Sweden’s Dirty Leftist Secrets

This blog deals with current issues in Sweden which are concerned with or affect Jews in Sweden and relations with Israel.  The blog has dealt extensively with the worsening violence among the mainly Muslim immigrant communities such as Malmö’s Rosengård neighborhood, and the dramatic increase in anti-Semitic hate crime which has already driven some Jews out of Malmö.  Those who remain in the community pay exorbitant costs for guards and surveillance to secure Jewish communal institutions. They also avoid walking the streets openly identifying as Jews.  For example, the Chabad rabbi—who is easily identified by his traditional garb and beard—has suffered numerous attacks, including an attempt to run him over.

The most disturbing element in this picture is the response of the authorities, which is paralleled, and in many cases, amplified by the media.  It seems the Swedish authorities are so busy congratulating themselves on having achieved multi-culturalism, that they fail to see that their main cultural import, i.e.  the Muslim immigrant sector, includes individuals and leaders who are absolutely intolerant, radical and destructive.  The result of this blindness is that the elites either ignore immigrant violence and hate crime or blame the Jews for it. For example, in the media, this is accomplished by “Photoshopping” images of immigrant youth to make them paler, and then referring to them by typical non-immigrant names such as “Johan”, when they are more likely to be “Muhammad”.  Poof! It’s all just teenage rabblerousing.  In the political sphere, this is typified by Malmö’s Social Democrat mayor Ilmar Reepalu blaming Swedish Jews for not publicly repudiating Israel.  In this equation, there may be a problem, but the Jews have brought it all on themselves. 

The question remains why both left-wing politicians and their leftist media associates, like the Aftonbladet daily—primarily a Social Democrat organ—choose to ignore anti-Semitic hate crimes, while actively sympathizing with the victim narrative of extremist genocidal Islamic groups such as Hamas.  How do they claim to be part of a liberal Swedish  tradition—while hopping in bed (or ship’s berth as in the case of the 10 Swedish Flotilla activists) with sworn jihadists who are looking for glory alive or preferably, dead?

Sadly, the answer is that the liberal tradition was never much more than a mirage, just like the myth of 200 years of Swedish neutrality.  After all, if you sell desperately-needed steel to the Nazis for armaments, you are aiding and abetting the Nazi war machine.  Similarly, you can’t claim to be a great proponent of peace while selling cut-price Bofors artillery to India so they could shell Pakistan in the 80s—that’s conflict escalation. Sitting out of the fight while making a good buck on the equipment is profiteering, not peace promotion.

What is the truth of the Swedish Socialist legacy? Well, one dirty secret which has been leaking out, albeit slowly, is the Swedish involvement in the Stasi, the highly-repressive East German police state’s internal spy network.  Remember, the Stasi employed yearly up to 91,000 people, most of whom were employed to spy on neighbors, co-workers, and friends; higher operatives carried out torture and executions.  At the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall a set of files referred to as the Rosenholz Files was acquired by the CIA.  Those files pertaining to Swedish Stasi operatives were passed to the Säpo, the Swedish Security Service.  Säpo has resisted demands to open the files to public scrutiny for years, but under court order finally will allow scholar and author Professor Birgitta Almgren, of Södertörn University to view the documents under limited conditions.  According to Sweden’s English daily The Local :

“The court itself will decide exactly which papers she will be able to read. She will also not be allowed to take the documents off Säpo premises, will not be permitted to make copies of the documents and will have to destroy her notes within a year.”

Not exactly an agenda based on “freedom of information” is it?  Why is there a need to protect Swedes who worked for the Stasi’s elite HVA (Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung—Main Reconnaissance Administration) more than twenty years ago?  HVA operatives worked mainly in West Germany through infiltration of Western intelligence agencies and gathered military, economic and technological data, disseminating misinformation, and carrying out sabotage missions as well.  But here is the nasty bottom line: HVA was the primary conduit for passing NATO intelligence to the KGB. This means that Swedish operatives—no matter what they did—both actively supported the repressive East German regime and aided its operations in undermining Western democracy.

Many in Sweden speculate that the reason why Säpo has been reluctant to have the names of Swedish pro-Communist spies released is that many of them are still active in the power elites of parties on the left, such as the Social Democrats.  How does this tie in with Israel and the Jews? Again, remember that the Soviets and their allies were major sponsors of Palestinian terror groups such as Arafat’s Fatah and other Marxist radical terror groups.  Anti-Zionism was a required item on radicals’ ideological agendas, especially since Israel clearly allied itself with the United States and NATO.

Unfortunately, the leftist elites still nurture nostalgic feelings for their radical youth—more about that in the tomorrow’s post covering Jan Guillou’s latest radical screed—and it seems collaborators to the brutal East German regime freely roam the corridors of the Swedish state authorities. Meanwhile, the Jews of Sweden will continue to be the victims of hate crime in Sweden, and blamed for it, too.

The text was written  by Chanah Shapira