Swedish paradise lost

A pro-Israel rally in the southern Swedish city of Malmö descended into violent chaos as an illegal counter-demonstration went on the offensive.

What was remarkable was that the illegal counter-demonstration was allowed by the police to come so close to the pro-Israel rally that the attackers were able to slice through the power supply cable to the PA system. They also got close enough to throw rockets, stones, eggs and glass bottles, eventually forcing the rally to abandon its programme at the insistence of the police.

In Malmö, Sweden, in 2009, Jews are running for their lives via back-streets while an insufficiently prepared and/or insufficiently interested police force allow violent attackers to swarm over the Jews’ meeting-place.

Among the rally participants were survivors of the Holocaust. One cannot even begin to imagine the images flying through their minds as they fled under a hail of missiles with the screams of the mob ringing in their ears. “Death to the Jews! Death to the Israelis” intermingled with the increasingly frenzied barks of police dogs, reawakening terrifying recollections from a not too distant past.

This is Sweden, the year is 2009. A Sweden where the mob rules and where people in police uniform bark orders.

The people responsible for this crushing defeat of democracy are not primarily the police, although there may be some reason for questioning their preparedness; the people who are responsible the media, who for years have pursued a virulently anti-Israel and borderline anti-Semitic campaign via the newspapers, radio and TV.

The power base of the mob has shown its power. Now it is up to Parliament to show its power, to demonstrate whether it will return Sweden to the course of democracy.

Or whether it will sit idly by as the country slides towards a situation that was last seen in Europe 70 years ago.

Tuesday January 27 is Sweden’s Holocaust Remembrance Day, marking the murder of six million Jews by other racist anti-democrats not so very long ago. It is to be hoped that Tuesday will not also be hijacked by an anti-democratic, racist mob, while uniformed police protect the “basic human rights” of the violent protesters – the explanation actually given by a police officer as the Jews were removed from their venue and the area was handed over to the jubilant pro-Palestinian and pro-Hizbollah protesters.

Today in Sweden a terrible echo from seventy years ago was heard loud and clear.

National Geographic hijacked

It would appear that National Geographic, that last bastion of neutrality in an increasingly polarized world, has finally succumbed to the relentless onslaught of pro-Arab bias and propaganda (“West Bank: Lines in the Sand”, October 2002).

With his infamously tainted background, it is scarcely surprising that Andrew Cockburn would wish to disseminate his own brand of anti-Israel prejudice. But did National Geographic not see fit to curb his worst excesses by insisting on the application of at least a veneer of honesty to some of his more outrageous sentiments?

I am thinking, in particular, of Cockburn’s Middle East timeline that skips from 1967 straight through to 1978 and the Camp David process – ignoring the lethal 1973 Arab invasion of Israel. An unequivocally Arab aggression, the 1973 Yom Kippur War simply does not fit in with the doctrine according to Cockburn. Being thus inconvenient, it was expunged from the record.

National Geographic, Magazine has been well and truly hijacked. Civilised people around the world know who gave the world this wicked weapon, and we also all know its cruel effects in the air and on the ground. Now we’re witnessing it in print.