The Swedish Mohammed Crisis, Jew-Hatred, and Anti-Semitism

The following is from Mrutyuanjai Mishra’s blog, translated from the Danish by TB:

The Swedish Mohammed crisis, Jew-Hatred, and Anti-Semitism

By Mrutyuanjai Mishra

Those who want to understand the anti-Semitism of today should read the story about a fine young journalist from The Wall Street Journal, Daniel Pearl. Daniel Pearl was a correspondent in Mumbai when he was lured to Karachi where he was kidnapped and later murdered. The Islamists videotaped the decapitation and forced him to say:

“My father is Jewish, my mother is Jewish and I am Jewish”

Daniel Pearl left a pregnant girlfriend and never lived to see his own child.

The well-known French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy has written a much-discussed book, Who Killed Daniel Pearl? The book should be mandatory reading if one wants to understand the connection between Islamism and anti-Semitism today. And I can contribute by saying that if one wants to know the connection between anti-Semitism and the extreme left, one should read the Swedish paper Aftonbladet.

The man who was responsible for the kidnapping of Daniel Pearl is Omar Sheikh, an Islamist born and raised in Great Britain who had been a student at nothing less than the elite London School of Economics. And he was not the only one from his family to have studied at the country’s finest universities. Despite that he chose to become a member of a jihadist organization.

On November 28, 2008 when India experienced its 9/11, the Islamists had as their specific and declared goal to kill as many Westerners as possible. Indian police released documentation to the world by publicizing the conversations between the terrorists and their leaders, but out of PC considerations not even The New York Times would report on the statements whose message was that everybody who was not Muslim should be killed.

The Daily Telegraph and the Huffington Post later reported that a Jewish rabbi and his wife and other Jews present in a local Jewish cultural center in Mumbai were killed. But they were not only killed, they were also tortured. The terrorist attack in Mumbai will not only be remembered as an attack against the Indian democracy which brought India and Pakistan to the brink of war. It will also be remembered as a terrible anti-Semitic attack on Jews.

What is the overall reason for these Islamists’ anger towards Jews? The best answer to that question was given by the American commentator Thomas Friedman in The New York Times, who on the 4th of July 2007 wrote:

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“The Islamic understanding of itself is that it is the most perfect and complete expression of the Monotheistic message, and the Quran is God’s last and most perfect word. Said in another way, Young Muslims are brought up with the notion that Islam is God 3.0, Christianity is God 2.0 and Judaism is God 1.0. Hinduism and all other religions are God 0.0”

Hindus and other polytheists cannot even reach dhimmi status in Islamic societies.

Now politically correct Sweden has got their own international case to deal with. In the middle of the Swedish EU-leadership the country has found itself in the world’s spotlight, and the discussion has exploded here in the North after a scandalous newspaper article in Aftonbladet written by Donald Boström on August 18, 2009, in which he, without any documentation, accused Israel of stealing organs from Palestinians.

The strong reaction from Israel is to be expected. It was in the heart of Europe that six million Jews were killed and their culture almost eradicated by the Nazis. But people do not get the idea of attacking a whole ethnic group in a single day’s time span. It always starts small.

In Europe it has again become acceptable to initiate smear campaigns against Jews and Israel — without documentation, that is. Understandably, Israel protests, and all should do the same.

I find it incredibly hard to understand this smear campaign against the Jews in Europe. Is it even possible today to get your high school diploma without having read Sigmund Freund, Karl Marx, and Albert Einstein? Einstein is not easy to understand, but everybody knows that he changed science just as much as Karl Marx changed sociology and Freund changed our views on sex and psychology.

What is common to these three is that they were all Jews. Just as one third of the Americans who have been given the Nobel Prize in science have a Jewish background. Compared to other minorities, the Jews are the one group to have the highest rate of University education. I think that we should respect the Jews as the industrious and science-loving people they are.

Israel is accused of many things. Even the writers who strongly opposed the foolish and undocumented article in Aftonbladet accuse Israel of having turned to the right. But dear Europeans, try to imagine being surrounded by Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, and even Omar Sheikh with a Pakistani background, all of whom want to eradicate Israel from the face of the earth.

During his global travels and media appearances the American president Barack Obama has been speaking to Arabs, Muslims, Eastern Europeans, Russians, and Africans. He has become a very respected politician, especially in Europe. But he has yet to talk directly to the Israelis and the Indians. The mistrust in both countries is strongly on the rise.

Obama is so busy winning the good opinion of the Muslim world that he is ready to neglect Israel. The reason that Sweden started to pressure Israel might be that they were inspired by Obama. Sweden in general and Malmö specifically have one of the fastest-growing populations of people with an immigrant background. If there is one country where Muslim immigration is changing society completely, then it is Sweden. The Swedes do not want to discuss this. In the housing complex of Rosengård, which was built to house a few thousand inhabitants, the population has now quadrupled. The ghetto is a reality. Take a trip to Rosengård. My neighbor told me that he had helped a woman who had lived in Sweden for 35 years without having learned a single Swedish word.

Sweden is by no means an ideal country. Were it not for Copenhagen, unemployment in Skåne would be far worse than it already is. Now the Swedes use the argument that they have freedom of speech. But have we forgotten the Swedish reaction during the Mohammed Crisis? The former Swedish Foreign Minister, Laila Freivald, removed the drawings from a web page. Luckily she did not get away with it and she was sacked.

It is possible that this is controversial, but it is my perception that modern anti-Semitism is on the rise, especially in those neighborhoods in Europe that house many with a Muslim background. I do not want to make any generalizations, but we have to acknowledge that the number of Nazis in Europe today is very small. They are almost non-existent. Because of the new immigration of people who watch Al Jazeera, however, immigrants have come who blame Israel for all the troubles in the Middle East.

I see the very worrying tendency in European countries that leftist-oriented parties have started pandering for Muslim votes.

Anti-Semitism, Islamism, Nazism, and Racism are all threats to a pluralistic society. The op-ed writer Flemming Bengtsson asks a very important question in Jyllands-Posten on August 27, 2009:

Why do the elites not talk about Jew-hatred?