Recently, SVT-Sweden's publicly funded television broadcasting company- issued a short teletext notice concerning the recent Israeli air strikes against strategic targets in Gaza, in retaliation for a rocket attack against Israel. The air strikes, the notice states, were aimed at two targets; a military training camp, and the “refugee tunnels” along the border to Egypt.
Let’s be clear about the Gaza-Egypt tunnel business. As documented by the mainstream media, and easily found on YouTube, the tunnels have been used for smuggling a large range of “goods”. Some of these include what may be termed consumer items—food supplies, fuel, appliances, and even sheep and cattle lowered and hauled up miserably on ropes. There has also been substantial human trafficking. But a substantial amount of the material brought in under the sealed Egyptian border includes drugs, weapons, missiles, and explosives.
These tunnels are fairly sophisticated, and have been dug out at considerable expense to the owners who, until recently, have made a very nice profit on their investment. Of course, anyone you see interviewed in these clips states that they are strictly in the grocery trade, but as anyone who has lived in the Middle East can tell you, these business owners paid some kind of kickback. Whether the payoff was made in cash, goods, or delivery services, the tunnels have been useful and good business for the Hamas regime.
Claiming these tunnels were “refugee tunnels” is a totally disingenuous misnomer, both because, as we have seen, that is not the purpose of these tunnels, but for a second, more significant reason. Lately, the tunnel business has been drying up. Yes, now that Israel has been trucking in even more consumer goods, the tunnels have become largely unnecessary for consumer goods. What that means is that now these tunnels have become almost exclusively weapons conduits.
When SVT, a publicly-funded broadcasting company, claims that Israel bombed refugees in retaliation for a rocket attack, it is not only wrong and purposely deceptive, but it gives credibility to the many rabid anti-Israeli leftists, and the not nearly as many but equally rabid anti-Israeli liberals and rightists, who are always quick to condemn “blood-thirsty”Israelis. Israel's opponents in Sweden are given another weapon to use in debates and op-eds, one which comes from a source which is considered to be reliable. Furthermore, it is disturbing that tunnels which are used for transporting weapons are described as being used by supposed Palestinian “refugees’ by a broadcaster funded by a compulsory fee, paid by all Swedes in possession of a television.
Notice that the Israeli action against weapons smuggling has been inverted to a “human suffering” story, while the renewed rocket attacks by Hamas directed against Israel’s civilian population, have been depersonalized to simply rocket attacks. The latest Hamas attacks hit the coastal city of Ashkelon and a children’s therapy center just outside the town of Sderot. Does anyone need to ask how the upgraded rocket got into Gaza?
It should also be noted that there as late as yesterday five rockets were fired from the Egytian-controlled Sinai desert which borders Gaza. Islamic terrorists fired into the area of Eilat and its neighboring Jordanian city of Aqaba, killing one person and injuring four others. This is a major escalation of the situation with Hamas and its affiliated terrorist weapons suppliers and operatives.
What's more, SVT is not the only publicly-funded Swedish broadcaster to have joined the choir of Swedish media spreading anti-Israeli propaganda; their radio counterpart, SR, has been waging a campaign against Israel for years. The latest of SR’s attacks against Israel is an article concerning the recent demolition of an illegal Bedouin village in the Negev, which the author of the article claims is part of the “Jewification” of the Negev.
This article, then, implies that the Negev, which constitutes about half of Israel's land area, does not belong to Israel. Furthermore, by using the word “Jewification”, the author of the article blames not Israel, but the Jews, for the demolition of the Bedouin village, evoking the ancient anti-Semitic stereotype of the greedy Jew, who in this case is constantly grabbing for more land. With such images being conveyed by the publicly-funded broadcasting companies, perhaps one need no longer wonder about the causes of the ever-increasing levels of anti-Semitism in Sweden.
Sweden is a democracy. That is a simple fact. However, when the publicly-funded broadcasting channels publish anti-Israeli and even anti-Semitic propaganda, one begins to wonder for how much longer the humanitarian racists will permit free speech which runs counter to their agenda.
By Adam Eberhag and Chanah Shapira
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