A response to Gideon Levy from a Swede who doesn't hate Israel
Last update - 14:13 20/03/2009
By Anna Ekstrom
In the aftermath of the Davis Cup event hosted in the Swedish town of Malmo, which on March 7 culminated in an anti-Israeli rally with traits of anti-Semitism and spurts of violence, there were two seemingly opposite comments published in English-language Israeli newspapers.
The first piece, by Abraham Cooper and Harold Brackman in the Jerusalem Post, was largely based on false premises and easily dismissed. The second article by Gideon Levy for Haaretz was a letter of sympathy with my compatriots, which is more offensive than Cooper and Brackman's criticism.
Levy portrays the Swede in the image of his own passions. It is difficult to understand why he is not offended by others' vilifying generalizations about his country, his compatriots and, by association, about Jews worldwide.
Praising us for our anti-Israel sentiments Levy writes that some populations, notably Swedish and Egyptian, are victims of pro-Israeli governments. This is reminiscent of a speech by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at the United Nations General Assembly, where he suggested that we are innocent victims of Zionism. Levy continues in the same note by alluding to the classic anti-Semitic myth of Jewish/Zionist control of the media.
He also speaks about unconditional support for Israel from foreign governments. This raises the question of whether Levy has read any foreign papers or looked on the Internet, for I doubt that any nation is at present as vilified as Israel. There is of course much legitimate criticism that can be levelled at Israel, but the terms must be equal to those applied to others.
Some of what passes for criticism of Israel is of a different nature, and it seems that Israel has been designated the role of "the Jew" in anti-Semitic mythology. The image of Israel as deceitful and evil reflects on the Jewish people, and goes toward explaining the events in Malmo. It also partly explains the sentiments in many other countries, such as the U.K., for the background to the Malmo riots is far from unique to Sweden.
The message from Malmo that reached the world is that the tennis matches were played behind closed doors due to security concerns or political decisions motivated by a large Arab-Muslim minority. It is true that a few Islamists, along with other extremists, have expressed anti-Semitism. But another fact is that immigrants, especially those with Arab or Muslim origins, are also experiencing racism. Innocent young men are looked upon as criminals simply because they are Arab or of dark hair. This too is a cause for concern.
However, the politicians who have uttered the most anti-Israel statements speak from a tradition present long before any significant Muslim immigration to Europe. This tradition is mainly upheld by the center-left-environmentalist opposition to the center-right government. Part of its ideological basis is the noble cause of defending those in need. Like Levy, these politicians claim to be speaking for peace. In Malmo, we can see that this had the opposite effect.
The Social Democrat mayor of Malmo, Ilmar Reepalu, bestowed upon Israel the epithet of "child murderer." Two representatives of other parties from the opposition coalition addressed the Malmo demonstrators. One of them, Per Gahrton, a former member of the European Parliament and current member of the faction which determines the opposition's foreign and security policies, claimed that Israel holds the world record in war crimes. He has also labeled Israel a "military dictatorship," and written that Swedish editors are controlled by the Israel lobby.
But the picture is not so clear-cut. Into the mix is the fact that some of the criticism against anti-Semitic tendencies comes from within the left and that the ultra-nationalist party has used pro-Israeli statements as an instrument to forward their anti-immigrant populism.
Blackened images of Israel that could reasonably be assumed to have incited hatred against Jews are thus to some extent being disseminated within mainstream society, not just thanks to these politicians, but also through biased news reporting and other channels. This is a much more severe problem than blatant and deliberate anti-Semitism within defined extremist groups.
Racist tendencies are not unique to Sweden in these times of economic recession, nor is the struggle against them. In February, some 120 parliamentarians saw the urgency in discussing how to combat the anti-Semitism that seems to have risen to an unprecedented level since WWII. The London Conference on Combating Anti-Semitism was attended by, among others, the foreign secretaries of the U.K. and Italy. Hence, Gideon Levy's statement "Not to worry: Everything is just dandy" is hardly consistent with reality. Luckily, there are Europeans struggling for his and others' human rights.
On the subject of human rights, Levy uses his comments on Swedes to defend the upcoming Durban II conference on racism. Country after country in the free world is leaving or objecting to the conference. They are doing so over the tone at the preparatory meetings, as well as the wording in drafts of the final declaration. Very recently the EU issued a united boycott warning.
Durban II is supposed to be a conference in defense of human rights against racism. It seems to have become a conference in defense of racism against human rights. Language is being perverted into the Newspeak of George Orwell's novel 1984, where truth came to mean untruth. In 2009, anti-racism means racism, human rights is the right of ideologies to silence the freedom of speech, striving for peace means incitement to violence. This not only attacks Israel or Jews, but also distorts those civil liberties and human rights that generations of Europeans fought hard for, and which are the foundation of our societies.
I can imagine that Israelis who have read the two opposing pieces on Malmo may have a black picture of the Swedes. I know that there are Europeans who, whether they have reflected upon it or not, have a dark image of Israelis and Jews. The difference is that the depiction of Jews has been revived over and over again. I believe that one of the most serious threats to peace within and between countries lies in the hatred spurred by such simple and unimaginative imagery. This threat is best fought by using our imagination to bring color and nuance into the pictures we paint of one another.
Anna Ekstrom is a Swedish freelance writer
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Sweden's anti-Israel apartheid policy is about more than sport
Mar. 9, 2009
ABRAHAM COOPER and HAROLD BRACKMAN , THE JERUSALEM POST
Neutral Sweden's mixed World War II legacy is still debated by historians. On the one hand it supplied Nazi Germany with iron ore and ball bearings and allowed the Wehrmacht to use the Swedish railway system to transport soldiers. On the other hand, spurred on by the Danes, it accepted Danish Jews marked for mass murder by the Nazis. Ultimately, the good name of Sweden was redeemed by the unparalleled heroics of one of its own - Raoul Wallenberg, who, using the cover of a Swedish diplomat, helped save tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews destined for Auschwitz, only to disappear into the Soviet Gulag. For decades, no Swedish government had the courage to demand his return from the jaws of the neighboring Russian bear.
While this Swede will forever be revered by the Jewish nation, it is brutally clear in 2009 that Jews and especially those uppity ones from Israel are of little concern to Swedish authorities, as their policies become more reminiscent of apartheid South Africa or Berlin in the 1930s than a 21st-century Scandinavian democracy.
INTERNATIONAL SPORTS strive to be free of politics and prejudice. But here they provide real-time proof of the poisoning of Swedish public life by biases that have echoes in Nazi Europe's anti-Semitism. In Sweden's third largest city, Malmo, where a virulently anti-Israel Muslim community makes up a significant percentage of the 250,000 population, the City Council voted five to four to hold the scheduled Davis Cup match between Israel and Sweden in an empty stadium, behind closed doors.
The losers are tennis players and fans of every nationality. The winners are the "Stop the Match" campaign which prevailed on the council's Socialist-Left majority to quarantine Israelis and Jews behind an apartheid police cordon to protest Israel's actions in the recent Gaza war.
The Malmo travesty comes on the heels of a huge international outcry after Dubai barred Shahar Pe'er from the Barclay Dubai Tennis Tournament in the UAE. Dubbed the apartheid tennis tournament, and threatened with having the games withdrawn from it, Dubai was forced to issue a visa for Andy Ram.
That controversy has had zero impact in Sweden however, as authorities announced that an Israeli tae kwondo delegation, consisting of 45 athletes and five coaches, en route to Trelleborg for the Swedish championship, was told to stay home due to Muslim threats. Not even tae kwondo - Korean for "the art of kicking and punching" - can provide protection from Sweden's supine complicity in leading today's anti-Israel bullies.
Spare us the alleged "public safety" nonsense. The same 7,000 anti-Israel demonstrators in downtown Malmo would have chanted the same slogans and the few dozen who attacked the police vans for the benefit of media coverage would have tossed the same projectiles had the stadium been packed with tennis fans on Saturday.
No the security card was invoked not to protect but to stigmatize Israeli athletes as pariahs.
None of this is about sports. It's about Jews.
FOR DECADES, Sweden has allowed demagogues like Ahmed Rami , whose Radio Islam is a 22-language flagship of Holocaust denial, Jew-hatred and demonization of the State of Israel, to poison the well among the nation's Muslim minority.
Over-the-top vilification anti-Israel rhetoric is a hallmark of a large swathe of the Swedish political establishment.
"Israel is an apartheid state. I think Gaza is comparable to the Warsaw Ghetto... I'm surprised that Israel... can do the exact same things the Nazis did," charged Ingalill Bjartén, the vice-chair for the Social Democratic Women in southern Sweden. "I don't think Israel is a democracy worthy of the name. It's a racist apartheid state," said the Left Party's Hans Linde, calling for a boycott of Israel. A leading Social-Democrat, Urban Ahlin, deputy chair of the Committee of Foreign Affairs, implored Stockholm to encourage the EU to suspend its cooperation agreement with Israel.
On the right, Carl Bildt, Sweden's foreign minister, after visiting Gaza charged Israel with intentionally targeting economic infrastructure and called its policies "neither morally nor politically defensible." In 2004, when a Europewide poll revealed that 59 percent of respondents identified Israel as "the greatest threat to world peace," a Swedish government conference on preventing genocide was coordinated with a Stockholm museum exhibit, entitled "Snow White and the Madness of Truth," that glorified an Islamic Jihad homicide bomber who mass murdered 22 Israeli Jews and Arabs at a Haifa café.
IN 2005, a US State Department report documented that anti-Semitic incidents against Sweden's tiny Jewish community spiked to over 100 a year after 2000, with attacks on Jewish shopkeepers and members of the Jewish Burial Society in Malmo, arson and vandalism of a Jewish cemetery, a swastika painted near the Jewish community building in Gothenburg, three Arab men disrupted the Rosh Hashana service shouting "I'll kill you, Zionists!" at the Great Synagogue in Stockholm where a pro-Israel street demonstration was violently disrupted by counterdemonstrators and members of Hizb ut-Tahrir handed out leaflets near a mosque that urged the liquidation of Jews in Palestine.
A 2006 poll showed 30 percent of all Swedes harbored moderate to strong anti-Semitic attitudes.
In 2008-2009 since the Gaza war broke out, slogans including "murderers... You broke the cease-fire" and "don't subject Palestine to ethnic cleansing" have defaced the Israeli embassy in Stockholm, while in Helsingborg synagogue windows were broken while an arson fire blazed outside.
Sweden is among the European countries with laws against Holocaust denial and defamation of minorities. Yet to judge from recent events, such laws are a dead letter regarding offenses against Jews. Though Swedish schools teach Holocaust education, according to polls one-third of Swedish young people doubt that the Holocaust occurred. One can only imagine what Swedish Holocaust hero Raoul Wallenberg, who saved thousands of Hungarian Jews, would think. It's time for Sweden to change sides and come out against, not for, the new war against Israel and the Jews.
Rabbi Abraham Cooper is associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center and Museum of Tolerance. He has been involved in efforts on behalf of Raoul Wallenberg from the 1980s. Dr. Harold Brackman, a historian, is a consultant for the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
This article can also be read at http://www.jpost.com /servlet/Satellite?cid=1236269377485&pagename=JPArticle%2FShowFull
Gideon Levy / Has anyone in Israel asked why the Swedes hate us?
By Gideon Levy
Tags: gideon levy, anti-Semitism
Was it a coincidence? The day after Israel's Davis Cup tennis match in Sweden, played in a practically empty arena this week, a brief item appeared on the Haaretz Web site: Historians have discovered that Sweden, former tennis superpower, aided the Nazi war machine by extending credit to German industrial plants.
Coincidence or not, neutral in 1941 or not, 68 years later, public opinion in Sweden is definitely not neutral: Thousands demonstrated there against Israel, which was forced to wield its racket like a leper, with no audience in attendance. Did anyone in Israel even ask why it was considered a pariah in Sweden? No one dared question whether the war in the Gaza Strip was worth the price we're paying now, from Ankara to Malmo. It's enough to recall that the Swedes were always against us. The fact that there were times when they were awash in love for Israel was erased from our consciousness.
The world is always against us, period. But the world is not against us - to the contrary: The truth is that there is no other nation toward which the world is so forgiving, even today. Yes, today. Granted, world public opinion is very critical, sometimes in a way that's unique to Israel, but most governments (except Venezuela and Turkey, but including Egypt and Sweden) are far from being in sync with the public opinion in their countries. The official world continues to be sympathetic to Israel, regardless of its actions. The rise of Hamas, the increase in hatred for Islam in the West, the American hegemony - all this helps in strengthening the support, and we know how to make the very most of it.
What's the difference between national tennis player Andy Ram and national tennis player Thomas Johansson? Johansson and his angry fans saw real pictures from Gaza; Ram and his complacent fans never did. Had Ram seen them, maybe he, too, would demonstrate. But he, like most Israelis, was spared this discomfort, thanks to the gung-ho Israeli press. Can we and Ram really criticize those who were horrified by the pictures from the war? Can we reproach those who dare to protest against the people responsible for those scenes? Are we demanding that the world remain silent once again?
The demonstrators in Stockholm waved banners against violence and racism. It may be okay to ask why they waved them only against us, as there are some other racist and violent places in the world, but it is not okay to question the right to do so in general. Was there really no violence in Gaza, and is there no racism in Israel? If we were Swedes, wouldn't we protest against the pointless killing and destruction wrought by Israel?
But we needn't get too worked up over the fury of public opinion in Sweden; its right-wing government is much less agitated, like all the other European governments. One need only recall the surreal scene at the height of the brutal assault on Gaza, when the heads of the European Union came to Israel and dined with the prime minister in a show of unilateral support for the side wreaking the killing and destruction. They didn't give a thought to visiting Gaza, and uttered nary a word of criticism against Israel. That is official Europe.
Now, as a new government is about to be formed, there is concern that Israel will pay a price in the international arena for its composition. Not to worry: Everything will be just dandy. The world will accept Benjamin Netanyahu as Israel's No. 1 statesman, Avigdor Lieberman as its No. 1 diplomat and Moshe Ya'alon as its No. 1 soldier. Lieberman's belligerent statements and the Israel Defense Forces' violent actions in the territories under former chief of staff Ya'alon will not present any obstacles. The world will accept them, too.
Furthermore, the growing concern that the new U.S. administration may be about to change the rules of the game vis-a-vis Israel could also prove to be unfounded: Barack Obama's new America has already pledged to clean up after Israel, as usual. The $900 million the administration has pledged to contribute to rebuild Gaza - without a word of criticism about who caused the destruction there, as if it were a natural disaster and not the work of an unrestrained army, particularly in light of America's current economic state - is a bad sign for anyone hoping for change. Israel wrecked Gaza with U.S. weapons, and America and Europe step in to fix things, not for the first time or for the last.
As the saying goes around here, what was is what will be: Israel will continue to destroy, and America will continue to mop up after it, without a word. A bad sign? Yes, for anyone who thinks that change will only come from the outside or, in other words, only from America.
Note how the upcoming Durban II conference on racism is also being thwarted, because of the fear that it will harshly criticize Israel. Does anyone know of any other country that can win such sweeping international backing? But we always complain: The whole world is against us. It's good for shoring up national unity and for squeezing out more and more support in the world.
The bleak prophecies about a change in America's attitude toward Israel are as old as the country itself. Whenever there's a change of administration in the U.S., anxiety spikes. But from president to president, our strength only grows: When George W. Bush was elected, we were told to be wary of the Texan, a friend of the Arabs and of oil. And what did we get? Never was there a president more "sympathetic to Israel," who gave it such a blank check for all its settlements, targeted assassinations and occupation activities. Obama is scary, too: He's already talking with Iran and with the Taliban. Most likely, fears surrounding this will also prove to be overblown, once he gets around to dealing with Israel.
International interest in Israel is completely disproportionate. Last week, every taxi driver in Bursa, Turkey could recite by heart the names of Lieberman, Tzipi Livni, Netanyahu - and also Avi Mizrahi, the major general who had criticized their country. Every little flutter of coalition action in Israel immediately makes headlines; the world does not focus as much attention on the internal politics of any other country. Only Israel. Whether it's good or bad for the Jews, it's hard to put one's finger on the roots of this phenomenon.
For decades now, the world has been buying the Zionist narrative almost in full. The occupation and settlements have been going on for more than 40 years with no serious impediment. Except for some international grumblings and resolutions no one has any serious intention of implementing, Israel continues to belong to the camp of the "good guys"; the Arabs are the "bad guys." The new atmosphere in the West against Islam is reinforcing this trend and Israel is benefiting yet again. Criticism of the media in the West from Israel's supporters is also quite excessive.
A Swedish journalist was recently laid off from her newspaper because she sided with the Palestinian position in the conflict. It's hard to imagine her editors acting the same way if it were a Jewish reporter who had written in support of Israel.
When I was interviewed once by a reporter from the France 1 channel, a commercial channel, at the doorway of a house in Gaza - where the army had killed the only daughter of a paralyzed mother - and I said that it was these sorts of moments that made me feel ashamed to be an Israeli, my words were not broadcast. The reporter phoned me the next day and told me his editors had decided not to include the quote, for fear of viewer response. When I once published an article in the German paper Die Welt, which is part of the publishing group of Axel Springer, where all writers had to sign a pledge that they would never cast doubt on the State of Israel's right to exist, the editor told me: "If this critical article about the occupation had been written by a German journalist, we would not have published it."
Despite mounting criticism of Israel, Europe is still very cautious. With Europe's Holocaust guilt, its anxiety in the face of Islam and its readiness to blindly follow the United States anywhere, Israel still enjoys preferential status in the world. Very preferential.
But perhaps this will not always be the case. Perhaps the worse our actions become, the harsher the criticism will be. Meanwhile, two pointless wars in two years were not enough to achieve this. Maybe the time will indeed come when the world will get fed up with this aggression and violence of ours, which endanger world peace, and will say at long last: No more occupation, no more wars perpetrated by Israel for which the world has to pay. Perhaps when Israel's dream team of Netanyahu-Lieberman-Ya'alon faces the American dream team of Obama-Clinton, conservatives versus liberals, warmongers versus seekers of negotiation - something will happen then.
In the meantime, let us remember: Israel beat Sweden 3-2 in tennis and justice prevailed once again.