Sweden: Journalist denies Jews were murdered in the Holocaust

Via CFCA and SAW:

This story is a little complicated, and shows how you can get to the worst antisemitic attitudes when you think you're fighting antisemitism.

Recently, Björn Söder, a prominent member of the right-wing Sweden Democrats party, said in an interview that Jews are not Swedes, though they could become Swedes by leaving their Jewish identity and assimilating.

His remarks were met with much criticism from the local Jewish community.  They were also mistranslated throughout the Jewish world.

What Söder meant is that Swedes are an ethnic group, a nation of their own.  If a Jew holds on to his own ethnic identity, he can be a Swedish citizen but he's not fully part of the Swedish ethnic group.

Martin Aagård, a journalist for Aftonbladet, wrote a scathing attack on the Sweden Democrats headlined "De hatar vårt sätt att leva" (They Hate Our Way of Life).  We are all Swedes, he said, and we're not made up of different nations.   Today's Sweden is more like the US.

In response, a far-right group called up Aagård and 'interviewed' him.   In the clip they posted, they ask Aagård about the Holocaust.  Do you deny that Jews were a separate nation there too?  Wasn't there a genocide against the Jewish people?

Aagård replied that there couldn't have been a genocide against the Jewish people, because Jews do not constitute a separate ethnic nation or peoples.  Therefore Jews were not murdered in the Holocaust. 

Aagård says that no Jews were gassed and no Jews were killed.  They were Poles and Hungarians, not Jews.

What Aagård said is just the extreme conclusion from the general left-wing attitudes.  Because he denies that Sweden is a nation-state of an ethnic people, he also denies Jews are an ethnic people with a separate identity.