Sweden: Jewish comedian says paper was looking for 'somebody to play the insulted Jew' for article on antisemitism

Jewish Swedish comedian Aron Flam says he was insulted by an employee of newspaper Aftonbladet.

Flam says he got a call from Aftonbladet. Before they realized he had answered the phone he heard somebody continue a discussion and saying : "come on, we need somebody to play the insulted Jew!"

When they realized he had heard them, the call became more tense, and then they stated the reason they called, to ask whether he would write something about antisemitism in Sweden.

Flam got upset at them.  Aftonbladet often uses double standards when reporting on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and about antisemitism in Sweden.  He told them he'd heard what they said and that he refuses to be their Jewish alibi.

Flam analyses various cases of Aftonbladet antisemitism, including their 2009 article claiming that Israeli troops harvested organs from Palestinians.  The article was titled "Our sons are being plundered for their organs".  The paper and the journalist who wrote the article, Donald Boström, later admitted they had no evidence for those claims, but that such claims, regardless of whether they were true or not, required an investigation.

Aftonbladet, by the way, denies any employee said any such thing to Flam.  According to Aftonbladet, there's no way he could have heard anybody speaking in the background, and furthermore, he had told them he needed to think about it and only later told them he couldn't write the article.

As Aftonbladet itself said in the past: I do not know what really happened, but I think any such claim deserves a thorough investigation, regardless.

More: Nyheter 24