Thursday, May 28, 2015

Sweden: Jew harassed in school, police do nothing


This story encapsulates the difficulties of Jews in Europe.

A young Jew was attacked in school.  He reported it to the police, who did nothing.  He asked his school to bring in an antisemitism activist.  The idea was rejected.  In fact, the school seems to imply that the best solution is to pretend he's not Jewish.

It's easy to say 'Muslims are the problem', but it's the non-Muslim Europeans who tolerate, justify and quite often encourage this antisemitism.

Via CBC:
Even so, a few months ago, Lunderquist's 19-year-old son Jonathan Vaknine - the only Jew in a school of 1,600 - was swarmed in the hallway, sworn at and pushed around by young men asking 'Are you Jewish?'

Harassment of young Jews in Malmö is not unusual, but the difference is that Vaknine reported it to the police and gave them the name of one of the attackers. It was three months before the police called Vaknine for a statement, and the named youth was not interviewed.

A few weeks after the swarming, Swedish television aired an hour long documentary on anti-Semitism in Malmö. A Swedish journalist put on a kippa, sat at an outdoor café and wandered into Rosengaard. He was called a Jewish Satan, and people threw eggs at him from their apartments.

Siavosh Derakhti was part of that documentary, and "it lit a fire in me," Vaknine says. He contacted Derakhti, who agreed to come to the boy's school to speak.

Derakhti has been awarded Sweden's first Raoul Wallenberg medal, named after the renegade Swedish diplomat who saved the lives of thousands of Hungarian Jews in World War II. He is a national figure, but the principal of Vaknine's school turned him down. 

The school authorities did emphasize their concern for Vaknine's safety, but the student says he told them, "Safe is not enough. That is not the issue. If I hide who I am and hide my identity, of course no one will know I'm a Jew and they will not do anything. But if I am going with kippa, with things that show that I'm a Jew, I'm not sure I would be safe."

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