Al Beeb's Savage Look at Malmö

See Tundra Tabloids here

Yesterday's BBC article about the Swedish city of Malmö, written by Maddy Savage,  is a model example of dishonest reporting.

In saying "Swedish city" I of course use that term loosely, since  the place in question is the archetypical example of the slow suicide Abbaland committed in 1975 when it decided to reinvent itself as a satellite of the Third World.

But being a Beeboid (as the "Biased BBC" website would term her) Maddy Savage is not politically incorrect, and so her article begins:

'Malmö’s international image is in need of a makeover — one that matches the genuine experience of its resident expats and citizens alike.

Saddled with a reputation for crime, the grittier neighbourhoods within Sweden’s third-largest urban hub have gained notoriety in recent years after appearing in global smash-hit Nordic Noir drama The Bridge, while more recent international debates have questioned safety amid large-scale immigration. US President Donald Trump has suggested that media and the authorities have hushed up how bad tensions are in the city, while UK politician Nigel Farage claimed it was the rape capital of Europe....'

With no attempt to discuss why Trump and Farage harbour such jaundiced views of Malmö, and to examine whether they may just have a point, Ms Savage warms to her appointed task: to present Malmö as a marvellous multicultural melting pot where everything in the garden's lovely.

The genuine experience of its citizens?

How about the genuine experience  female victims of sexual assault by, er, savages?

Not only in Malmö but in other parts of Sweden.

Look, for instance, at the post a visitor to Sweden put under this recent video of high jinks in Malmo:

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AReNfqqGsb8

 I was lucky enough to spend New Year's in Stockholm with my girlfriend and I must say it is a fantastic city everyone should visit! The the Swedes are real friendly  and we really enjoyed it but what let it down for me was New Year's Eve travelling to the fireworks going through central station and the hordes of young North African/Arabic men hanging around staring disgustingly at every blonde girl that walked past including my girlfriend and when we took the the underground to return to our hotel after the fireworks we saw a different Stockholm, not a single Swede was on the tube, just Arabic-looking men all crowded in and wanting to stand as close to my girlfriend as possible  and staring disgustingly at her and when we arrived at our stop (Solna Strand) and we got off some of them started shouting in their language at my girlfriend and harassing her as we walked off the tube. It really opens my eyes to these primates that Europe is allowing in.  So thanks Sweden for your hospitality but f*ck you for allowing this scum into Europe and allowing them to reign free.  I feel real sorry for your wives and daughters that have to put up with that kind of sh*t everyday." [Emphasis added]

Here's Swedish journalist Ingrid Carlqvist.  She could teach Maddy Savage a thing or three:

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uv75JP2BGbs

How about the genuine experience Jewish victims of seventh-century antisemitism imported into twentieth and twenty-first century Malmö?

See my post about the plight of Malmö's Jews here
Here too (video)
Breitbart here with video
Ingrid Carlqvist here

It seems the experiences of Malmö's Jews don't count in Beeboid Maddy Savage's view.

She mentioned the drama series The Bridge but avoided telling of the disquiet a Jewish actor in that series felt about antisemitism in the city it was made in, leading him to quit.  She made no attempt to interview people who have had bad experiences in that city owing to their gender or their Jewishness.

Needless to say, there's no doubt, no doubt at all, that the reverse would apply if the perpetrators of those rapes and those antisemitic crimes had been white men and right-wingers respectively.

In Malmö, A Walk On The Wild Side

Non-Jew Patrick Reilly decided  to test the antisemitic reputation of Sweden's third city, Malmö, for himself.  Donning a kippah, he took a stroll through a bustling neighbourhood.

It was an unsettling experience:

"....The idea was to go about my normal day and also visit places which a potential tourist may go to, albeit with one major difference – the kippah clipped to the back of my head....

Well, it didn't take long before I got the feeling that I was on display as I walked towards Möllevången. Möllan, as it is referred to by locals, is the bohemian quarter of Malmö with a bustling fruit and veg market manned largely by immigrants by day and pubs serving cheap beer by night.

I've walked down this street countless times in my normal garb, without causing as much as a backwards glance. Now, it was as if I had two heads judging by the number of stares arrowed in my direction.

As I passed a well-known bar I spotted some lunchtime coffee drinkers looking open mouthed in my direction. Navigating the fruit and vegetable stalls it was obvious that I was being stared at by shoppers and stall workers.

When it came time to make a purchase something strange happened. The stall worker started to giggle and beckoned his boss to come over and witness this transaction. Both were friendly to the point where it was almost too much.

Stares I'd expected but good-natured laughter I certainly hadn't. This was strange.

For safety reasons I asked a friend to shadow me from a discrete distance just in case things got ugly. Whilst in Möllan we went to one of the local coffee shops sandwiched between the falafel and ethnic food stores.

As we waited for our drinks I was spotted by two men in the corner of the small coffee shop. I could feel their eyes burning into the back of my borrowed shiny white kippah but –  again – nothing was said or done that could be construed as anti-Semitism, or at least not of a sort that would make me fear for my safety.

Nevertheless, I was nervous and those feelings only intensified as we sat outside in the public square to drink our coffees.

On several occasions people stopped and looked back at me with a mixture of disbelief and menace. Another woman promptly broke into a fit of giggles like it was the funniest thing she had seen in ages. Then a group of men with large dogs lingered, for what seemed like an eternity, just in front of me.

Perhaps it was because they spoke fast in a language I didn't understand or it was the close proximity of the dogs which made me feel scared. Whether the threat was real or imagined the fear was genuine and that stemmed from what I was wearing on my head.

This was hardly helped when my friend told me that another group of men had been staring solidly at me for 30 minutes from a cafe across the street.

It was time to leave Möllan but I wanted to buy some flatbread before then. Once again the young man in the ethnic food store broke into laughter when I handed him the ten kronor for the fresh bread. A (faux) Jew in this part of town certainly had a curiosity factor.

Next I walked up the big shopping street, Södra Förstadsgatan, to the main square at Gustav Adolfs Torg. More stares followed, particularly from a woman as I ate lunch, but I did feel safer in this part of town.

After a while I began to forget I was wearing the kippah until a burly man walked aggressively in my direction and mouthed "fucking Jew" to his friend. It was a reminder that making your Jewish identity in Malmö obvious carries its own risk. Frankly, it was a relief to take it off.

I've lived in Malmö for almost two years and in that time there have been numerous shootings and violent crimes. As an Irish person abroad I've never felt remotely threatened but wearing the kippah for a few hours was enough to instill feelings of fear. Even when I didn't feel afraid I was made to feel different and unwelcome.

The statistics show that my fear is well-placed. Sixty anti-Semitic hate crimes were registered in Malmö in 2012 – almost three times the number in previous years. None of these resulted in a conviction....'

Read the entire article here
Hat tip: Vlad Tepes blog

The Fool's Paradise Of Swedish Multiculturalism

Australia has been dubbed "The Sweden of the South," and from Peter Wertheim, executive director of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry comes a robust statement deploring the attack on the Jewish community centre in Malmö, Sweden last Friday: 

"It is bad enough that the Jewish Community Centre in Malmö was attacked with an explosive device and bricks through its reinforced entrance just after Yom Kippur.  What is worse is that in Sweden, a country that prides itself on its progressive human rights record, the authorities lack the courage to confront the pervasive Jew-hatred that produced this attack in the first place and to bring the perpetrators of past attacks to justice.  Worse still is the apparent public and media indifference.

Seventy years after Europe was devastated by the Nazis, antisemitism is once more commonplace and tacitly accepted on that continent.  European civilisation has failed to cast off its long and disgraceful history of anti-Jewish prejudice and persecution.  The mark of Cain remains etched indelibly on its forehead, and for this it will one day again pay a terrible price."

Here's a reminder of the plight of Jews in Malmö:

 And here's another:

Since those videos were made three years ago hate crimes against Jews in Sweden's third largest city have continued apace, as this interview that took place earlier this year indicates:

 Let's hope the "Sweden of the South" heeds the lessons inherent in the real Sweden's mistakes.

Northern Plights - Swedish Antisemitism and the Swedish Left

Some years ago, an Australian Jewish academic of my acquaintance, employed at a university somewhere in what is frequently dubbed "Eurabia", returned to his homeland for a visit.  During an interview with a reporter from the local Jewish newspaper he mentioned his conviction, based on the European experience, that unrestricted Muslim immigration into Australia would not bode well for Australia's Jews.  Imagine his surprise when he returned to his university and found that a small group of Aussie Jews, taking umbrage at his "Islamophobia", had contacted both the head of his department and the university's vice-chancellor in an apparent effort to get him sacked.  I guess that's the totalitarian hard left for you!

I'll be blogging in the very near future about the current situation in Australia, but today I want to focus on the plight of Swedish Jewry, about which perhaps not enough is known outside Scandinavia.  I base most of my information on a briefing paper authored by Mikael Tossaveinen, issued by the Stephen Roth Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and Racism at Tel Aviv University, and on the excellent blog Sweden Israel and the Jews, from which I took the accompanying photograph.  The blog http://www.swedenisrael.blogspot.com/ is essential reading for anyone wishing to gain an insight into just how viciously hostile towards Israel, and ambivalent towards Jews,  the Swedish left - government ministers, politicians, clergy, trades unionists, academics, journalists - has become.

You may recall that about a year ago a leftwing Swedish newspaper, Aftonbladet, shamefully published an article which alleged that the IDF was killing Palestinians and harvesting their organs; the article, whose title translated into English was "They plunder the organs of our sons", was essentially the medieval blood libel wrapped in a modern cloak.  Its author, an extreme radical and anti-Zionist propagandist, was duplicitously described by the paper as a "journalist".   In that same year, there was a dramatic increase - up 57% on 2008 - of antisemitic incidents in Sweden, although it's well-known that many incidents go unreported, so that this is only the tip of the iceberg.

It's also well-known - despite the attempts, some of them farcical, of the mainly oh-so-politically-correct Swedish press to disguise the fact - that most antisemitic incidents are overwhelmingly the work of members of the large Muslim community that has grown in Sweden over the past generation, especially in the southern city of Malmo (total population perhaps as high as 300,000), where a fifth of inhabitants are Muslim.  In 2007, for Sweden's National Day, 6 June, marked each year as an official holiday, it was decided by officialdom - in a nod to Muslim numbers - to hold  celebrations at the mosque.  Hence this photo of ethnic Swedes in their national costume performing traditional Swedish folk dances in a bemusedly incongruous setting. 
Hence, too, the frequent use of Arabic rather than Swedish music that has come to mark the day.

As in certain other European cities, the Jews of Malmo, whose community was founded in the late nineteenth-century, feel intimidated by this large - and aggressive - Muslim presence.  With good reason, for physical threats and sometimes actual violence lie in wait for those sufficiently courageous - or foolhardy, depending on your viewpoint -  to appear in public wearing kippot or other symbols of Jewishness.  The local Chabad rabbi, easily identifiable, has been victimised innumerable times - there was even an attempt to run him over. 

During Operation Cast Lead, the tiny Jewish community, less than 800-strong (its numbers have since fallen further owing to emigration), held a "peace rally" in Malmo's main public square.  Despite that description of the event they were surrounded by a surging hate-filled mob of Muslims and ethnic Swedish leftists.  This mob clashed with police and hurled bottles and firecrackers at the Jews, who were eventually, for their safety, shunted into an alley by police.  Not long afterwards, two Israeli tennis players in Malmo for the Davis Cup were forced into playing their match in private - with no spectators - as a mob of the same elements, similarly armed with missiles, attempted to storm police barricades and invade the court.  One of them, Andy Ram, described the experience to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz as "distressing and disgusting ... the first time I have come across such a demonstration and felt the hatred towards Israelis".

The attitude of Malmo's Social Democratic mayor, Ilmar Reepalu, to the plight of his city's Jews has been exceedingly obnoxious - and instructive, reflecting as it does the attitude of so much of the political left (and not only in Sweden) towards Jews and Israel.  Reluctant to implicate the Muslim community, he has attempted to shift the blame to right-wingers, and has also dismissively stated with regard to the flight of Jews out of Malmo owing to the intolerable situation there that if the city's Jews choose to settle in Israel, that's not Malmo's concern.  A reporter, whose paper had run a series of articles on the threats, "Hitler" taunts, and harassment experienced by Malmo's Jews from members of the Muslim community, asked Reepalu for a statement.  Far from condemning the Muslim behaviour in unequivocal terms and expressing sympathy for the Jews, Reepalu declared "We accept neither Zionism nor antisemitism", describing them both as unacceptable supremacist ideologies, and observed that the Jews had brought their troubles on themselves by supporting Israel and that it was incumbent upon them to prevent antisemitism by distancing themselves from Israel.  Subsequently, he claimed to have been misrepresented by the reporter - but the reporter had wisely taped his words - so he claimed to have been set up by the "Israeli lobby" instead.

Predictably, therefore - yet of course no less outrageously for that - when, very recently, following a bomb threat, the Malmo synagogue (a beautiful Moorish structure dating to 1903) was attacked by an explosive device that blew out windows, Reepalu refused to comment.