May 17, 2006

Anti Definition League

Sweden helped many Jews escape the Holocaust during World War II through heroic and risky efforts. It offered asylum for almost 9,000 victims from Norway and Denmark alone.

After the war, many Holocaust survivors were brought to Sweden for medical care and rehabilitation. By the 1950’s Sweden had accepted hundreds of Jews from Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland who were victims of Communist-led witch hunts. Soon, a law was passed prohibiting the incitement against ethnic groups. Today, anyone wearing Nazi symbols or producing White power music could do jail time.

However, Muslim extremists who have filtered into Swedish society in the past few decades are unaffected by the country’s hate crime law. The hate website Radio Islam continuously spews Anti-Semitic commentary without consequence. The site divulges names of Jews (authentic or bogus) and fosters anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.

Swedish authorities demonstrated the utmost hypocrisy when the Ministry of Foreign Affairs shut down a website by the radical right-wing party, the Sweden Democrats, because it had posted one of the controversial Muhammad cartoons. Meanwhile, Radio Islam was free to continue its vitriolic rampage.

A mosque in Stockholm was recently under investigation after cassette tapes were sold in its bookshop containing anti-Semitic lectures that were “strongly degrading to Jews,” according to Chancellor of Justice L. Goran Lambertz. He mentioned that the speaker called for a Jihad to kill Jews by suicide bombers and that the lecturer refers to Jews as “brothers of apes and pigs.” He eventually dropped the investigation because this hate speech against Jews could be considered to originate from the Middle East conflict. Therefore, it is acceptable to call for the massacre of Jews as long as the Palestinian conflict is mentioned.

Further surrendering to Islamic wishes, Sweden cancelled its participation in international air force exercises to take place in Italy this month to protest the involvement of the Israeli Air Force in the drills. This announcement arrived just one day after Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Swedish Jews live in constant fear and Jewish communities spend roughly 25 percent of their budgets on security.

Hate crime in Sweden pales in comparison to other European nations. But the growing tension is a ticking time bomb that needs to be diffused immediately.