As our readers know, the government-subsidized Swedish press usually specializes in anti-Israel bias. This is due to the fact that there is one major supplier of international news, the TT press agency. As we have demonstrated previously, TT takes stories from other suppliers, including AFP, and re-spins them for the mainstream print and electronic media in Sweden. As they note on their website, “Sweden's major media cooperate with TT”.
As a result, Swedish readers are guaranteed to get a serving of highly selected material showing mainly the Palestinian viewpoint. This includes bypassing any reporting of stories which show Arab “activists” or “militants” for what they really are—terrorists.It was showed this last month, that when Israeli citizens were brutally murdered by Palestinian terrorists Swedish media took little notice and Aftonbladet set an example of the many newspapers which didn’t even classify it as a terror attack.
Today we are highlighting a few items, which we challenge TT or anyone else in the Swedish mainstream media to report to their readers.
Today we are highlighting a few items, which we challenge TT or anyone else in the Swedish mainstream media to report to their readers.
The Hamas terror regime in Gaza has, while crying poor, been building a shopping mall, beach villas, and eating out in style—and Swedish protest tourists may opt to stay at the deluxe Grand Palace Hotel. But it’s not all play. Israel’s Channel 2 news reported that the Kassam rockets which presently are fired on southern Israel are continuously in the process of being upgraded. Having increased the range and accuracy of these missiles to reach the area of the Ashkelon power station (which supplies most of Gaza’s electricity), Hamas weapons manufacturers are now adding on a much more destructive 10 kg payload—a sizeable increase and investment over previous models which carried an average of about 3 kg of explosives. Hamas’ firing of missiles which target civilian areas constitutes a war crime and is collective punishment directed at non-combatants. This report will not be found in the pages of Aftonbladet.
In a related item, the Jerusalem Post reported on September 5th that there was an explosion in a village in southern Lebanon caused by the accidental detonation of yet another one of Hezbollah’s hidden arms caches. This was never once mentioned in Swedish media. It seems like the detonation of arms caches in southern Lebanon and the illegal practice of storing quantities of explosives arms in private homes in residential areas are not newsworthy topics for the “journalists” at Aftonbladet.
The Jerusalem Post also reports a story entitled “Abbas’s plea to Arab states: Show me the money!” that,
-“Most of the Arab countries have failed to meet their previous pledges to provide the Palestinians with financial aid, the PA said. With the exception of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, the Arab world was continuing to ignore the Palestinians’ repeated requests for help… Last week, PA President Mahmoud Abbas complained that the Palestinians haven’t seen ‘one cent’ of the hundreds of millions of dollars that the Arab countries promised them”.And even the oil sheikhs that paid up shelled out far fewer petrodollars:
-“In 2009, Saudi Arabia gave the Palestinians $240m. In comparison, the Palestinians received only $30m from the Saudis between January 1, 2010, and the end of last month.”
Followers of Middle East policy and events know that this is business as usual. Don’t expect this item to appear in a TT-based story—because it shows that, in fact, the Palestinians really aren’t the prime concern of the Arab world. The Arab and Islamic leadership may be fond of speechifying and pledging aid, but they rarely bother to deliver, and the Western media never calls them on the carpet for broken promises. These days Arab states have real concerns over Iran’s nuclear potential and Western inaction; the Palestinians are small potatoes.
The Swedish media often demonizes Israel as the sole aggressor and actively promotes the Palestinian line, while ignoring, for example, Iranian-backed Hezbollah’s massive weapons stockpiles and terrorist acts in Lebanon. They also turn a blind eye to the increasing threat of more advanced missiles coming out of Gaza—another Iranian arms client. This will not promote peace. Sticking one’s head in the sand won’t make Iranian aggression-by-proxy go away; it will only encourage Hezbollah and Hamas intransigence to continue without penalty and, as far as the Swedish media is concerned, without comment.
By Chanah Shapira
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