One Ship, Many Kippot

Controversial headgear

Today's Jerusalem Post has a tidy overview of the current situation in Sweden. Israel is about to be pestered again by so-called human rights activists of the Swedish Ship to Gaza movement supporting the totalitarian Islamist Hamas regime. Meanwhile Jews and others in Sweden are gathering in public wearing kippot--that is visibly appearing as Jews--in order to protest the ongoing anti-Semitic climate that makes it dangerous for individual Jews to appear as Jews on the streets in Sweden.

Wear a kippa, but only with police protection

By ILYA MEYER

Sweden is haunted by its uneasy relationship with Israel. Not just Israel, but everything Israeli, Zionist and Jewish.

Sweden is a remarkable country. In many ways the envy of Europe, not least for one of its most famous sons Raoul Wallenberg, its vaunted social welfare program and its industrial successes of the recent past, yet haunted by the murders of its prime minister Olof Palme and foreign minister Anna Lindh.

And by its uneasy relationship with Israel. Not just Israel, but everything Israeli, Zionist and Jewish.

Soon to arrive off the coast of Israel is the Estelle, a small Swedish vessel that is part of a publicly-funded “Ship to Gaza” propaganda exercise. Although it claims to be carrying “humanitarian aid” for the people of Gaza, what it is really carrying is a crew of human-rights saboteurs intent on vilifying the Jewish state and supporting Hamas.

While the Estelle is on its way from Sweden to the hotbed of terrorism that is the Hamas-led Gaza Strip, here in Sweden the nation continues to contend every day with the climate that spawns “Ship to Gaza”: widespread anti-Semitism in Sweden’s third-largest city, Malmö, media animosity toward Israel that easily spills over into tacit anti-Semitism, and political fear of a sizable Islamist minority following decades of immigration from strife-torn Middle East countries.

Sweden is a country whose Jews are largely invisible. Jews have been living here for more than 250 years and number about 20,000 souls. But showing one’s Jewishness in a public place is fraught with danger. Sweden is a society whose well-established, thoroughly integrated and officially recognized Jewish minority is cowed into invisibility.  

Article in full here.