconstruction of Israel and its replacement with an Islamist state.

For a brief yet exhaustive examination of what IAW and its cohorts stand for and what they really could do, read Christopher Aqurette’s article entitled “Racists celebrate annual Israel-bashing week”.

Of course, IAW does not operate in a vacuum. It is aided and abetted by politically driven media and by some rather besotted politicians.
 
Sweden’s Foreign Minister Carl Bildt writes in his blog (in Swedish) about his concern over Israeli military overflights in Lebanese skies – but ignores the reason for these monitoring flights: that Iranian terrorist proxy Hizbollah, in flagrant breach of a binding UN Security Council resolution, continues to rearm in southern Lebanon along the border with Israel. Carl Bildt writes his blog from his vantage point aboard a UN helicopter flying along the Lebanon-Israel border where he can clearly see the massive Hizbollah infrastructure swiftly spreading ever further south towards Israel. Perhaps his helicopter had blacked-out windows.
 
Sweden’s Minister for International Development Cooperation Gunilla Carlsson is currently participating in an overtly anti-Israel event called the Gaza Accountability Conference in which she demands that “the Gaza crossings must be opened unconditionally and immediately” and that “Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem must be united”. She has not said anything about what the Palestinian Arabs have to do to earn this, such as a stop to terror or racist indoctrination. Neither has the Swedish government minister said anything about Hamas releasing the one Jew still (hopefully) alive in a Gaza Strip that has otherwise been ethnically cleansed of all Jews, both dead and alive. Gilad Schalit was kidnapped as a teenager from inside Israel more than three years ago and has since been held in Gaza without access to legal representation (not that he is accused of anything), without visits by the Red Cross (not that they have demanded visitation rights), and without access to his family. Swedish government minister Gunilla Carlsson’s silence on this issue while voicing demands that benefit Palestinian Arab terrorists is a cause for grave concern.
 
Large swathes of the major media here seem to be equally blind. The UN’s own Middle East envoy Robert Serry says clearly that there is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza. In other words, the hysterical allegations of Gaza’s humanitarian crisis are merely media manipulation, politically motivated activism in favour of a preordained strategic agenda. His position and title notwithstanding, Robert Serry is being largely disregarded the world over since his message does not fit in with the image that the racists and anti-Israel demagogues are determined to disseminate.
 
In the meantime, Islamism is advancing in leaps and bounds. At the same time as Carl Bildt uses the media to report what he does not see, Robert Serry is ignored by the media for what he does see and Gunilla Carlsson is given a media megaphone to voice what the Swedish public want to hear in this election year, Islamist terror organizations are growing in strength not just in the Middle East but elsewhere. Martin Bright reports that Britain is developing into a crucial hub for Hamas, the Gaza regime that is regarded as a terrorist organisation by the UN, the EU and the Quartet. His article makes frightening reading.
 
Back in Sweden it’s business as usual. Swedish extreme-left publication Flamman has an interview (in Swedish) with Anna Wester, public relations contact for the Palestinian Groups in Sweden (PGS), in which she says that should the extreme-left coalition of communists, social democrats and environmental crusaders win the national elections in Sweden this September, they will “recall Sweden’s military attaché from Israel and all weapons trade with Israel will be stopped”. This includes banning the use of unmanned Israeli-made drones to protect the lives of Swedish soldiers fighting Taliban terrorists in Afghanistan. The Israeli drones have proven their superiority in protecting Swedish soldiers on dangerous missions deep in Afghanistan, but the red-green coalition, should it come into power, would prefer to see dead Swedish soldiers rather than Swedish soldiers owing their lives to Israeli technology. By way of reference, during the World War Two – during which Sweden remained neutral while selling high-grade iron ore to Nazi Germany – sedition against one’s own country’s armed forces was a treasonable offence. The coalition of Sweden's extremist reds and greens must be reading a different rule-book.
 
Flamman also knows how to up the ante. In an article reminiscent of Sweden’s infamous Aftonbladet allegations (unfounded and later withdrawn) that Israel systematically murders Palestinian Arabs to harvest their organs, the newspaper insinuates in a recent Swedish-language article that there may have been mass rapes of women in Gaza (the insinuation being that the rapes were carried out by Israeli soldiers) for the simple reason that in conflicts in other parts of the world, such abominable acts have indeed taken place. Not even Hamas allege any such thing, but the left-wing Swedish paper has its own dirty war to fight against the Jewish state. Jews are guilty by virtue of someone else's crime on a totally different continent. Sweden's communists go from strength to strength.
 
Meantime the increasingly open red-green-brown anti-Semitism continues to stain Sweden’s third-largest city, Malmö. Some Swedish writers such as Per Gudmundson, Gulan Avci, Mathias Sundin and Dilsa Demirbag-Sten (articles in Swedish) have been very quick to train the spotlight on this disease.
 
The strange thing is that when it comes to anti-Semitic attacks on the Jewish state by Swedish politicians, many bloggers wrote already a year ago about communist party (nowadays rebranded Left Party) leader Lars Ohly sporting a keffiyeh in which the whole of Israel has been erased and replaced by an Islamist Palestine. Back then, the Swedish media ignored the episode and the evidence in the blogosphere. This year, however, is election year, so suddenly last year’s blog news has suddenly made it (article in Swedish) into the mainstream traditional media.
 
Better late than never, of course. But why so late?

One fine day it’s going to be way too late. The victims have already been marked – and not just in Sweden.
 
It’s a strange world – deafening silence on moral issues, but deafening cacophony on non-issues. In the category of cacophony we find the Middle East’s most underrated stand-up comedian, Libya’s Moammar Gaddafi, who is actively whipping up the Arab world into a jihadi frenzy against Switzerland.
 
You read right – Switzerland!
 
And while Libya is wowing the Arab masses against Europe, Iran is meticulously and methodically pursuing its plan for global jihad on a scale never before imagined. Read here what Reuters writes about Iran’s plans to force the world to its knees. Iran has its sights set not on the USA or Israel but the world, first stop Europe. Ignore the Reuters report at your peril.

Europeiska kommissionen inför rätta

Europeiska kommissionen står nu inför rätta för otillbörlig finansiering av subversion mot ett enskilt land.

En israelisk organisation ifrågasätter EU:s finansiering av anti-israeliska grupper via beskattade offentliga medel.

Organisationen NGO Monitor har stämt Europeiska kommissionen med motivering att den har på ett icke-transparent sätt använt skattemedel från EU-länder för att destabilisera och demonisera Israel.

All finansiering av NGO:s, det vill säga organisationer som inte har några direkta statliga band, skall enligt EU:s förordning vara transparent.

Många internationella organisationer som betecknar sig som NGO:s – alltså oberoende av regeringen i respektive land – är i själva verket helt eller till stor del statsfinansierat. Den statliga finansieringen av dessa organisationer utgör ett slags ”grå utrikespolitik” utanför den etablerade, officiella och lagenliga utrikespolitiken. Den här sortens operation har stora liknelser med de ”dirty tricks campaigns”, dvs smutsiga under-bordet-kampanjer, som olagligt använts för att destabilisera länder och regeringar.

Det har uppdagats att flera europeiska stater och andra FN-länder avsätter betydande summor ur beskattat statligt medel för att finansiera indoktrinering mot och destabilisering av FN:s medlemslandet Israel.

Organisationen NGO Monitor har därför bestämt sig för att i ett första skede stämma Europeiska kommissionen för att bringa klarhet i denna subversiva internationella operation och för att klarlägga de exakta summorna det är tal om, som olagligt spenderas av EU och FN på underminering av Israel via olika länders riksbanker.

Aftonbladet’s defence begins to crumble

STOP PRESS STOP PRESS STOP PRESS
The Swedish Chancellor of Justice Göran Lambertz commented this afternoon on the Aftonbladet affair.
He says that the government could go much further in its criticism of the Aftonbladet article without in any way contravening the constitution. "The government has considerable leeway in such matters. A minister can without risk say something along the lines of 'We have no reason to believe these allegations', but would be contravening the constitution if he or she actually criticised the decision to publish the article," according to Mr Lambertz. He went on to say that the decision not to comment on the article was a nod to political considerations, not legal constraints.
Link to the article on Swedish TV website, filed by news agency TT: http://svt.se/2.22620/1.1666252/lag_tillater_hardare_artikelkritik


Aftonbladet’s defence begins to crumble along with its libellous story as the truth begins to emerge.

Read Khaled Abu Toameh in the Jerusalem Post. He makes clear that at no time did the Palestinian Arab family figuring in Aftonbladet’s libellous article tell Swedish writer Donald Boström that their son's organs had been removed.

It is worth repeating: at no time did they speak to this or any other journalist about suspicions of organ harvesting. They never, ever, spoke to Donald Boström about this subject. His article is based on a fabrication. He took a photograph. The rest is a myth.

Donald Boström evidently has a highly creative relationship with the truth.

Now, however, in an almost comical reversal of logic and ethics, the family claim that since Boström has made the claim – about a conversation they never had with him – they now want an inquiry to substantiate his claims. Claims proven to be the figment of Boström’s imagination. Anything that can be used against Jews and/or Israelis is grist to the mill.

It never occurred to either Boström or Aftonbladet to point out the absurdity of organ-harvesting claims when the donors in question have been killed with extreme trauma – which would render their organs unusable. Not just through physical damage to the organs themselves, but through infection after bodily fluids leaked through surrounding tissue into the organs to be harvested. Organ transplantation requires the utmost clinical sterility; shooting someone dead in a dusty street and then waiting while a suitable vehicle is found to transport the corpse to a nearby facility for the necessary immediate surgery is not exactly a scenario that is set to succeed.

But none of these considerations mattered to Boström or Aftonbladet.

Boström’s article is sourced from material he originally wrote in a book published back in 2001. That book was financed by the Swedish Foreign Ministry as well as other Swedish government-financed organisations, most notably several Church of Sweden organisations.

One might well ask what conclusions can be drawn from the fact that the Swedish government plays an active role in defaming a sovereign nation – yet claims it is unable to comment on an article when this government-supported defamation takes the form of a virulently anti-Semitic blood-libel.

One might also well ask why the Church of Sweden feels it is so important to spend its funds financing anti-Semitic libel. The Church of Sweden has played no part in alleviating the plight of Christian Arabs in the Gaza Strip or West Bank. All its resources – both time and money – are spent on demonizing the world’s only Jewish state.

For a detailed and well-researched study on the Church of Sweden’s long-standing antipathy to Israel and its extremely active Swedish government-funded role in promoting anti-Semitism in the Arab world, read the NGO Monitor’s excellent report entitled “Diakonia: An Analysis of Activities in the Arab-Israeli Conflict”.

There is an increasingly wide gap between the vast majority of everyday, honest, highly ethical Swedes in this country, on the one hand, and the deeply anti-Israel/often anti-Semitic politicized leadership of the Church of Sweden, the rabidly anti-Israel Left-leaning media, and politicians paralysed by blinkered dedication to political correctness, on the other.

The problem is that it is politically correct politicians who are financing the activities of rabid anti-Semites.

With Swedish tax revenues.

Which is what some Swedish newspapers are finally beginning to investigate. It’s a slow process – because these newspapers are taking the time to verify their stories and corroborate their sources.

Normal journalistic measures alien to Boström and Aftonbladet.

Articles on the subject:
NGO Monitor1, NGO Monitor2, JPost1, JPost2, JPost3, JPost4, IlyaMeyer1, IlyaMeyer2, IlyaMeyer3, IlyaMeyer4, IlyaMeyer5, Barry Rubin, TundraTabloids, Metro (in Swedish), SvD (in Swedish)

In Sweden, silence is golden – literally

Just ask Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt

The gold is in the form of Swedish tax revenues paid dutifully by hard-working Swedes lucky enough to still have a job.

That gold is used by the Swedish government. Not for the Swedish population but for the Palestinian Arab population. 700 million kronor per annum, and increasing year on year. As can be seen from the pictures in the following articles, the Gaza Palestinians don’t exactly seem to be in any danger of under-nourishment…

Silence is golden according to Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt, the government official who insists his country’s ambassador to Israel must refrain from expressing an opinion on virulent anti-Semitic accusations in Swedish left-wing tabloid Aftonbladet. Accusations intended as a blood-libel against all Jews and Israelis everywhere.

Silence is so golden according to Carl Bildt that despite the millions that he takes from Swedish citizens to give to Palestinian Arabs, he deliberately chooses not to condition these payments on the Palestinians’ release of the only Jew in the otherwise ethnically cleansed Gaza Strip: the young Gilad Schalit who was kidnapped by Palestinian government party Hamas 1200 days ago and since then not allowed contacts with his family, legal representation or the Red Cross – or indeed even granted the privilege of seeing sunlight.

Carl Bildt firmly believes in silence. He maintains total silence on the issue of the Jewish hostage Gilad Schalit, while at the same time plundering Swedish state coffers to support the Palestinians in Gaza.

Carl Bildt firmly believes in silence. He insists that his ambassadors remain silent in the face of raw anti-Semitism.

Carl Bildt firmly believes in silence. That’s why there is no Foreign Ministry investigation into the link between the increasing Swedish funding of Palestinian Arabs and the corresponding increase in Palestinian Arabs disappearing from life-supporting dialysis sessions, only for them to turn up instead abroad where they purchase organs from cash-strapped donors and have them transplanted into their own bodies before returning to the West Bank.

Is the Swedish Foreign Minister thus suffering from an inability to see, as well as his documented inability to speak, hear, think and do elementary maths?

Ultimately we have to remember what the whole fuss is about: Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet published a story about organ trafficking that involved people in the US – but when it turned out that one of the people involved was a Jew, angled the entire article as a blatant anti-Semitic tirade.

In Sweden, anti-Semitism is not punishable. Nor is crass stupidity. Neither is gross incompetence in public office. But an ambassador who expresses her honest dismay over anti-Semitism while at the same time upholding Sweden’s proud tradition of freedom of expression and freedom of the press, is censured by the Swedish Foreign Minister. The same Foreign Minister who declines to say a word about the kidnapped Jew Gilad Schalit, held by Muslim Arab human traffickers in the Gaza Strip.

Israel’s Ambassador to Sweden Benny Dagan gave a resounding interview in Swedish daily Sydsvenskan, summarising his nation’s and his people’s view of the situation.

Rampant Swedish media distortion and the tacit and blatant anti-Semitism expressed in various Swedish governmental and quasi-governmental organisations can be charted with the utmost clarity in a report by NGO Monitor.

The results of media distortion and constant demonising of Jews and Israelis are felt in Sweden all the time – most recently yesterday in a soccer match involving Jewish youth club IF Hakoah, in which spectators raced onto the pitch during and after the match to beat up the Hakoah players for the crime of being Jewish. One problem, however: at this particular match, none of the Hakoah players were actually Jewish. Not that it mattered in a climate of hate fuelled by large swathes of the Swedish media and government silence.

So back to the infamous article in populist left-wing tabloid Aftonbladet. The article’s author Donald Boström freely admits that he has absolutely no evidence of any of his allegations but says it is up to Jews and Israelis to prove themselves innocent. An interesting twist – Jews are guilty until they prove themselves innocent. Now where have we heard that before? Democracy doesn't appear to be Boström’s or Aftonbladet’s strongest suit.

Much of the material in Boström’s article came from a book he published in 2001, “Inshallah” (the title is something of a giveaway, you can probably already see where this is going), which was jointly financed by the Swedish Foreign Ministry and various other government-backed organisations. Here in fact is what Boström writes in the acknowledgements section (comments in brackets are my explanations):

"Thanks to Diakonia [90% government-financed Christian aid organisation], Forum Syd [government-financed aid organisation], Graphics Industry Union, Stockholm Graphic Workers' Union [part of the Swedish Trade Union Confederation, co-owner of Aftonbladet], the Swedish Christian Study Center, the Brotherhood Movement [Christian branch of the Social Democratic Party], the Swedish Palestinian Solidarity Movement [partly government-financed], Trade union TCO and the Swedish Foreign Ministry for their financial donations."

It appears Foreign Minister Carl Bildt has every reason to be tight-lipped. There’s too much at stake if people start talking, writing or asking questions. Swedes might start demanding some of their tax money be spent on their welfare rather than on organ-harvesting for Palestinian Arabs.

And Israel, which sees Sweden spending huge amounts on Palestinians involved in organ trafficking and human trafficking, might start considering legal action.

That would put Sweden’s selective silence in jeopardy.


For additional perspective on the subject of selective treatment of Israel, read Professor Barry Rubin's blog: http://rubinreports.blogspot.com/2009/08/why-is-israel-demonized-while-real.html

With thanks to Dmitri Wasserman, Stockholm, for valuable supplementary material.

Haaretz, Barry Rubin, Vlad Tepes, Tundra Tabloids