(This abridged article by Ingrid Carlqvist and Lars Hedegaard appeared originally in complete form here on the Gatestone Institute website.)
If anyone had thought that the slaughter of four Jews in a Paris supermarket — for the reason that they were Jews — would have caused the Swedish mainstream press and the government to explain who is behind Europe’s growing anti-Semitism and anti-Jewish violence, he would be sadly mistaken.
With the exception of one television program, the connection between anti-Semitism, Islam and Muslim mass immigration remains a mental no-go area in Sweden.
Swedes now tend to view all immigrants as victims of totalitarianism, and most of the country has never realized that one minority group may expose another minority group to violence and intimidation.
They refuse to acknowledge that not all immigrants think like Swedes and cannot comprehend that people would flee if they were not hated and threatened.
Sweden’s history when it comes to Jews is not a pretty one. It was not until 1870 that Jews were permitted to settle wherever they wanted in the country. Sweden was behind the proposal to stamp a big “J” in the passports of German Jews, to prevent Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany from entering. And now the Swedish authorities close their eyes to the new Jew-hatred that is imported in the wake Muslim immigration.
Unfortunately, one of the worst offenders trying to hide the truth is a Jewish organization, the Swedish Committee against Anti-Semitism [SKMA]. What seems to have upset supporters of the SKMA was a comparison of them to the Organization of German Nationalist Jews, who in the 1930s supported Hitler and claimed that Jews were treated fairly in Nazi Germany.
In 1943, when it became clear that Hitler would lose the war, Sweden hurried to restore some of its reputation. In Nazi-occupied Denmark, about 8,000 Jews had escaped deportation to Nazi concentration camps because they were under the protection of the Danish government, and were never forced to wear the yellow Star of David.
But on August 23, 1943, all cooperation between the Danish government and the occupation authorities broke down. The government resigned and the Germans imposed a state of emergency.
The Danish resistance got wind that the Germans planned to round up all 8,000 Danish Jews in the night between October 1 and 2, 1943, to deport them to German camps. In no time, the resistance, with the aid of a great many civilians, managed to thwart the operation. Fishing boats were mobilized to smuggle more than 7,000 Jews to Sweden.
The Danish Jews and a number of Danish resistance fighters were housed in Swedish boarding houses, youth hostels, hotels and private homes.
After war’s end, most of the Jews in Sweden returned to Denmark, but Sweden’s self-image was forever changed. Finally, Sweden had something to be proud of after its highly dubious behavior at the time when it appeared that Hitler was on a winning streak.
Unfortunately, the Swedes drew an erroneous conclusion from their rescue of the Jews. Many Swedes are now firmly convinced that everyone seeking shelter in Sweden is in the same desperate predicament as the Jews were in 1943. One reason Swedes are more welcoming to asylum seekers than the inhabitants of most other European countries, is that they are distancing themselves from their despicable treatment of Jews before World War II, until 1943.
But this is precisely what has paved the way for a new Jew-hatred in Sweden. Swedes know nothing of the Jew-hatred in the Koran and the hadiths, so they just don’t understand why Muslims attack Jews. The Swedish media seldom write about the attacks, which Swedes will believe have something to do with the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.
