Belgium: Jewish woman reportedly threatened with firearm outside her home

Via Times of Israel:

A Jewish woman whose family has endured months of anti-Semitic intimidation in Belgium said a man pointed a gun at her outside her home.

The woman, identified in the Belgian media only as Nicole, told the SudPresse media group that the incident happened on Oct. 9 outside their home in Marchienne-au-Pont, a suburb of Charleroi, 30 miles south of Brussels, the media group’s report from Friday said.

...

Recounting the firearm incident, Nicole told SudPresse: “We stopped at a red light in front of a hair salon near our street. There was a bearded individual there whom I recognised because he verbally assaulted me two weeks ago. He turned to us. He first looked at my husband and then at me, saying: ‘I’m going to put a bullet in your head’.” Then he took out a gun and pointed it in her direction, Nicole said.

Earlier this year, the La Meuse regional daily published an article about the multiple cases of harassment directed at the couple. They had been living for over two years in Marchienne-au-Pont without incident, according to the report.

But this summer, the report said, she and her family have been targeted in a campaign of harassment that has featured written death threats stuffed into their mailbox and the scrawling of anti-Semitic graffiti on their front door.

“We are too afraid to leave our home since this started,” Nicole, a native of Chile, told the newspaper. “Several people discovered we’re Jewish and ever since we’ve been getting death threats.” One letter addressed to Nicole called her a “dirty whore” and other insults.

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Sweden: 'Anti-Semitic' motive suspected in arson attack on politician's home

Via The Local:

A Jewish rights group has said that a fire affecting a politician's house in southern Sweden was likely a deliberate "anti-Semitic attack" and followed threats and harassment of local public figures with a Jewish background.

Police were called to a fire at a private property in Lund, owned by a local politician, shortly after 2am on Tuesday morning. Police later said that several people in the same row of terraced homes had been evacuated but no one had been injured in the fire.

The Jewish Community of Malmö chairman Fredrik Sieradzki told The Local that the property owner had previously received anti-Semitic threats.

"This person has been threatened and harassed earlier this year, and been given messages that were clearly anti-Semitic. We had already been helping her with these threats, and our suspicion is very strong that it's an anti-Semitic attack. Police also see this as an arson," Sieradzki said.

The organization called the fire "an attack on Swedish democracy" and said that it had a "strong suspicion" that there was an anti-Semitic motive in a statement released on Wednesday.

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France: Jewish scholar Alain Finkielkraut is worried for France’s future

Via The Times of Israel:

If Jews in France have long had a charged — at times painful — relationship with their country dating back centuries, they now face a new, particularly pernicious reality, says prominent French Jewish intellectual and writer Alain Finkielkraut.

“I’m extremely worried — as much for French Jews as I’m worried for the future of France,” says Finkielkraut, during a recent interview with The Times of Israel in his Paris apartment. “The anti-Semitism we’re now experiencing in France is the worst I’ve ever seen in my lifetime, and I’m convinced it’s going to get worse.”

Sitting at a long table in his living room, whose walls are lined with tall shelves laden with books, Finkielkraut, 69, comes across as a serious, deep-thinking man. (…)

His commentary is often trenchant, especially concerning the plight of his 500,000 Jewish compatriots. Among the worrisome developments that preoccupy him is what some call “internal migration.”

“Due to the increased hostility Jews are facing, especially in certain suburbs of Paris, many feel the need to leave where they’ve lived for a long time,” says Finkielkraut, referring to a growing unease caused by virulent anti-Semitism in predominantly immigrant areas.

“In recent years, tens of thousands of Jews have moved, some to Israel, most to neighborhoods where they feel more secure. Such a situation would have been unimaginable 20 years ago. It’s without precedent in France and, what’s really terrible, it’s going to continue,” he says.

For Finkielkraut, the origin of this malaise is clear.

“It’s a terrible phenomenon linked to immigration,” he says. “And as immigration is increasing, so is the rise in this anti-Semitism. Not only does a big part of the left refuse to recognize this, but they explain to us that the immigrants are the new Jews and that it’s important to know how to welcome them as the country should have done for Jews during World War II.

“What’s crazy is the situation is going to get worse with the complicity of people who claim to have learned the lessons from the Holocaust. We are at an absolutely diabolical juncture,” Finkielkraut says.

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Norway demands Israel explain seizure of Gaza-bound boat

Obviously, not a single Norwegian/European flotilla on its way to Yemen, to the Congo…

Via Ynet:

Norway has asked Israel to explain the legal grounds for detaining a Norwegian-flagged fishing boat seized while activists tried to sail with aid to the Gaza Strip, Norway's foreign ministry said on Tuesday.

The ministry said its diplomats in Israel had been providing consular assistance to five Norwegians who were among the 22 passengers and crew detained onboard the vessel Kaarstein on Sunday. Two Israelis on board were quickly released.

"We have asked the Israeli authorities to clarify the circumstances around the seizure of the vessel and the legal basis for the intervention," the spokesman for the Norwegian foreign affairs ministry in Oslo said. A spokesman for Israel's Foreign Ministry declined to comment.

Torstein Dahle, head of the group Ship to Gaza Norway which organized the shipment, said it was the first Norwegian aid vessel to attempt to breach the Israeli blockade of Gaza. 

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Germany seems to once again be embracing anti-Semitism

Victor Davis Hanson @ Hoover Institution:

Every 20 to 50 years in Germany, things start unraveling. Germans feel aggrieved. Ideas and movements gyrate wildly between far left and far right extremes. And the Germans finally find consensus in a sense of victimhood paradoxically expressed as national chauvinism. Germany’s neighbors in 1870, 1914, 1939—and increasingly in the present—usually bear the brunt of this national meltdown. […]

Germany has always had a “Jewish Problem.” In the late nineteenth-century, German academics became obsessed with pseudo-research about eugenics and racial purity—which often led to talk of both Aryan purity and crass anti-Semitism that played out in the real world with disastrous results during the Holocaust. After World War II, Germany tried to make amends through introspection, some reparations, and the subsidized sales of military supplies to Israel. Yet Germany seems to once again be embracing anti-Semitism quite aside from its fierce opposition to Israel. Dieter Graumann, the president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, has warned of the present climate: “These are the worst times since the Nazi era. On the streets, you hear things like ‘the Jews should be gassed,’ ‘the Jews should be burned.’ We haven’t had that in Germany for decades. Anyone saying those slogans isn’t criticizing Israeli politics, it’s just pure hatred against Jews: nothing else.”

In response to the growing hatred, Felix Klein, Germany’s newly appointed special envoy entrusted by the Merkel government with addressing the nation’s growing anti-Semitism—much of it the result of the influx of Muslims—recently shrugged it off, simply pointing out that more and more Jews are leaving Germany: “It is quite understandable that those who are scared for the safety of their children would consider leaving.” […]

In a perfect world, Germany would address its frustrations through introspection. After all, no one forced Berlin to take in over a million problematic refugees from the Middle East. No one forced it to export goods on easy credit to leveraged buyers who visibly lived far above their means. No one forced it to renege on its NATO defense promises and responsibilities. No one forced it to have a long and catastrophic history with the Jewish people. And no one forces it to expect perpetual U.S. military protection while continually setting record trade surpluses.

Despite the long postwar history of U.S.-German friendship, and despite Germany’s financial and economic power, the country is becoming psychologically isolated, if not unhinged. While Germans broadcast their anti-Americanism, they seem oblivious that Americans may likewise be tiring of German petulance.  

If we are entering yet another historical period of dangerous German resentment, the ensuing result will bode ill for everyone involved.

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Germany: Antisemitic grafitti in Hamburg

Via Watch Anti-Semitism in Europe:

Several anti-semitic graffiti were found in Hamburg such as "Gas the Jews":

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Bosnia: Anti-Semitic graffiti found on homes of Jewish community members

Via European Jewish Press:

Jewish community leaders in Bosnia have expressed concern after anti-Semitic graffiti were discovered this week in the country’s capital Sarajevo and in Tuzla on homes of community members.

“We received this news with regret and bitterness, aware that these incidents will not violate the good neighbourhood relations that Bosnian Jews have built with their fellow citizens from other ethnic and religious groups,’’ the Jewish community said in a statement issued on Friday.

“We appeal to the competent authorities to identify and punish the perpetrators,” it said, stressing that the country has no recent history of anti-Semitic incidents.

Jews have been equal citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina for more than 450 years and they did not deserve something like this, said the community President Jakob Finci. […]

About 1,000 Jews live in the country, half of them in Sarajevo and the rest in Mostar, Zenica, Tuzla, Doboj and Banja Luka.

Two-thirds of the community left after the outbreak of conflict in the former Yugoslavia (1992-1995), but the tendency toward emigration has slackened. Some 90% of the community is Sephardi. However, only older people still speak Ladino.

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German Jewry: a bleak future

Via Jewish Policy Center (Benjamin Weinthal):

[…] A second telling example of the growing—or perhaps continued—indifference was the April attack by a Syrian refugee on Adam Armush, an Israeli Arab, because he dared wear a kippa (yarmulke) on a Berlin street.

The assault triggered headlines in the German and foreign media because there was video evidence of the attack. Der Spiegel’s influential columnist Jakob Augstein blamed the Israeli for having “come up with the idea to wear the kippa and use it as a provocation.” Augstein—who inherited significant ownership in the Spiegel news organization—has played a key role in mainstreaming media anti-Semitism. The Simon Wiesenthal Center ranked him ninth on its “2012 Top Ten Anti-Semitic/Anti-Israel Slurs” list for his bigoted statements.

Armush told the Deutsche Welle news outlet: “I am not Jewish, I am an Israeli and I grew up in Israel in an Arab family,” adding, “It was an experience for me to wear the skullcap and go out into the street yesterday.” He said he filmed the attack “for the police and for the German people and even the world to see how terrible it is these days as a Jew to go through Berlin streets.”

For observers of Jewish life in Germany, the anti-Semitic attack on Armush came as no surprise. In 2016, the spokesman for Hamburg’s nearly 2,500-member Jewish community, Daniel Killy, said a breakdown in security in the Federal Republic has created a highly dangerous situation for Jews.

“No, we are no longer safe here,” Killy told the tagesschau.de news outlet. Killy said the collapsing sense of state power, excesses of the extreme right-wing, the loss of political credibility, and “the terrible fear of naming Islamism as such” have all contributed to creating a climate of insecurity for Jews.

The response to the attack on Armush was a call for an anti-anti-Semitism protest. “Berlin wears the kippa” was the name of the feel-good rally on April 25 against Jew-hatred. It attracted some 2,000 people, according to press reports. The real number of attendees is believed to have been fewer than 1,500, in a city of 3.7 million. The demonstration took place under conditions that resembled those in a maximum-security prison.

A second protest against anti-Semitism in the largely Muslim neighborhood of Neukölln in Berlin had to be called off after a mere 20 minutes because of the anticipated violence of pro-Palestinian counter-demonstrators.

To put things in perspective, roughly 150,000 people marched in Berlin in 2015 against a planned free trade deal between the United States and Europe.

Germans frequently invoke the phrase “nip it in the bud” at Holocaust remembrance events when referring to anti-Semitism. Dead Jews trigger widespread commemoration events across the country, but the fight to stop anti-Semitism against living Jews limps—at best—on both legs. A detached observer might ask of modern Germany: Have we learned anything from the Holocaust? […] 

Germany’s woefully inadequate system for classifying anti-Semitic crimes is also cause for alarm. As anti-Semitism rises in the country, the authorities continue to classify Islamic-animated anti-Semitism as a “politically motivated right-wing extremist crime.” A telling example, cited in Die Welt, was an outbreak of Hezbollah-related anti-Semitism that was registered as right-wing extremism. 

Supporters of the Hezbollah terrorist organization participated in an anti-Israel march during Operation Protective Edge in 2014. Twenty Hezbollah supporters yelled the Nazi slogan “Sieg Heil” (Hail Victory) at a group of pro-Israel activists in Berlin. The “Sieg Heil” call violates Germany’s anti-hate law and was designated as a far-right extremist crime.

The result is German whitewashing of the leading cause of lethal anti-Semitism in Europe: jihadi-based eliminatory anti-Semitism.

The Holocaust survivor Charlotte Knobloch, who is head of Munich’s Jewish community, said in 2017: “The Muslim associations have for decades not only done nothing [to combat anti-Semitism], rather they have allowed anti-Semitic hate preachers from Muslim countries to bring their anti-Jewish ideology into German mosques and into the heads of young Muslims.”

Germany’s tiny Jewish community—100,000 among a population of over 82 million in the Federal Republic—is in dire straits today and faces an increasingly precarious future. Chancellor Merkel and mainstream German society would do well to remember the words of the British historian Sir Ian Kershaw: “The road to Auschwitz was built by hate but paved with indifference.” Acute indifference is now the norm in Germany.

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France: Are the Jews of France doomed?

Via The Algemeiner (Shmuley Boteach):

"For all the reports that we American and Israeli Jews read about growing French antisemitism, especially emanating from sectors of the Muslim community, and for all the reports of French Jews wanting to either make aliyah to Israel or emigrate to Canada, French Jewry is still thriving.  

What has changed is that it’s becoming more and more subterranean. Yes, you can still find large numbers of synagogues, kosher restaurants, and Jewish community centers. What you don’t see on the streets, however, is Jews. Or you see them, but you don’t necessarily know they are Jews. Overt, identifiable symbols of Jewishness — like a kippa, Magen David, or tzitzit — are disappearing from French streets and cities."

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Sweden: Caught between jihadists and neo-Nazis, Jews fear for their future

Via JTA (Cnaan Liphshiz):

When Carinne Sjoberg dissolved the Jewish Community of Umea in northern Sweden, she knew it would send shockwaves far beyond the small congregation that she had spent decades building.

The move in May owed to intimidation by neo-Nazis, making it the first time in decades that a Jewish organization in Western Europe acknowledged that it felt compelled to close shop over safety concerns.

Neo-Nazis from the Nordic Resistance Movement, beginning in 2016, pasted stickers with fascist imagery on Umea’s Jewish community center, “making the place look like after Kristallnacht,” Sjoberg said. The closure followed surveillance activity on the center by the neo-Nazis, who published details about individual visitors.

“I didn’t take it lightly,” Sjoberg, a 56-year-old Jewish mother of two, told JTA about the decision to close. “I hate giving neo-Nazis this victory. But I can’t bear the responsibility for people’s lives, not under such threats,” she said of her city’s Jewish community of 70 people.

The closure caused a national uproar. Amid intense media coverage in Sweden of the affair, Prime Minister Stefan Löfven mentioned it in a speech denouncing anti-democracy forces in his country.

But the indignation did little to change the fact that in Sweden, Muslim extremism and the far right are part of a broader set of challenges to Jewish communal life. So while the Jewish community of Stockholm may be growing, the problems are nonetheless causing some Swedish Jews to fear for their future as a minority here.

“We have a vibrant community in Stockholm but even here we face multiple threats, from Muslim extremism to far-right violence,” said Aron Verstandig, president of the Council of Swedish Jewish Communities — an umbrella group with approximately 6,000 members out of Sweden’s estimated 20,000 Jews.

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Switzerland: Knife-wielding man attacks Jewish family in Zurich

Via Arutz Sheva:

An Orthodox Jewish family was attacked by a man carrying a knife in Zurich, Switzerland over the weekend, local news outlets have reported.  

According to a report by the Zurich-based Blick newspaper, the incident occurred Saturday evening in Zurich’s 3rd district, when a man carrying a knife lunged at an Orthodox Jewish family. When his would-be victims fled, the attacker chased after them, hurling anti-Semitic curses as he pursued them.

The attacker was later arrested and transferred for questioning, Zurich police said.

A report by LOOK claimed that the incident began in a playground, when the attacker began staring at a group of children.

When the children’s father, approached the man and asked if he needed any help, the “guy reacted very aggressively and stood up in front of me,” the father said.

“I didn’t want any trouble, so I took my kids and left.”

The Jewish man and his family returned home, believing that was the end of the matter.

When they stepped out half an hour later, however, to go to synagogue, the man was waiting for them, carrying a knife.

The family attempted to quickly walk away from the man carrying the knife, but the attacker “suddenly started sprinting towards us,” the father said.

A passerby, who is also a member of the local Jewish community, later managed to subdue the attacker until police came.

The assailant has been identified as a “local man”, who police say is neither a radical Muslim nor a known member of any neo-Nazi movement.

Police held the suspect overnight, but freed him on Sunday.

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UK: The weird Israel hatred world of Claudia Webbe

Via Harry's Place:

Claudia Webbe’s elevation to chair of the Labour party’s disputes panel is causing controversy. No wonder:

But she stood by her decision to write a letter to the Guardian in defence of the former London Mayor in 2006 after he was suspended from the party for four weeks over his encounter with Mr Finegold.

Ms Webbe worked as an adviser to Mr Livingstone in 2000 and 2004 and, in the Guardian letter, said his suspension “smacked in the face of true democracy”.

“His history of work in the anti-racist movement is unquestionable,” she wrote in the letter.

Oliver Finegold is the Jewish journalist Livingstone compared to a “concentration camp guard” in 2005.

What a fine anti-racist, eh. Keep in mind that Livingstone had already earned notoriety in 2004 by inviting Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the hate preacher extraordinaire, to London. Al-Qaradawi duly told BBC Newsnight that he fully supported suicide bombing attacks on Israeli civilians. Jewish community leaders protested about the visit at the time.

Webbe went on to become an Islington Labour councillor. For a revealing look at her weird Islington world, try a Gaza meeting she chaired at the Finsbury Park Mosque in August 2014.

A tape of the meeting is available on YouTube. Webbe praises and identifies with the crowd, opening the meeting with this line: “This is a true unity meeting. This is about all of us.”

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Holland: Muslim city counselor tweeted "Oh Allah, destroy the Zionists"

Via Bad News from the Netherlands blog:

Arnoud van Doorn, a Muslim member of the Municipal Council in the Hague tweeted that he read an interesting article about whether the 'good people' won the second World War or were the Nazis the protectors of the European civilization against American Zionism and the communism of Stalin. He added that there is perhaps a distortion of history here.

A month ago he tweeted "Oh Allah, destroy the Zionists."

read more in Dutch @ AD.NL

Belgium: “Would you mind removing your kippa for security reasons?”, rabbi told in Brussels

Via The Jerusalem Post (Axel Benjamin):

“Would you mind removing your kippa for security reasons?” The one sentence that sums up the malaise at the heart of Europe.

“You have to hear this”, said our usually un-flappable and very level-headed chairman Rabbi Menachem Margolin. So, when he said that, we all knew something significant was about to be said. But even now, as I write this, it seems so ludicrous to repeat out loud, particularly considering the source it came from.

The more I think about it about it, the more it speaks volumes and underlines how deep the malaise currently affecting European political and cultural thought goes. You will have to wait a bit longer for the punchline, first let’s put it into context: At the end of last week, we at the European Jewish Association and our partners at Europe Israel Public Affairs, the European Jewish Community Centre and European Coalition for Israel twinned European Parliamentarians, EU Institution policy heads and Jerusalem’s brightest and best high-tech entrepreneurs and venture partners for the second of our annual High Tech conferences in the European Parliament. The conference was organized by the Jerusalem Development Authority and the Israeli Ministry of Jerusalem and Heritage. Oscar bit done, now the story. (…)

“Would you mind removing your kippa for security reasons?” asked the Belgian policeman to Margolin. Boom. Back to earth with a bump.

Welcome to Brussels in 2018. Where perceived security and provocation from the forces of law and order stems from the act of wearing a kippa, instead of those who find it an affront in the first place.

This logic implies that a girl could be asked to not wear a skirt because she might provoke a rapist, or that a priest should remove his collar in case someone from ISIS takes offence at the ‘infidel’. Is this really what passes as maintaining security in Brussels these days? 

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Germany: Jewish teen was listening to Hebrew song before Arab men attacked him in Berlin

Via EJP:

Because he was listening to a Hebrew song on his cellphone, a Jewish teen and two of his friends were attacked in Berlin by a group of Arabs, the Bild newspaper reported.

The attack happened at a train station late on Saturday.

According to the report, the Arab assaillants said they were from the Gaza Strip.

The 17-year-old teen, identified as Jonathan, told the daily Israel Hayom newspaper that he and his two non-Jewish friends, of the same age, were waiting for a train when he played Israeli singer Omer Adam’s hit song 'Tel Aviv, Ya Habibi, Tel Aviv' on his phone.

According to the Israeli teen, the Arab men shouted at him: "Hebrew music? For 70 years you are murdering children. Berlin is our city now and here we don’t listen to fucking Jewish music."

After pointing out that just as they can play Arabic music he can listen to Israeli music, Jonathan said, he and his friends moved away from the group but they were followed and threatened them: "If I had a knife, I would kill you…"

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Sweden: Jewish group shuts down after Nazi threats

Via The Local:

Sweden’s most northerly Jewish community group has closed down following a succession of threats from neo-Nazi groups.

The Jewish Association in the city of Umeå shut itself down at a board meeting at the end of May.

“It’s a heavy blow. I’m very sad about it, and have even shed a few tears,” said Carinne Sjöberg, the Liberal Party politician who chaired the association. “In some way, it feels like we lost.”

In a tweet, Sweden's Jewish Youth Association thanked Sjöberg and other board members for the work they had done since the group was established in 2010.

"This means that there is no Jewish organisation in Sweden north of Uppsala," it wrote.

 The association moved out of its premises in April last year, after swastikas were painted on the walls alongside antisemitic stickers which included pictures of the Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, the text ‘we know where you live’.

Association members also received threatening emails and Sjöberg was even visited at her home.

According to the Dagens Nyheter newspaper, the threats came predominantly from the neo-Nazi Nordic Resistance Movement, which has been growing in strength in recent years, and is very active in northern Sweden.

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UK: Jewish student center serving the University of Oxford was subject to two attacks this month

Via The Algemeiner:

A Jewish student center serving the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom was subject to two attacks this month, drawing condemnation from community leaders.

On May 19, the eve of the Jewish holiday of Shavuot, two unidentified offenders placed “antisemitic” notes and sparked a fire at the Chabad of Oxford, Thames Valley Police said.

“Thankfully the fire burned out within a couple of minutes, it didn’t cause significant damage and no-one was injured,” said Detective Sergeant George Atkinson of the incident, which was classified as a hate crime.

Four days later, a white powder and offensive notes — one reading “Jew House” — were found at the center. The substance was later identified as talcum powder.

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Belgium: Brussels chief rabbi declines to wear kippa publicly, citing security concerns

Via The Times of Israel:

Amid reports of widespread fear among Belgian Jews of being attacked by anti-Semites, the chief rabbi of Brussels and other Jews declined over security concerns a public broadcaster’s request to film them walking on the street while wearing a kippa. The RTBF broadcaster reported Thursday it wanted to film Chief Rabbi Albert Guigui, among other rabbis, wearing a kippa for a program about anti-Semitism.

But Guigui declined, telling the channel he has stopped visibly wearing a kippa in 2001 following an anti-Semitic assault on his person. In December of that year, Guigui was attacked by a group of Arabic speaking youths.

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Read also:
Brussels and Barcelona chief rabbis say there is no future for Jews in Europe

France: Anti-Semitism is now so profound that Jews are victims of “ethnic purging”

Via The Spectator (Gavin Mortimer)

Why should France tolerate Islamic intolerance? 

[...] Why has the refusal of France to grant a passport to an Algerian woman who declined to shake the hand of a state official at her citizenship ceremony because of her “religious beliefs” made the BBC website? Picked up by other news’ outlets, including the New York Times, it’s not unreasonable to infer that the subtext is: there go the French again, discriminating against Muslims. If it’s not the burka or the burkini, it’s a handshake.

But why would any western country welcome a woman who shuns one of its oldest and most courteous customs? If she finds shaking hands with a man beyond the pale, one is entitled to suspect she may not look too favourably on gays and Jews. Anti-Semitism is now so profound in France that on Sunday 250 well-known figures, including Nicolas Sarkozy and Manuel Valls, signed a letter warning that the country’s Jews are victims of “ethnic purging” at the hands of “radical Islamists”.

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Sweden: Former PM Carld Bildt relativizes current anti-Semitism with odd and inaccurate historical arguments

Via Politico (Paulina Neuding, editor-in-chief of the online magazine Kvartal)

Sweden may be known for its popular music, IKEA and a generous welfare state. It is also increasingly associated with a rising number of Islamic State recruits, bombings and hand grenade attacks.

In a period of two weeks earlier this year, five explosions took place in the country. It’s not unusual these days — Swedes have grown accustomed to headlines of violent crime, witness intimidation and gangland executions. In a country long renowned for its safety, voters cite “law and order” as the most important issue ahead of the general election in September.

The topic of crime is sensitive, however, and debate about the issue in the consensus-oriented Scandinavian society is restricted by taboos. (...)

In March, Labor Market Minister Ylva Johansson appeared on the BBC, where she claimed that the number of reported rapes and sexual harassment cases “is going down and going down and going down.” In fact, the opposite is true, which Johansson later admitted in an apology.

Similarly, in an op-ed for the Washington Post, former Prime Minister Carl Bildt described the country’s immigration policy as a success story. He did not elaborate on violent crime. After repeated attacks against Jewish institutions in December — including the firebombing of a synagogue in Gothenburg — Bildt took to the same paper to claim that anti-Semitism is not a major problem in Sweden.

“Historically, in Sweden it was the Catholics that were seen as the dangerous threat that had to be fought and restricted,” Bildt claimed, seemingly unaware that the laws he cited also applied to Jews. Intermarriage was illegal and hostility was based on ideas of Jews as racially inferior. Bildt’s attempt to relativize current anti-Semitism with odd and inaccurate historical arguments reflects how nervously Swedish elites react to negative headlines about their country.

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Read also:
Sweden: Son of Holocaust survivor explains why he left Sweden to Israel
Sweden: Former PM Carl Bildt says Israel pushing US into region-wide war with Iran