The Swedish recipe: all children are equal, unless they are Israelis

Swedish Foreign Minister Ms Laila Freivalds will shortly be visiting Ramallah to enlist Yasser Arafat’s help in ending the anguish of a Swedish mother whose five children were kidnapped by her estranged Palestinian husband and are being held hostage in Gaza under armed guard.

Ms Freivalds is to be commended for playing such a personal role in the wellbeing of young children. She deserves every best wish in her endeavour. She will hopefully be able to bring about a happy resolution to the agony of a mother who has had her children taken away – albeit temporarily – and that she will be thus able to alleviate the fear and anxiety of the children themselves, the youngest a mere 6 years old.

What seems strange in this context, however, is that the Swedish Foreign Minister has apparently never been equally moved to make a similarly personal appeal to Yasser Arafat to end the indiscriminate killing of Israeli children on streets, in buses, at parties, at religious celebrations. This despite the murder of a Swedish citizen and the attempted murder of several others at a Pesach celebration in Netanya, and the murder of a 20 year-old Swedish citizen at an Egged bus stop in Israel. All carried out by Palestinian terrorists closely or loosely affiliated with Yasser Arafat. These victims – many of them children under school age – are not being temporarily held against their will by estranged family members – they have been murdered, their families will never see them again.

It would be absurd to suggest that Ms Freivalds is anti-Semitic or that she reflects an anti-Semitic Swedish government. However, it cannot take much imagination to realise that this is precisely the kind of subtle signal that is – quite correctly – interpreted by Islamist fanatics in Sweden and elsewhere that they are immune regardless of their actions and that Europe applies one yardstick to Jews and Israelis and quite another to Muslims and Palestinians.

Swedish Foreign Minister Freivalds deserves all the support she can muster in the delicate task facing her. It would be so much more of a credit to her government if she were to apply the same dedication to Israelis suffering in the same way – children and parents alike.

Quiet diplomatic support and off-the-record words of encouragement to Swedish and Israeli Jews not only do not go far enough – it is the very absence of outright public support that by definition encourages a growing anti-Semitic undercurrent among extreme Islamists in Sweden and abroad.

One law for Israelis and Jews, another for Palestinians and Muslims

Swedish Foreign Minister Ms Laila Freivalds will soon be making a personal visit to Ramallah. There she will enlist Yasser Arafat’s help in bringing to an end the anguish of a Swedish mother, Elisabeth Krantz, whose five children have been kidnapped by their Palestinian father and held hostage in Gaza.

Ms Freivalds is to be commended for playing such a personal role in the well-being of young children. She deserves every best wish in her endeavour and it is to be hoped that she manages to put a swift end to the unimaginable agony of a mother who has lost her children, and to the constant fear and anxiety of five children, the youngest a mere 6 years old.

What is remarkable, however, is that the Swedish Foreign Minister has never felt it necessary to make an equally personal appeal to Yasser Arafat to bring an end to indiscriminate killing of Israeli children on public streets, in buses, at parties, at religious celebrations – including the murder of a Swedish citizen and the attempted murder of several others at a Pesach celebration in Netanya.

While not for one moment suggesting that Ms Freivalds is either personally anti-Semitic or that she in any way reflects an anti-Semitic Swedish government, it cannot take much imagination to realise that this is precisely the kind of subtle signal that is – quite correctly – interpreted by Islamist fanatics in Sweden and elsewhere that they are indeed off-limits and that Europe does indeed apply one yardstick to Jews and Israelis and quite another to Muslims and Palestinians.

The Swedish Foreign Minister deserves all the support she can muster in the immensely delicate task facing her. It would be so much more of a credit to the Swedish administration if she were to apply the very same standards to the rest of an equally suffering regional population.

Behind-the-scenes support for and quiet words of encouragement to Sweden’s Jewish population not only don’t go far enough – the very absence of outright public support is per definition encouragement of a growing anti-Semitic undercurrent among the more extreme fringes of Sweden’s Muslim population.

Whither the White Buses?

By fomenting anti-Semitism, a Swedish leader shames her brave forebears.

Sixty years ago, Sweden made headlines sending its White Buses to bring scores of Jewish Holocaust survivors out of the terrifying hell of European anti-Semitism to a safe haven in Sweden. Today if Swedes were to make news, it would be over gaps in logic and empathy large enough to drive a bus through - while Swedish anti-Semitism reaches new heights.

A few weeks ago, Swedish Foreign Minister Laila Freivalds achieved considerable notoriety when, during a visit to a class of 16-year-olds in Gothenburg, she accused Israelis of behaving like Nazis towards the Palestinians. She beamed with appreciation when one of the pupils, a Muslim girl, voiced the theory that according to the Torah, the Land of Israel was promised to the Jews upon the return of the Messiah, and since the Messiah had not returned the Jews had no right to be there and should accordingly be expelled.

This happened at a school with a high proportion of immigrants, many of them Muslims, and one solitary Jewish student. When that pupil, devastated to the core of his being, wrote in the newspapers of his sense of betrayal that the foreign minister in the country of his birth could treat the truth in such cavalier fashion, Freivalds denied it all.

Fast forward to the visit by the same Laila Freivalds to Yad Vashem in Jerusalem on June 9. In her speech there, she said, "Let me state very clearly that it is legitimate to criticize Israeli government policies as it is to criticize the policy of any government. Such criticism can never in itself be equated with anti-Semitism, and we firmly reject attempts to do so."

At no time during that speech or in any context prior to that speech, however, did Freivalds show interest in expressing criticism of the Arab regimes surrounding Israel. Criticism of Israel, the world's only Jewish state, while failing to even mention the reprehensible actions of the regimes surrounding it, has one effect: it nurtures anti-Semitism.

Freivalds had more to say in her speech at Yad Vashem: "In Sweden, anti-Semitism falls under the legal ban on racial, ethnic, or religious incitement. Swedish law enforcement acts firmly against any such punishable actions. They are prosecuted to the full."

Either Freivalds is severely out of touch with reality, or she is being somewhat flexible with the truth.

Here are the facts: For an anti-Semitic crime to work its way into the statistics by which Freivalds sets such store, Swedish law requires that there be 10 witnesses. The reason is that racial hatred has to have been spread for it to constitute a crime of incitement. If it is not spread (to the requisite number of witnesses), there is no crime to prosecute. Case closed.
I SPEAK from personal experience. Several cases involving anti-Semitic attacks by Muslim youths on my 13-year-old son have been closed for precisely this reason. If the required number of witnesses cannot be furnished, the case does not get as far as court. Nor does it get to court if the perpetrators are too young to be prosecuted - which, unfortunately, describes a significant proportion of the perpetrators.

Freivalds went on to claim that "statistics are kept, and published annually. According to the latest figures, the number of anti-Semitic crimes in Sweden is declining." Ms. Freivalds is apparently oblivious of the following: Most anti-Semitic crime in Sweden is perpetrated by youngsters of Arab and Muslim background. If they are under age, the case does not go to court - so it does not figure in Ms. Freivalds' statistics. If the gangs attack a solitary Jew (usually a youngster), then here too there is no means of bringing a case against the perpetrators without the requisite number of witnesses. Again, such incidents do not make it into Freivalds' statistics.
Just two days after Freivalds spoke at Yad Vashem, there was a football match in Stockholm between two teams of 15-year-olds. One team is IK Maccabi, Jewish boys from Stockholm; their opponents were kids from families originally from Somalia. Throughout the match, the Jewish kids were being taunted with "Death to the Jews," "We'll deal with the lot of you after the match," "Smash Zionism," and "We'll take it easy now and sort them out after the match," this last by the team captain.

At the end of the match, according to customary sportsmanlike tradition the teams were to line up on the pitch and shake hands with each other. However, led by the team captain, who instead of shaking hands held his opponent with one hand and hit him in the face with the other, the Somalian team launched a full attack on the Jewish team. They were immediately joined by their supporters, who also laid in with punches and kicks to the 15-year-old Jewish football players. The Jewish team was led away bleeding, shocked, and traumatized. Not, however, before administering a lesson their opponents would not easily forget.

No one is suggesting that Freivalds was as active in supporting this disgrace as she was in encouraging hate and division at the school in Gothenburg, but her spirit seems to have pervaded every pore of Swedish society. The 15-year-old Somalian kids have taken their cue from a leadership that will go to any lengths to deny it has created and is nurturing a problem.
But Sweden does not have a problem, it has a festering sickness. The first step in curing any sickness is to identify it and administer the appropriate medicine. Denying one has an ailment because it is a highly embarrassing one may be a perfectly understandable human reaction, but it is hardly conducive to pursuing a cure.

Sometimes surgery is the only option. Freivalds may find she is part of the sickness, not the cure, and her removal from office may be the only option if there is to be a cure for an increasingly ailing Sweden.

She may also find that no number of White Buses furnished by yesterday's Swedish leaders will do anything to undo the disgrace of some of their successors. Prime Minister Göran Persson, that man of immense vision and the force behind Sweden's renowned Living History program, should act before there is nothing left to save.

14 year-old boy on anti-Semitism in Sweden:

I’m not free to wear my Star of David

I’m afraid every time I’m alone in the city. Just because I’m Jewish, I’m constantly attacked by racist guys with roots in the Arab countries Journalists such as Helle Klein in Aftonbladet deny that the hate that I experience almost every week even exists As a young Jew, I want to treat others and be treated with respect.


These are the words of fourteen-year old Nadav Meyer in Swedish daily Expressen on 29 January 2004.

I am Jewish, 14 years old and born in Gothenburg. And I’m afraid every time I’m on my own in the centre of town – on my way to school, sports training, friends.

I’m afraid because I am often threatened. I am threatened and attacked and have even been thrown off buses because I wear my Magen David, my Star of David, which shows that I am Jewish.

The people doing these things to me are always (with one single exception) young Muslim or Arab guys with roots in the Middle East. I don’t know if they were born there or here. It’s never adults, and never girls; always young guys.

They feel that because of the conflict far away in the Middle East between the Jewish state of Israel and a whole bunch of Arab/Muslim states, especially the Palestinians, it is therefore OK to attack a Jew on the other side of the world – me. For them, I represent everything they hate about Israel and Israelis. They’ve said it to me time after time.

I just walk away when they start, because I don’t want to be involved in any trouble. They swear, push, shove and hit, but I always walk away. Once, when I was hit twice by two guys, I hit one of them hard in the face. His face started bleeding and I took the chance to run off. But I don’t want to fight. They never ask me what I think about the politics of Israel. In any case, I’m entitled to think what I like, but they never even ask.

It’s always the same: “Pity Hitler didn’t finish off the job properly, you bloody Jews don’t have the right to breathe the same air as real people, we’ll finish off the job Hitler started” and so on. But just think if I did the same? If I started insulting and beating up Arabs or Muslims on the street just because I don’t like what a Muslim Arab named Osama bin Laden did in the USA, or what Saddam Hussein did to the Kurds? That’s ridiculous.

I still wear my Magen David openly. I’ve always worn it since I was little. Christians often wear a crucifix around their necks. Sikh men wear a turban, Hindu ladies sometimes have a bright red spot on the forehead, Muslim ladies often wear a veil. How can any of this be a problem to anyone? I think it’s great to see so many different styles and colours.

I would like the newspapers to stop writing so much, and above all so aggressively, about Israel. Israel is not the only place in the world where there are problems, although you could easily get that impression judging by the huge number of aggressive articles that are written about Israel. But they never write in an aggressive way about other countries with big problems. The guys who attack me don’t understand the difference between a Jew and an Israeli. If the newspapers keep writing in this aggressive way about everything that Israel does, and never ever write anything negative about any Arab country, it’s really quite understandable that these people are going to see me as their enemy. All they ever hear is negative things. Why should they treat me any differently?

I saw one example of this on Monday 26 January, the morning after I appeared on Swedish TV2 in “Agenda”, where I was interviewed about the anti-Semitic things that have happened to me. On Monday, a journalist called Helle Klein who writes in Aftonbladet, wrote “thankfully, there is nothing to suggest that … Jews are harassed by Muslims everywhere – in schools, on the streets, on the subways”. But just the very evening before, on TV, I had talked about exactly these things, about these exact same places. When we visited Stockholm last autumn, I was attacked on the subway because I was wearing my Magen David. My father tried to talk to the guy, who was about 17-18. My dad tried to calm him down and put out his hand to shake hands, saying adults shouldn’t behave in this way. But the guy just stared at him, he was really insulted, and he shouted “Are you mad? I don’t shake hands with any **** Jews!” Nobody on the train said anything. We got off.

The police, who have been really nice and kind when I reported these incidents, say I should hide my Magen David to avoid making trouble. But just think if the problem wasn’t that I was Jewish, but that I was black? I mean, there are lots of idiot racists who hate black people just because they are black. Would the police tell me to hide my black skin just to avoid making trouble? That means we wouldn’t see any black people on the streets – that’s just sick.

Everyone agrees that Nazis are racists. In Sweden, everyone protests loudly against Nazis, but they are quiet when Muslim or Arab racists say and do exactly the same things against Jews. Nobody wants to be accused of being against Muslims, so they stay quiet. I am not against Muslims or any other minorities. My father grew up as part of a small Jewish minority in India, among Muslims and Hindus. He never had any problems there. My mother’s mother was her family’s only survivor after Hitler finished with his terror of Europe’s Jewish minority. She survived Ravensbruck and Auschwitz. In my family we know what it is like to be part of a minority.

Here in Sweden, I’ve never ever heard of any Jew walking up to people in the street and threatening them or beating them up just because they are Muslims or Arabs. I think that is because we Jews grew up with the feeling that it is always difficult to be in a minority, so we must always show respect to all other people. I would like to talk to people, instead of having to protect myself from them. In my family this is called showing respect.