The fact that the anti-Israeli and anti-American writer Helle Klein, for many years the political editor of Aftonbladet, at her blog also speaks warmly of “free speech” is such an extreme case of hypocrisy that it simply cannot go unanswered. Free speech does not exist in Sweden. Although some countries such as Britain and Belgium are trying hard to claim the title, I would personally rate Sweden as being probably the most totalitarian and politically repressive country in the entire Western world as of 2009, and Aftonbladet has made substantial contributions to this repressive climate. Sweden has huge problems caused by mass immigration, and Muslim immigration in particular, but speaking honestly about this is absolutely taboo among the mainstream media. According to journalist Karen Jespersen, Helle Klein has stated that “If the debate is [about] that there are problems caused by refugees and immigrants, we don’t want it.” Opinion polls have revealed that two out of three Swedes doubt whether Islam can be combined with Swedish society, yet not one party represented in parliament has been genuinely critical of the immigration policies, and there is virtually no real debate about Multiculturalism and Islam.- - - - - - - - -
As I have stated in my essay Why Europeans Should Support Israel, the demonization of Israel should be rejected not just because of Israel, but because of Europe. The very same people who are demonizing Israelis are also demonizing native Europeans who resist the Islamization of their lands and the state-sponsored colonization of their countries by alien peoples. The truth is that Israelis defend themselves so that their daughters do not have to suffer rape at the hands of Muslim Jihadists, the way the authorities in Western European countries, and in Sweden in particular, allow to happen every single day. Here are a few relevant quotes from the chapter The Case of Sweden, taken from my book Defeating Eurabia. I suggest that Israelis send some of these quotes to Aftonbladet, Helle Klein and Carl Bildt and challenge them with the information it contains:
The Swedish organization Expo has demonstrated a willingness to “share information” with radical groups of “anti-Fascists” in Antifascistisk Action (AFA). The thugs of AFA in the spring of 2008 destroyed the car of an elderly woman and wrote “nasse” (Nazi) on top of it. As it turned out, they picked the wrong car. Yet years of such attacks against private citizens have not prompted the authorities to crack down on their activities.
Leading newspaper Aftonbladet has close ideological ties to the Social Democrats, the country’s dominant party for most of the past century. Helle Klein, its political editor-in-chief from 2001 to 2007, during a demonstration organized by Islamic and anti-racist organizations in December 2006 stood in front of a banner which read “A Sweden for all — Stop the Nazi violence” and held a speech warning against Islamophobia in the media. Klein has voiced sympathy for terrorist organization Hamas in her editorials while warning against the threat posed to world peace by Israeli aggression and the Christian Right in the USA. Hamas is a Fascist organization openly calling for mass murder of Jews. Violent attacks against Jews in Europe in 2008 are to an overwhelming degree caused by Muslim immigration, which is encouraged by the EU and the national political elites. The irony of warning against “Nazi violence” while showing sympathy for an organization that wants to finish what the Nazis started apparently doesn’t strike Ms. Klein.
One of Klein’s fellow columnists at Aftonbladet, the long-time Communist Robert Aschberg, is the publisher of Expo magazine. Leading Expo member Charles Westin in October 2007 published the book Brunt! (“brown,” as in “Fascist”), where he let members of AFA contribute some of their intelligence regarding “right-wing extremists,” among them people associated with the legal party the Sweden Democrats. In addition to Mr. Westin, the book was co-authored by Mats Deland, who is a journalist in Aftonbladet. Why is it considered OK that a representative of one of Scandinavia’s largest newspapers, with ties to the country’s largest political party, thus associates himself openly with an organization known for physically assaulting members of a legal opposition party, even in their private homes?
Read the rest at Atlas Shrugs.
15 comments:
As the resident half-Jew here, and one who researched Helle Klein after Fjordman mentioned her in a previous essay, I have to add that she is Jewish. That makes her political outlook and conduct 50% more odious for me.
In that case, Takuan Seiyo, is Klein not just the second wave or reincarnation of Jewish Bolsheviks? They also had a hate-on for the (Russian) culture in which they lived, managed to decimate then shackle it, with many of the instigators eventually falling to the unstoppable and none-too-selective bloodthirsty forces they helped put in motion.
With American Jews casting over 80% of their votes for the now radical Democrats and providing up to 40% of their funding, is it not at least tenable to argue that a concerted effort on the part of the Jewish community to socialize the United States is also going on?
I'm just doing some exploratory thinking here, but don't Jews behave internationally the way Muslims do i.e. regardless of what country they live in, a large majority vote and act predictably according to their culture/religion? (I would say culture for Jews since many no longer consider themselves religious). The vast majority vote left and push governments left to multiculturalism etc. That's not working out so well for the fast-shrinking Euro-Christian majorities in many countries.
Now that the international Left is demonstrably the second main source next to Muslims of anti-semitism and anti-Israel policies, is it not emerging that for secular Jews their leftism trumps certainly Israel's interests if not even their own Jewishness?
Laine,
“Is Klein not just the second wave” -- Yes and no. Yes because, like the majority of the Russian-Jewish (Polish and Hungarian-Jewish too) nomenklatura, Cohn-Bendit, Chomsky, Zinn, Alinsky, Bernie Sanders et al. Klein is a true believer. And the majority of Ashkenazi Jews are either true believers, particularly in the academia and jurisprudence, or sympathizers with activism limited to votes and checks.
But no, because the Eastern-European Jews had a legitimate, humanely universal and understandable cause to join and even direct the commie repression apparatus: revenge. Terrible, inhuman and evil things had been done to them by the Cossacks, the White Russians, the Catholic and Orthodox churches, the gentry and the freehold peasants in those areas. Communism offered ethnic equality, meritocracy etc. – it seemed like a heaven they had not experienced in 1800 years.
But Western lefty Jews have no such excuse. They are pulling down their societies for no good reason, other than moral delusions. Still, that should not lead you to fanciful MacCarthyite conclusions either. For while the Jewish BHO phalanx, to take one example, is harming its host society, it’s harming itself the most. That’s why, contrary to the silly assertions of Social Darwinism, theirs is a demented, suicidal behavior.
Just take Helle Klein, a grand-granddaughter of a famous rabbi, and extrapolate 20 years forward in the direction of the political and social trends she advocates. She will be first in line for all the evil that a Muslim population reaching 25% visits on its kuffar host, starting with rape and beating. Western Jews’ leftism trumps not only their Jewishness or their Israel, but even their own survival. That’s why it’s sick.
But then, is you look at the majority of main denomination Christians nowadays, you’ll discover a parallel phenomenon…
Ms Klein is also a convert to christianity which will even worsen her case once the muslims has taken over. Both jew AND a christian. I kinda doubt they would even spare her life even if she agreed to convert to islam because of that. Nonetheless she is not only a traitor to her country but to her own people as well.
It's not only our treacherous politicians that has earned themselves nasty nicknames on blogs and forums like Mona Muslim or Fredrik Dhimmifeldt (Schweinfeldt is another popular variation) but even some of the tabloids get their fair shair of this. Aftonbladet has thus been nicknamed Aftonhoran, where the later word aludes to the so called oldest preoffesion in the world...
Helle Klein, born July 9, 1966, is cand.theol and was ordained in the Stockholm diocese on January 13, 2008, by Caroline Krook, since 1998 Bishop of the diocese of Sockholm.
Helle Klein is said to have grown up in a religious-neutral environment. Her great grandfather Gottlieb Klein was rabbi of the synagogue in Stockholm. His son and his grandson, Helle Klein's father married non jewish women. Apparently Helle Klein first realized her Jewish heritage through her studies of the Old Testament. Helle Klein in her teens allegedly decided to become a priest. After having got her A-levels (of that time!), she started studying theology at the University of Lund. After an interval as editor in Örebro-Kuriren for 4 years and then 2001-2007 as political editor of the Social Democratic Aftonbladet, she is now curate of the parish of Nacka outside of Stockholm.
She switched wholetime journalism for the pulpit, but the socialist commitment is the same since her teens.
Helle Klein is said to be convinced that atheism has lost.
- Now it's okay to be at the same time intellectual and religious - but the personal faith must be real!
- It is interesting that I have not been regarded as a crack-head [knäppskalle]!
Helle Klein, an islamofil of grand proportions, has the same loyal enthusiasm for Hamas as the chairman of today of the Swedish Social Democratic Workers Party, Ms Mona Sahlin, alias Mona Muslim.
In some context, Helle Klain has been mentioned as the possible future chairman of the Social Democratic Party - at least she has got both brains and an education.
No matter how, Sweden is heading for disaster!
It feels like an obsession with career. Since she could not become a "Rabbi of Stockholm", she went straight away to head something Christian, islamic, leftists.
A triple "rabbi" outside her limiting original realm of female Jewry...
Ciao Takuan Seiyo,
Let me take the opportunity to thank you for the very interesting posts (at the Brussel's Journal and here / and both).
Frankly, concerning this woman, I would talk about Enlightenment blood as opposed to the mystical/religious/cultural kind. It comes with learnin'.
In the words of Malcolm Muggeridge:
"Accumulating knowledge is a form of avarice and lends itself to another version of the Midas story... man is so avid for knowledge that everything that he touches turns to facts; his faith becomes theology; his love becomes lechery; his wisdom becomes science; pursuing meaning, he ignores truth."
Jew or Protestant or both, she is simply despiritualized towards her own people, the land where she lives, her neighbors. She's broadminded and loves humanity. Broad notions and concepts are her neighbors and those that she forgives and loves as herself. It's empty, sideral space Christianity... in other words, it's enlightenment.
Enlightenment blood is water.
There is no such thing as "half Jewish". These people left Judaism (both religion and nationality) two generations ago, and while Judaism is probably the most culturally segregated ethnicity ever, these people have nothing but internationalistic tendencies.
Whoever leaves a faith, will often become the faith's most venomous detractor. Perhaps this is the easiest way to explain the embrace of multiculturism by post-Jews.
Shalom from Israel.
Re: Jewishness v. education v. stupidity
Nakmoro- contrary to your statement, there is such a thing as half-Jew, and that is to be born to one parent who is Jewish and one who is gentile, to use a shortcut term. I am one such case, the writers Mark Steyn and Jonah Goldberg are others, there are many more.
The issues of culture, faith, ethnic solidarity etc. that you bring up is how Jews define Jewishness. But what counts more is how the enemies of the Jews define Jewishness. For almost 150 years they have defined it by blood. Here, Anti-Islamist’s info helps. For it does not matter to antisemites that Klein is a pastor, and it will not matter to the sharia-mogers who will take over Sweden in 30-40 years. Edith Stein was as a Catholic nun, and a true one. It didn’t help her much, did it?
Likewise, you’ll find in Neonazi + sympathizers’ chatrooms that Lawrence Auster, who is a Jew and a sincere Episcopalian, and I who am a half-Jew and Catholic from birth, are described as clever Jew saboteurs who assumed some of the characteristics of their host societies in order to better screw the goyim.
BTW, the reverse of it that you posit is not necessarily true either. You can say that Auster, Steyn, Goldberg and I have “left Judaism,” but neither one of us is the faith’s “most venomous” detractor. Unless it be liberalism – the true faith of perhaps 70% of the Jews alive -- of which we are critics in varying degrees of intensity.
As to ambition and education, the points Czechmade and IoshkaFutz have made are true and explain something concerning the Jewish leftism phenom, but they don’t explain its suicidal insanity. The Jews who became big wheels in the Communist regimes did so partly out of ambition “to make it” in such societies as theirs were. An ambitious opportunist in Sweden, gentile or Jewish, will go the Socialist route, because that’s where the gravy train is now. But people like Klein do it out of idealism.
And yes, education and Enlightenment broaden one’s horizons, and remove blinders – but that is just an auxiliary condition for becoming a liberal rather than a causative one. For instance, I spent 14 years at elite American universities, where the 3rd World’s oligarchy tends to train its heirs. Among my closest friends were Pakistani PhDs, Iranian astrophysicists, Egyptian architects, Mexican MBAs etc. But I did not come out of that experience believing that my feelings for these particular people could be transformed validly into how I felt about Pakistan, or Islam, or MECHistas in California. To make that kind of emotive leap – particularly ridiculous in one presumably trained at a university to think – that is what defines the liberal’s madness.
"But what counts more is how the enemies of the Jews define Jewishness."?
It matters, yes - when you try to analyze other cultures' subjective view of Judaism. But in order to define neo-liberalism or even communism as a phenomenon in the Jewish world, you have to see how Judaism defines Judaism, and they are trying to run away from it to the opposite corner of the ring.
Also, i believe Goldberg and other culturally-liberal politically-conservative folks, are simply the exceptions which only strengthens the validity of the rule. 85% of American non-Orthodox "Jews" are liberals, while 70% of the orthodox are independants or conservatives. That's one very solid number.
Why? Because they are afraid that the way to conservatism will lead them back to the "shteitel", to the closed doors with less freedom. And by freedom i don't meant the freedom to do what they want, but the freedom of responsibilities, freedom from having to occasionally stand up for yourself and your people in front of an able enemy, rather than for some universal lovey-dovey value. It's all about the fear of responsibility of being a nation-religion, and a "chosen" nation at that.
So they take it to the extreme. They also use the "Jew" label with them - in order to give it the right direction, as opposed to the real Judaism they in truth loathe.
In any case, a Jew or any other member of a any other culture, should NEVER define himself by his enemies' definitions.
Eh, and sorry about my broken English. It's a (distant) third language to me.
Mark Steyn is not half-Jewish. He wrote in a column - apparently because emailers kept pestering him about it - that his great-grandmother on his father's side was Jewish.
Can anyone answer the questions just above?
Let me repeat the question in the correct form:
Fordman:
Doesn't Sweden have "hate speech" laws? Most western European countries do. If so, then are Jews the only group for whom the so-called "hate speech" laws do not apply?
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