Like cockroaches, anti-Semitism is difficult to eradicate

Case in point: Swedish photographer Donald Boström made the embarrassing mistake of diversifying out of photography into writing.

Problem: he doesn’t know how to write.

He doesn’t know how to research his subject.

He is too subjective to be objective (he is a self-confessed pro-Palestinian radical).

In short, he is a nonentity way out of his depth.

In August, he came up with the idea of linking the death 19 years ago of a Palestinian terrorist on the West Bank, with the fact that Israel, like most other countries, has a programme for organ donation. He then proceeded to link these two unrelated issues with the arrest in the United States in summer 2009 of a man accused of money-laundering. That man was a Jew, and among his alleged shady deals was trafficking in human organs. Not from dead corpses, but from live people willing to sell their organs for money – a trade in which unscrupulous people prey on the poor and make vast amounts of money out of their body parts.

But he was a Jew! This was sufficient for Donald Boström to write an anti-Semitic article that Swedish radical left-wing tabloid Aftonbladet was only too pleased to publish. That article led to particularly strained relations between Israel and Sweden since Israel felt that both the Jewish nation and Jews worldwide were being wrongfully accused of a despicable trade. The allegations aroused added ire owing to the fact that even the Arab family concerned denied that they had ever claimed their son’s organs were harvested for transplantation. Most analysts worldwide concurred that the article was an example of woefully inadequate research employed to disguise raw anti-Semitic propaganda. It echoed the traditional anti-Semitic blood-libels that have prompted innumerable pogroms against Jews worldwide over the centuries and is now a frequently used approach by large swathes of the Swedish media.

Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt and his Foreign Minister Carl Bildt claimed at the time that he could not comment on the article because the Swedish constitution protected freedom of speech and he was therefore not at liberty to make any statement on unfounded racist accusations leveled by radical left-wing Swedes. The Swedish Chancellor of Justice, however, verified that there was nothing in the constitution to prevent the PM or FM from making a statement on the issue, so long as it was just a statement and not an attempt to prevent freedom of speech. He pointed out that all Swedes enjoy freedom of speech - even the PM and FM.

Two months later, on 21 October 2009, unfounded racist accusations (read the article here, in Swedish only) were levelled by radical right-wing Swedish party The Sweden Democrats in the very same newspaper, Aftonbladet. They accused the country’s Muslims of being a threat to the nation. Within a few hours the Swedish Prime Minister went on air to distance his nation from the racist comments.

Observers worldwide shook their heads in disbelief at the two very different responses to two sets of racist allegations made to two different sets of minority Swedes – Jews and Muslims.

Now Donald Boström has added further fuel to the fire by insisting on radical Arab news channel Al Jazeera that his original allegations about Jewish organ harvesting hold true. He said, among other things:


“I showed that the organs were plundered and that illegal organ trade is being systematically undertaken in Abu-Kabir (Israel’s forensic institute in Tel-Aviv).”

“We have evidence that links Israel to this trade.”

“What I wrote in my original article is sufficient evidence, but I am nonetheless continuing to investigate the information and there is other information that other journalists are investigating.”

“In the USA there is a branch of this operation that sells organs to rich Americans.”

“(Israeli Defence Minister) Ehud Barak is lying. He knows there is illegal trade in organs. He knows that people are being killed and that their bodies are being desecrated. He is lying time after time.”


Of course, there is little hope that the Swedish Prime Minister will step in to curb Donald Boström’s anti-Semitic libels. The Swedish PM only comments when Muslim sensitivities are at risk. There are about half a million Muslims in Sweden, and less than 20,000 Jews. The mathematics is quite straightforward, with less than a year before the next national elections in Sweden.

What is remarkable is that even as Donald Boström peddles his anti-Semitisc poison in the Muslim world, his invitation to travel next month to Israel to participate in the Dimona Conference is still being extended.

Incitement to violence is a crime. It is also a very real danger to national security.

Ehud Barak, who has the ultimate responsibility for the security of the nation, ought alreadyw to have a plan for intercepting Mr Boström at the border and turning him back, just as Israel has previously barred entry to adherents of ISM, the radical Palestinian pro-terrorist group, before they could clear passport control at Ben Gurion Airport.

Israel’s security is at risk. It is true that Ehud Barak cannot persuade a cowardly Swedish Prime Minister to abandon his double standards and stand up for principle – that is after all entirely a domestic Swedish issue.

But Ehud Barak can stop the export of Swedish fundamentalism to Israel.

We’ll never rid the world of cockroaches, but we can surely keep our own doorsteps clean.


Thanks to Ron Tennenbaum of Sweden for his help in translating Donald Boström's comments on Al Jazeera.

Andrea Levin: Anatomy of a Swedish Blood Libel

Israel does not exist

Not according to Swedish news agency TT.

The Swedish Nobel Prize committee today announced the winners of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. The three joint winners are Mr Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, from the UK, Mr Thomas A. Steitz from the USA, and Ms Ada E. Yonath from Israel.

Swedish news monopoly TT (Tidningarnas Telegrambyrå), however, refused to report on the nationality of Ms Yonath, stating merely that she was born in Jerusalem. TT meticulously stated the nationalities of the other two Nobel Prize winners.

Sweden’s TT is in the vanguard of a nationwide campaign to demonise and delegitimise the State of Israel and is highly successful in indoctrinating the entire nation in anti-Israel sentiment. TT pursues a strict policy of anti-Israel news slant in the media and its reporting on the Middle East is often perceived as barely disguised anti-Semitism.

One of the main shareholders of TT with a 40 percent stake in the company is Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet. Aftonbladet recently rose to prominence when it published what was widely regarded as an anti-Semitic diatribe in the form of a highly controversial and totally unsubstantiated article on organ trafficking.

To put TT’s activities into a wider perspective, watch the following film entitled “Icon of Hatred”, obtained from The Second Draft.

It shows just how powerful the media can be in first manufacturing and then methodically spreading a lie, with disastrous – and entirely intentional – results for innocent civilians.



There is general consensus that organisations such as Hizbollah and Hamas are terror organisations. TT’s reporting on the Middle East is part of the media onslaught of these organisations and TT’s operations should be viewed as such.


Articles on TT and the Swedish media from this website, in English:
Freedom of the Press in Sweden
How Sweden became anti-Israel
Totalitarian control of the media in Sweden
The art of terror, Swedish style
The truth only the media could miss
Instructions to Swedish journalists


Articles on TT and the Swedish media from this website, in Swedish:
Allt som behövs för att ondskan ska segra
Bortgången hederlig journalism
TT bestämmer i Sverige
Svensk demokrati hotad av femte kolonn
TT - ett politiskt verktyg
Vem behöver ljuga? Att undvika sanninen är lika bra
TT - svenska mästare i snedvriden rapportering
En terrorist blir en gärningsman

Freedom of the press in Sweden

A month ago a controversial newspaper article in left-wing Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet alleged systematic Jewish and Israeli organ harvesting involving body parts from Palestinian Arabs.

With the initial shock of those sinister –and unsubstantiated – claims now dying down, this is a good time to examine what that article signified and how it plays out in the wider Swedish media discourse.

Much of the controversy hinged on “freedom of the press”, with the newspaper and its supporters claiming that in a democracy like Sweden the press is free from the fetters of outside control.

And so indeed it is.

Or is it? On Friday September 11, rockets were fired from the Lebanon into civilian Israeli territory in an unprovoked surprise attack by militants under the control of Hizbollah. Hizbollah maintains de facto control of southern Lebanon and, as a major parliamentary faction, is in negotiations to play a sizeable role in the next Lebanese government.

Newspapers in countries with a free press all ran headlines along the lines of “Rocket fire from Lebanon” or “Rockets from Lebanon provoke Israeli artillery response”.

Not so the Swedish press. To a man, virtually every newspaper in Sweden carried headlines such as “Rockets rain across Lebanon-Israel border”, “Exchange of fire between Lebanon and Israel”, “Cross-border rocket fire between Lebanon-Israel”.

No mention of who initiated the unprovoked attack. The headlines and the articles were skewed to show that Israel was engaged in military action. One newspaper, Dagens Nyheter, wrote “At least eight rockets struck Lebanese territory” and only much later in the body of the article mentioned that the attack was initiated from the Lebanon.

So was the Aftonbladet article last month an aberration, or was it symptomatic of how Israel is treated in Sweden?

Most foreign news coverage in Sweden is provided by Tidningarnas Telegrambyrå (TT), a Soviet-era Pravdaesque nest of left-wing and ultra-left-wing journalists obsessed with only one subject: Israel.

TT has a virtual monopoly on foreign news dissemination since for budgetary reasons most media outlets here subscribe to its services. This therefore means that a radical left-wing entity, an unelected political power broker with a highly specific political agenda, is in competition with the Swedish government to determine how Swedes perceive one aspect of Stockholm’s foreign policy: Israel. TT’s news is distributed in the printed media, the electronic media and over the airwaves on both radio and TV.

Since Swedes are avid news consumers, this puts TT in a critical position of power. And it exercises that power 365 days a year.

The question therefore has to be asked: was the Aftonbladet article a one-off piece of poor judgement, woefully inadequate research, immature language, sinister innuendo, offensive racism and subjective pursuit of one particular newspaper’s policies?

Or was it yet another example of the daily battering that Israel takes in the wider Swedish press? A crude, vicious, calculated, blatantly anti-Israel and barely concealed anti-Semitic attack on the world’s sole Jewish nation?

The answer depends entirely on the ethical integrity of anyone who reads, watches and listens to the Swedish press. In other words, it depends on the honesty with which one views the question and objectivity with which one analyses the facts.

What is beyond doubt, however, is that Swedes as a nation are not anti-Semitic. The government are not anti-Semitic. The politburo of the Church of Sweden is anti-Semitic in its obsession with Israel. The general membership of the Church of Sweden is not. Not for nothing are increasingly large numbers of Swedes leaving the Church of Sweden and opting not to pay Church dues.

Large swathes of the Swedish press are totally consumed by hatred of Israel. They produce unsubstantiated stories, regurgitate hearsay without corroboration, deliberately rewrite facts, deliberately mistranslate articles from the foreign press, deliberately omit the truth, deliberately disseminate lies – all in the cause of an anti-Israel policy pursued by a shadowy non-governmental agency with very real power, the power to shape citizens’ minds.

Targeting Israel has developed into a religion in Sweden. It is a religion practised by a majority of the Swedish media. The foremost victims of this religion are Sweden’s own Jewish minority: it is no longer safe for Jews to wear a skullcap or Star of David in the country in which they have been living as a recognized minority for 250 years.

It is against this background that the Aftonbladet article should be seen. In Sweden freedom of the press is unassailable. Unfortunately it is abused to give the press total freedom to vilify Israel and, increasingly, Jews.

Considerable foreign media focus was trained on what the Swedish government did or did not say in the aftermath of the Aftonbladet debacle.

The spotlight needs instead to be trained on the agency that really runs the country: the Swedish media and its shock-troops in a propaganda machine with far-reaching tentacles and very real power – news agency TT.

Ynet, JPost, Haaretz, Haaretz2, JIW, Global Arab Network, Daily Telegraph, Washington Post, SBS Australia, Australian Herald, Euronews, WN, Tiscali, Gloria Center, Israel i Sverige (in Swedish),

Instructions to Swedish journalists: "Spice it up with fiction"

“Spice it up with fiction”
“Tell small lies”
“Make it up”
“Simple tricks for blending fact with fiction, telling half-lies and writing semi-literary works”

This is how Swedish journalism’s king of the Radical Left, Jan Guillou, describes the recipe for achieving success in journalism.

He goes on to state that today “most journalists (in Sweden) are better than in my day”.

He measures success by the degree to which the media succeeds in persuading the public of its agenda.

Using any means that make it difficult to separate hard fact from personal opinion.

This goes a long way to explaining the obsession of extreme-Left tabloids like Sweden’s Aftonbladet to defaming Israel and trampling on the sensibilities of Jews. It explains Aftonbladet’s recent unsubstantiated claim that Israel – and through tenuous implications Jews – engage in systematic organ trafficking. Claims that both the journalist behind the piece and the editor freely admit have no basis in fact.

Anyone wanting to find out what drives the extreme Left in Sweden – and the media in Sweden form a largely Left-wing stronghold – should take note of what Jan Guillou says. He is the Grand Old Man of Swedish journalism and has for decades set the tone for journalism in this country.

Sweden’s Constitution guarantees freedom of expression and freedom of the press. And quite rightly too, as in any self-respecting democracy. It is not the role of government to interfere in the workings of the press.

But it is the responsibility of the public to be aware of the agenda that drives many journalists and to be familiar with the tricks used.

With some thankfully excellent exceptions, Sweden does not have a free press. Sweden has a press free of critical thinking.

A press nurtured on deception as a means to a pre-determined political end.

The interview with Jan Guillou is in Swedish and can be viewed here.

For an example of the sort of journalism that Swedish journalists do NOT engage in and an example of the sort of story that most Swedish papers will NOT report on, read the following article.

It’s all about the terrorist training camps run by Gaza’s Hamas rulers for children as young as eight.

You won’t read about it in Sweden’s Aftonbladet.

TV4 (Swedish programme), IDF, NGO Monitor, NGO Monitor2, IlyaMeyer1, IlyaMeyer2,