One month of Islam and Multiculturalism in Sweden: August 2015

No one seems to have given any thought as to where all the people who are granted asylum in Sweden are supposed to live. There is a massive shortage of housing, which has led to young Swedes, well into their 30s, being forced to live with their parents. In 2014, a report from the Swedish Union of Tenants (Hyresgästföreningen) disclosed that close to 300,000 young people between the ages of 20-27 do not have their own place to live. The Immigration Service has the right to send “unaccompanied refugee children,” who are often, in fact, undocumented adults, to the local municipalities — and then it is their problem to procure accommodation. It was also recently reported that adult migrants with residence permits have a right to bypass Swedes in waiting lists for housing. The municipality of Skellefteå now plans to inventory all the empty houses in the countryside, looking for possible alternatives for migrants.

February 3: Teenage girls attending the Vårboskolan high school in the Malmö suburb of Arlöv were sexually assaulted and stalked by young migrants in their 20s who take Swedish language classes at the school, according to the local daily newspaper, Sydsvenskan. As most of the migrants are male, the gender balance at the school has been severely skewed. 14-year-old Emilia and Nora told Sydsvenskan:

“The guys stared at us and made kissing noises. They said things we did not quite understand, told us we were sexy and good looking and stuff like that. And they took pictures of us and other girls with their phones. During recess, they stand outside waiting for us and then they follow us. Sometimes guys have groped us in the lunch line.”

February 6: A gang of youths threw stones at a police patrol in the immigrant-heavy neighborhood of Hageby in Norrköping. The police officers were monitoring traffic when one of their cars was set on fire by a gang of 15 or 20 youths, who then proceeded to throw stones at the officers. Four youths, aged 16-18, were removed from the scene, but inexplicably not arrested.

February 7: An ambulance was vandalized by unknown persons in the immigrant-heavy suburb of Tensta in northwestern Stockholm. Three windows of the vehicle were smashed. If the patient for whom the ambulance had come had been critically ill, “the consequences,” as the police reported, “could have been dire.”

Åke Östman, head of Emergency Medical Services in the Greater Stockholm area, told the daily, Dagens Nyheter:

“I cannot understand why anyone would do this — we are not a government authority; we are there to help. The next time, it might be their parents. If the ambulances have to wait for a police escort, people living in certain areas may get inferior service.”

February 8: According to an opinion poll commissioned by the daily, Dagens Nyheter, immigration and integration are now the leading political issues for Swedish voters. 40% of respondents said that immigration was the most important issue — double the number from previous poll. Johanna Laurin Gulled, a research analyst at the Ipsos polling institute, told the paper that this was the biggest shift the institute has ever seen in any poll. Education, the most important issue in June of last year, is now in second place.

February 11: A Kurdish immigrant in Stockholm was sentenced to 18 years in prison for killing his wife. The apparent motive was that a few months before the murder, his wife had worn to her brother’s wedding a dress that, according to the husband, “made her look like a whore.” The couple was separated at the time of the murder, but the husband had come to their apartment to collect some things for their young son. The argument over the dress resumed. The husband claims he does not remember what happened next; he just suddenly found himself covered in blood and holding a knife. The autopsy found that he had stabbed his wife 66 times.

February 11: Aside from the housing shortage for migrants to Sweden, there is also a severe absence of appropriate jobs. Rather than talk about the problems that come with the illiteracy of so many immigrants, the Swedish government announced that it is now going to introduce a “fast track” for immigrants claiming to have a teaching degree. Recently, Swedish schools have gone from being top-rated among the OECD countries to being among the worst. Thus, fewer and fewer people want to work in the school system. In 2013 the Swedish Teachers’ Union described the situation as “extremely serious.” The government still claims that many of the new arrivals are highly educated, and now it wants to speed up the process of approving foreign teaching degrees. Critics maintain that the “fast track” for immigrants is probably a euphemism for lowering school standards even more.

February 13: One person was killed and three wounded in a knife fight at an asylum seekers’ house in Ljusne. When the police finally entered the building, they took three people into custody. Lars Ulander, the Immigration Service Unit Chief in Söderhamn, told the daily, Aftonbladet: “I thought, damn it. We had a conference … I actually said that we should be thankful things that have happened in other places have not happened here, and then this happens. It is incredibly sad.” A man in his 20s is being held, but three other suspects remain at liberty. The police investigation is expected to take some time due to a shortage of interpreters.

February 16: A Danish actor, Kim Bodnia, star of the acclaimed Swedish-Danish TV show, The Bridge (Bron), revealed in an English-language interview on Israeli television that it was the rampant antisemitism in Malmö was one of the reasons he left the show. Antisemitism “is growing, especially in Malmö, where we shot ‘The Bridge’, in Sweden. It’s not very nice and comfortable to be there as a Jewish person. … I don’t feel so safe there, you know. It’s not funny, it’s growing and we have to deal with it every day…”

February 16: The Administrative Court supported the decision of the municipal government of Örnsköldsvik that the children of traveling Roma beggars are entitled to go to school, free of charge.

During the past few years, as a result of European Union rules on free movement, Sweden has been flooded by thousands of Bulgarian and Romanian Roma. They have a right to stay in the country for three months, after which, if they are not employed, they are required to go back to their own country. However, many choose to stay in Sweden illegally and earn a living through begging; there are now beggars sitting outside virtually every store in the country.

Last year, the government appointed Martin Valfridsson as “National Coordinator for Vulnerable EU Citizens,” to investigate what could be done about the problem. His conclusion was that long-term efforts and co-operation between Sweden, Bulgaria and Romania are necessary to get to the root of the problem. Just to give the Roma money and social benefits is actually not “kind”, but rather, exacerbates the problem. As he explained in an interview with the TT news agency, “Children of beggars should not be offered schooling as a general rule. And to put money in the beggars’ cups is not a good idea in the long run.”

February 16: Swedish public television reported that more and more “refugees,” tired of waiting for a decision on their asylum application, return home. This year more than 1,100 people have retracted their asylum applications; in 2015, there were 4,200 retractions. The most common reasons for retractions are that it takes a long time for cases to be processed; that there are long waiting periods for family reunions, and that there is a strained housing situation. SVT public television interviewed “Ahmed” from Iraq, who arrived in Sweden in April 2015, after crossing the Mediterranean in a rubber boat and walking several weeks across Europe:

“We were told by people around us that the asylum process would not take more than a few months, but it has almost been a year and I am still waiting for a decision. My family cannot wait any more, I have small children who need me; my eldest son is not able to provide for the entire family.”

February 18: A Somali-Swedish girl, 17, who was arrested in Vienna on suspicion of planning to join the Islamic State in Syria, was sentenced to one year in prison. However, as eleven months were a suspended sentence, and she had already spent one month in custody, she was immediately released. Pictures of executions performed by ISIS were found on her mobile phone, as well as a chat history in which she wrote delightedly about the Paris terror attacks. During her trial, she refused to answer any questions.

February 18: A trial began against an 18-year-old man, accused of throwing a hand grenade at a police van in August 2015. The prosecutor, Stefan Creutz, demanded eight years in prison for the accused, saying that the young man seemed “indifferent to whether people lived or died.” Four policemen were inside the van at the time of the attack.

The defendant was arrested after his DNA was found on the lever of the grenade. But the District Court of Södertörn apparently did not find it beyond a reasonable doubt that the man’s DNA had wound up on the grenade at the time of the attack, and acquitted him. He was, however, sentenced to three years in prison for weapons offenses and two aggravated robberies.

Left: A police van, riddled with shrapnel from a hand grenade attack in Stockholm last year. The man accused of the attack was recently acquitted, because the court doubted that his DNA, found on the grenade’s lever, had gotten there at the time of the attack. Right: Kim Bodnia, star of the acclaimed Swedish-Danish TV show, The Bridge (Bron), revealed last month that one of the reasons he left the show was the rampant antisemitism in Malmö (the filming location).

February 18: Two “unaccompanied refugee children,” remanded in January on suspicion of the aggravated rape of a younger boy at an asylum house in Alvesta, were revealed to be much older than 15 years old — the age they claimed to be. One of them, an Afghan man, wrote on Facebook that he was 44. Prosecutor Emma Berge said during a press conference that x-rays of the men’s teeth also showed that the other suspect was decidedly older than 18. According to the indictment, the men had lured the victim to a wooded area and took turns raping the boy, while filming the act with a mobile phone camera. The municipality has reported itself to the supervisory authority, the Health and Social Care Inspectorate (IVO), for allowing a child to share a room with older men.

February 18: A 27-year-old asylum seeker from Iran was sentenced to 10 months in prison for sexually assaulting a mentally disabled woman. In the verdict, the woman is described as living “in a supportive housing facility with a guardian. Developmentally, she is far behind a normal person. She can neither read nor write. She is naïve and immature and has trouble remembering things.”

The Iranian man lured the victim into a public restroom, where he molested her. Thanks to DNA evidence, he was sentenced to 10 months in prison, then to deportation, but will be banned from Sweden for only five years.

February 19: The daily newspaper GT reported that the management of the housing facility for “unaccompanied refugee children,” where Alexandra Mezher was murdered on January 25, was aware that her killer had severe psychological problems. The facility had even been granted extra funds from social services, yet Alexandra Mezher was working there alone that night.

Mezher’s murderer initially claimed to be 15 years old and from Somalia, turned out in fact to be a 25-year-old man from Ethiopia. He had at first lived with a foster family and gone to school, but when it became clear that he had serious problems, the family demanded that he be moved to a facility where he could get “professional help.” Before the murder, he was twice committed to a psychiatric care unit. According to the forensic psychiatric investigation, has a “distorted perception of reality.”

Stefan Alexandersson, a spokesperson for the company that managed the facility, HVB Living Nordic, told GT that the “scope of the problems had not been evident until one or two days before the murder.”

February 27: The people at the public television channel Sveriges Television seem to be working hard to alienate the Swedish people. First, they chose a Muslim, Gina Dirawi, as last year’s Christmas Show host; two months later, Dirawi hosted Sweden’s most popular TV show — the music contest Melodifestivalen. This show selects the song that will compete in the next Eurovision Song Contest. During the show, Dirawi and a children’s choir sang Sweden’s national anthem “Thou ancient, Thou free” (“Du gamla, du fria“), but with the lyrics partly rewritten. Instead of “I want to live, I want to die in the North”, they sang, “I want to live, I want to die on Earth.” The show’s producer, Edvard Sillén, explained to the newspaper Göteborgs-Posten: “Melodifestivalen is not for those who get upset if the national anthem is changed. The focus should be on the people of this country who have ‘different roots.'”

February 27: An immigrant doctor, who as it turned out did not speak Swedish, sent a young man home with a prescription for antidepressants, even though the young man displayed clear signs of a having a brain tumor. The young man had come to the hospital, deeply concerned that one half of his face was drooping and that his speech was slurred. A few weeks later, it became clear that the young man had a brain tumor. The doctor has since been reported to the Health and Social Care Inspectorate, who may or may not end up giving him a warning. Why he works in Swedish health care without understanding Swedish, or possibly medicine, is still unclear.

February 27: Two “unaccompanied refugee children,” suspected of being behind a large number of mobile phone thefts in Stockholm and Uppsala, were apprehended by police. The “children” had snatched phones out of the hands of two girls, who were able to provide a physical description. The thieves, who claim to be 15 and 17, were arrested in a restaurant, but did not have the girls’ phones on them at the time. They did, however, have another stolen phone. They were taken into custody under the Aliens Act, but were later released.

February 28: The Swedish embassy in London says it thinks that the British newspaper Daily Mail has got Swedish immigration policy all wrong. According to the Swedish daily, Dagens Nyheter, the embassy has written a report to the Ministry for Foreign Affairs. The report claims that the paper is “campaigning against Sweden and Swedish immigration policy” and that “Sweden is being used as a bad example [of failed immigration and integration policies].”

The embassy says it is now trying to counter the negative image.

Ingrid Carlqvist is a journalist and author based in Sweden, and a Distinguished Senior Fellow of Gatestone Institute.

Christianity is a universal religion, therefore Christianity in Sweden should have many similarities with Christianity in other countries.

If Christianity in Sweden begins to embrace a doctrine that has nothing to do with the universal world religion of Christianity, Sweden has then invented a new religion.

If you look at how Christianity has developed in Sweden today, it seems that this is what Sweden is about to get.

Stefan Swärd is an influential Christian pastor in Sweden with a background in the Evangelical Free Church in Sweden. In an op-ed from September 2014, Swärd describes Christianity the following way:

“When congregations in Sweden meet in diversity and integration and integrate Africans, Chinese and Latin Americans, they express the very essence of the Christian community’s being.”

He continues,

“As Christians, we should work for a generous refugee policy. We will work so our churches and congregations become good examples of functioning integration, where people of different backgrounds can come together in a common life.”

In December 2014, he gathered 380 Swedish ministers from the Pentecostal movement, the Evangelical Free Church in Sweden, the Uniting Church in Sweden, the Salvation Army, Word of Faith Movement and the Swedish Alliance Mission, as well as several other churches, to sign a petition, which declared, among other things, that these denominations do not believe that Sweden applies a refugee policy that is too generous. This was written before the migration crisis in 2015, when Sweden already had the most liberal immigration policy in Europe and gave all Syrians permanent residence in Sweden.

To those concerned about the future of Sweden, where many new migrants might not be able to be assimilated or might not want to be assimilated, Swärd is regarded as misusing Christianity to argue for a liberal immigration policy.

In his recent book, Jesus Was Also a Refugee (Jesus var också flykting), Swärd and his co-author, Micael Grenholm, try to answer the following question: “What does God think about the global refugee crisis and Swedish migration policy?” The answer that the book gives is that there should be no immigration restrictions at all and that rich countries have to open their borders simply because they are rich countries.

Swärd and his coalition of ministers are not an anomaly in Swedish Christianity. They represent the norm for what much of Swedish Christianity preaches nowadays. Antje Jackelén, the archbishop of Sweden’s largest denomination, the Church of Sweden, said in an interview from January 9, 2016 that Jesus would not approve of the Swedish government’s new restrictive migration policies, which the government was forced to implement because of the migration crisis. Archbishop Jackelén stated:

“The Bible is full of stories of refugees. Jesus himself was a refugee in his infancy. To protect the stranger, the one who is not protected, runs like a thread through the Old and New Testament. There would probably be no approval from Jesus for the government policy.”

On the basis of what many Christian leaders in Sweden say, Jesus seems to have been interested in migration policies, and he seems to have thought that they should be liberal.

According to the Church of Sweden, there are even clear political positions that God has on how immigrants should integrate into a new country. Archbishop Antje Jackelén, for instance, said in an interview from September 2014 that if one requires that immigrants assimilate into the country after their arrival, it is contrary to a Christian view of humanity. Is that statement based on the Bible, or is it based on the political agenda of the Swedish liberal establishment? Antje Jackelén leads the church in which 63% of Sweden’s population are members. Her message is that Jesus has clear political positions on both migration and integration policies.

Christian leaders in Sweden have re-made Christianity into a religion that serves the political agenda of an establishment whose extreme liberal ideology lacks popular support. Left: Sweden’s Crown Princess, King, Archbishop Antje Jackelén, and the Queen pose after the archiepiscopal ordination of Jackelén on June 15, 2014 (Image source: Church of Sweden). Right: Influential Swedish Christian pastor Stefan Swärd co-wrote the book Jesus Was Also a Refugee, which advocates for a policy of no immigration restrictions; rich countries have to open their borders simply because they are rich countries.

After the June 2016 terrorist attack in Orlando, Florida, in which ISIS sympathizer Omar Mateen murdered 49 people at a gay nightclub, another influential Christian pastor in Sweden, Stanley Sjöberg, wrote on his Facebook page that homosexuals should be more low-key, not to provoke Muslims. After his statement about the Orlando massacre, Sjöberg told a Christian magazine:

“But I believe that we must adapt to the multicultural way when we’ve brought several hundred thousand Muslims here. I believe that politicians and serious thinkers agree with me that we cannot just continue with our culture, with Pride festivals, or to drink in public. We in Europe are forced to step back to show a little more considerate attitude to the environment.”

The Church of Sweden has actively tried to influence Swedish politicians to support a liberal immigration policy. When the Swedish parliament was going to vote on restrictive migration policies in June 2016, a bishop of the Church of Sweden in the Diocese of Västerås pleaded with MPs to vote against the proposal. When the media asked him why he should interfere in political matters he responded:

“It is obvious to me. Otherwise I would not carry out my duties as bishop unless I committed myself to the vulnerable.”

There are lot of vulnerable people in Sweden. 225,000 retirees in Sweden lived in poverty in 2014, and all estimates shows that this number is going to grow rapidly. So why is the Church of Sweden obsessed with vulnerable people who come from other countries?

It seems to have become part of Church of Sweden’s mission — and Christianity in Sweden generally — to make the country implement a liberal immigration policy.

But is this really the mission of the Church and Christianity? What happened with spreading the Word and letting people know that Jesus is the truth, the way and the life?

It is not even certain that Christian leaders in Sweden care so much about Jesus and his opinions. After a French priest, Jacques Hamel, was murdered by ISIS sympathizers in Rouen, France, on July 26, 2016, an initiative started in Sweden where Swedish Christians took “selfies” with a cross to show solidarity with persecuted Christians. The initiative, called “Mitt kors”(“My cross”), was started by three priests from the Church of Sweden. The Church of Sweden, however, criticized it. Gunnar Sjöberg, Head of Communications for the Church of Sweden, wrote on his Facebook page:

“I really do not know about that. This thing about Christians suddenly wearing a cross as a sign for or against something. It is actually nothing new, but the call seems seditious and un-Christian in the conflicts that already exist.”

So now, according to a senior official in the Church of Sweden, the call to wear a cross to show solidarity with persecuted Christians is “un-Christian”.

That the Church of Sweden distances itself from people who carry the cross caused Ann Heberlein, a doctor of theology and lecturer at Lund University, to write,

“The leadership of the Church of Sweden no longer wants to lead a Christian community; they want to lead a general ethical association for humanistic values of the most vulgar kind.”

The Church of Sweden’s attacks on the “My cross” initiative continued until one of the priests who had started it publicly left the Church of Sweden. In an article, Johanna Andersson, the priest who is resigning, writes:

“Church leadership has for several weeks been running a campaign against us who started the group ‘My cross.’ In this campaign, I have been discredited, called ‘questionable’, ‘unclean’, ‘agitator’, ‘un-Christian’ and attributed xenophobic hidden agendas.”

The question, therefore, is whether some Christian leaders in Sweden really care about Jesus and Christianity or whether they are using Jesus to convey a political agenda which includes a liberal immigration policy and multiculturalism.

While the Church of Sweden opposed a campaign that tried to use the cross to show solidarity with the persecuted Christians, Archbishop Antje Jackelén co-authored an op-ed in one of Sweden’s largest newspapers with four other Swedish religious leaders, including Mahmoud Khalfi, chairman of the Swedish Imam Council, who has connections to the Muslim Brotherhood.

There are many examples of how Christianity in Sweden has gone astray and become something else. One might describe Swedish Christianity as a new religion that worships multiculturalism and leftist values in general. In Swedish Christianity, Jesus has been reduced from being the son of God, to an activist fighting for multiculturalism and open borders.

In 2013, the Swedish Social Democratic Youth League had an advertisement for elections in the Church of Sweden, in which they declared that “Jesus was a Social Democrat.” Meanwhile, there are Christian leaders who claim to know exactly what Jesus thought about the current government’s immigration policy.

This is the state of Swedish Christianity today, and it is not certain that Christians around the world would recognize the religion in Sweden called Christianity. Christian leaders in Sweden have taken Christianity and made it into a religion that serves the political agenda of an establishment whose extreme liberal ideology lacks popular support among the Swedish people.

If the Swedish establishment wants multiculturalism, then Christian leaders will declare that God says multiculturalism is good. If the Swedish establishment wants a liberal immigration policy, Jesus says that he has always been for a liberal immigration policy, despite the fact that he was born more than 2000 years ago. Swedish Christianity has become a mixture of madness and deception.

In Malmö the Church of Sweden publishes a local magazine called Trovärdigt. In the latest issue, you can read that a priest, who serves at St. Peters church in Malmö, said,

“The rainbow in the Pride Flag is also a sign of the promise between God and man”.

Really? Not even the most radical gay activists believe that the rainbow in the gay pride flag is a sign of the promise between God and man. For many influential Christian leaders in Sweden, it does not matter what it says in the Bible anymore. In fact, if you take a step back and look at the overall picture, it is clear that many Christian leaders in Sweden do not worship God; they worship the romanticized, multicultural utopia they want Sweden to become. These Christian leaders betray not only the Swedish people, but they also betray the God that they promised to serve, by making Christianity into a bullhorn for the liberal elite who hold political power in Sweden.

One can have different interpretations of what Jesus did or what opinions he had, but we can all agree that he did not serve the Emperor or other earthly rulers. Too many Christian leaders in Sweden have become the servants of earthly rulers by conveying the message of the political establishment in Sweden.

Nima Gholam Ali Pour is a member of the board of education in the Swedish city of Malmö and is engaged in several Swedish think tanks concerned with the Middle East. He is also editor for the social conservative website Situation Malmö. Gholam Ali Pour is the author of the Swedish book “Därför är mångkultur förtryck“(“Why multiculturalism is oppression”).

One of the most visible effects of Muslim mass immigration into Sweden is that anti-Semitism is very much on the rise in the country. Swedish Jews are being harassed and threatened, mainly in the Muslim-dense city of Malmö, where in January 2009, the friction deepened during a peaceful pro-Israel demonstration. Demonstrators were attacked by pro-Palestinian counter demonstrators, who threw eggs and bottles at the supporters of Israel. The mayor of Malmö at the time, Ilmar Reepalu, failed to take a clear stance against the violence, and was accused of preferring the approval of the city’s large Muslim population to protecting Jews. He remarked, among other things, that “of course the conflict in Gaza has spilled over into Malmö.”

In January 2009, an Arab mob in Malmö pelted a peaceful Jewish demonstration with bottles, eggs and smoke bombs. The police pushed the Jews, who had a permit for their gathering, into an alley.

The situation in Malmö has twice been deemed so alarming that U.S. President Barack Obama sent Special Representatives to the city: Hanna Rosenthal visited in 2012, and Ira Forman came in 2015. “We are keeping an eye on Malmö,” Forman told the media.

The harassment of Malmö’s Jews was, for a long time, a mystery to the general public; Were neo-Nazis really walking the streets of Sweden’s third largest city? Many believed that to be the case, until the local daily paper Skånska Dagbladet published a series of articles, in which the Jewish community finally pointed out the elephant in the room: Malmö’s growing Muslim population.

Fredrik Sieradzki of Malmö’s Jewish community explained that when he grew up, Jews could still wear a kippa (skullcap) without anyone bothering them: “Nobody dares do that now,” he said.

Malmö Rabbi Shneur Kesselman, one of very few Orthodox Jews in Sweden who wears a traditional Hassidic black hat and frock-coat, has, in the last few years, filed more than 50 complaints with the police about various kinds of harassment. On May 31, 2016, an 18-year-old Muslim by the name of Amir Ali Mohammed was finally convicted of shouting “Jewish bastard” at Kesselman. The media, however, chose not to publish any information about Mohammed’s name or religion.

In June 2016, a report with a special focus on Sweden was published, entitled “Different Antisemitisms: On three distinct forms of antisemitism in contemporary Europe.” Its authors, Swedish researchers Lars Dencik and Karl Marosi, based the report on two studies, conducted by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the EU’s Fundamental Rights Agency (FRA).

The report states that the Swedish anti-Semitism, leading mostly to verbal attacks on Jews, comes from Muslims. The ADL study, encompassing eight European countries (Belgium, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Sweden and Britain), showed that Sweden has the least anti-Semitic population. Only 4% of Swedes are classified as anti-Semites, compared to 41% of Hungarians. Sweden, in fact, came in number 100 out of 102 countries studied, followed only by Laos and the Philippines.

The FRA study asked Jews in various countries what group of people had attacked or threatened them: Far-right extremists, far-left extremists, Christian extremists or Muslim extremists. In Sweden, out of 81 Jews asked, 51 stated they had been attacked by Muslims, 25 by far-left extremists, 5 by far-right extremists, and none by Christian extremists.

There can be little doubt, therefore, that ethnic Swedes do not have a problem with Jews, and that the rampant anti-Semitism in Sweden is apparently due to Muslims from the Middle East, who now make up 10% of the population.

The British current events analyst and commentator, Douglas Murray, said in a recent interview, that Muslims in Europe have big problems with anti-Semitism. He referred to an article in the New Statesman, in which Muslim Mehdi Hasan wrote:

“It pains me to have to admit this but anti-Semitism is not just tolerated in some sections of the British Muslim community; it is routine and commonplace. Any Muslims reading this article — if they are honest with themselves — will know instantly what I am referring to. It is our dirty little secret. You could call it the banality of Muslim anti-Semitism.”

Murray points out that anti-Semitism is a widespread sentiment among Muslims, even among those who have lived for decades in Europe. When asked what the West can do about the problem, Murray said:

“We may not be able to [do anything]. I wouldn’t have thought France would be able to, I cannot see any particular long-term future for Jews in France. … There will be some countries, when Muslim anti-Semitism grows, say it is not the Jews who should leave, but the people who would make the Jews leave. There are some countries where that may happen, but other countries where it will fail.

…

“There isn’t much of a desire to do anything about it. … it should also be said that the so-called interfaith outreach work, which the Jewish community places a lot of hope in, achieves almost nothing… A couple of old bearded men get together and agree on some dietary thing they’ve got in common, but it doesn’t solve the fact that anti-Semitism mainly comes from Muslim communities these days; it doesn’t solve the problem, the fact that that’s taught in many mosques and many Muslim schools, and it doesn’t address the fact that now, if you go to, if Israel does anything anywhere in the world, anywhere in its region, there will immediately be a protest of very angry young Muslims in the center of London and other British cities. You can have an old rabbi and an old mullah, you know, sitting around having tea, agreeing on dietary stuff, but that doesn’t solve why the hatred is being taught. And that’s something the rabbi and the Jewish leadership in this country, among other places, just don’t want to admit to. Perhaps it’s too bad to confront?”

The question that arises is, are the elites of Sweden in general suffering from a case of Stockholm syndrome? Are we encouraging our adversaries to Islamize Sweden, which in the long run, might result in the abolition of freedom of religion, forcing Jews and Christians to live as dhimmis [subjugated citizens] in humiliation?

Many of the Swedish elite seem to feel that it is the duty of the Swedes to take in anyone and everyone claiming to be a refugee, regardless of that person’s attitude towards democracy, freedom of speech and the right of non-Muslims to live in this country.

That a majority of Swedes welcome mass immigration is actually a myth, cultivated over the last few years, mainly because critics of immigration are sometimes branded “racists”. In 1993, the general mood was quite different: the daily newspaper, Expressen, published an opinion poll which showed that 63% of Swedes wanted immigrants to return home. The poll, which caused quite a stir, was presented under the headline, “THROW THEM OUT”. The editor-in-chief, Erik Månsson, wrote:

“How long are we Swedes going to pretend that we welcome immigrants and refugees? Because we do not. The Swedish people have a firm opinion on immigration and refugee policies. Those in power have the opposite opinion. It does not add up. It is an opinion bomb about to go off. That is why we are writing about this, starting today. Telling it just like it is. In black and white. Before the bomb goes off.”

Instead of listening to the people, the paper’s owners fired their editor-in-chief, and journalists and politicians started raising the Swedes not to speak their minds on immigration.

To their credit, many Swedes certainly do not want to repeat the mistake we made in the 1930s, when Sweden only allowed about 3,000 German Jews, fleeing from the Nazis, into the country. Once World War II broke out, Sweden changed its course, and saved, for example, almost all of Denmark’s Jews. In a huge rescue operation, orchestrated by the Danish resistance, 7,000 Jews crossed the Öresund sea in fishing boats, bound for the Swedish coast, where they received a warm welcome and avoided deportation to the Nazi death camps.

Swedish Jews are a small community. About 20,000 Jews live here, while the number of Muslims, according to some calculations, is approaching one million and rising fast. The other looming question is: If by allowing hundreds of thousands of Muslims to settle here — people much more hateful of Jews than the average German during the Nazi era — are we not in fact paving the way for another Holocaust?

The historian Ingrid Lomfors, head of the Swedish public authority The Living History Forum (created for the very purpose of informing about the Holocaust), caused a stir last fall, when she gave a speech at the event “Sweden Together” (Sverige tillsammans), arranged by the government in support of unlimited asylum immigration. (Two months later, the government completely reversed this policy and implemented border controls.) Virtually the whole Swedish establishment was present, even the King and Queen.

Lomfors stated that:

1. Immigration [to Sweden] is nothing new;
2. We are all products of immigration;
3. There is no such thing as a native Swedish culture.

Despite many politicians and historians attempting to change the narrative on Swedish history in recent years, most Swedes are aware that the country was one of the most ethnically homogenous in the world, until the late 1960s.

Moreover, in general, Swedes are extremely proud of Swedish culture. Thus, many quickly realized that what Lomfors said was simply not true. Swedes expressed their fury on social media, and Conservative (Moderaterna) Member of Parliament Hanif Bali (who is himself of Iranian descent) thought it an “absurd claim” that there is no Swedish culture. Bali told the online newspaper, Nyheter Idag that there seemed to be a contradiction in saying we will integrate people who come here, while claiming there is nothing Swedish to integrate them into.

Lomfors was forced to recant her assertion that there is no Swedish culture:

“Of course there is a Swedish culture. Right now, I am writing in the language that is Swedish and a part of this culture. A culture I value and appreciate very much, it is a part of me, and I of it.”

Sadly, Lomfors’s original statement is not unique. Many in Sweden seem reluctant to acknowledge the vast differences between Swedish and Muslim cultures, and completely deny that Muslim anti-Semitism exists, or that it is particularly prevalent in Muslim-dominated cities such as Malmö.

In February 2016, for example, the Danish-Jewish actor, Kim Bodnia, said in an interview with Israeli television, that the real reason he left the international hit television show, The Bridge (Bron), was the rampant anti-Semitism in Malmö, where much of the show is filmed.

Daniel Jonas, Administrative Director of the Jewish Congregation in Gothenburg, when asked the same question Gatestone asked Swedish politicians and the clergy, if Islam is compatible with democracy, replied:

“Absolutely! But then, that depends on what era you are talking about. One of Judaism’s periods of great prosperity was under the Muslim rule of Spain, the Moor era. While the rest of Europe was trapped in the dark ages, in Spain there was a rule that wholly accepted everybody – not because of who you were, but based on how capable you were.”

Many in Sweden also seem to believe that the best period in world history for Jews was Al-Andalus, that is, the Muslim occupation of Spain 750-1492.

This statement makes Andrew G. Bostom, a physician and author of The Legacy of Jihad, explode in anger:

“What Daniel Jonas said is idiotic rubbish. Muslim Spain was a rigid Sharia state. Period. The devastating Muslim jihad conquest of Spain during the 8^th century imposed a rigorous system of Islamic Law — the Sharia — on those non-Muslim Christians and Jews who survived the mass murder and pillage. Brutal enslavement — agricultural, construction, military, harem, and eunuch (forced human castration), with over a 90% mortality rate — took place on an enormous scale. Those indigenous, vanquished Christians and Jews who were not enslaved, were subjected to the humiliating discrimination inherent in the Sharia, and always at risk for collective punishment, and renewed full-blown jihad campaigns waged against them, if they failed to accept these discriminatory Sharia mandates.

“Jews suffered from both the chronic, grinding Jew-hatred intrinsic to Islamic theology, and paroxysms of mass killings in the 11^th and 12^th centuries, in particular. The 1066 C.E. Jew-hating pogrom in Granada — ‘inspired’ by popular Muslim preachers exhorting Jew-hating themes from the Koran — Jews as apes, or apes and pigs (Koran 2;65, 5:60, and 7:166), meriting permanent contempt and humiliation (Koran 2:61, 3:112), and “dhimmi” status (Koran 9:29), only — resulted in the slaughter of some 4,000 Jews, more than the entire sum of Jews killed in the Crusader ravages of the Rhineland villages some 30 years later, and fully liquidated Granadan Jewry.”

Bostom’s The Legacy of Jihad is a historical look back at global Islamic jihad during the last 1,400 years. It clearly shows how non-Muslims have time and again been persecuted and oppressed by Muslim rulers.

In the book, Bostom describes the dress code imposed on Jews and Christians in the marketplaces of ninth-century Muslim Spain. Non-Muslims had to wear a visible label on their clothing — a monkey for Jews, a pig for the Christians. To be sure, this is reminiscent of how the Nazis forced the Jews to wear visible Stars of David on their clothing, making Daniel Jonas’s praise of Muslim Spain difficult to accept.

Being forced to wear a label on your clothing, however, was not the worst part for non-Muslims during this period. Bostom relates how the Muslim legal scholar Ahmed ibn Said ibn Hazm wrote about the freedom of the “unbelievers” being always in peril. The dhimmi (inferior, non-Muslim) who refused or was unable to the pay special tax, the jizya, could be sold off as a slave or executed. If one or more dhimmis in a village refused or were unable to pay the jizya tax, the Muslim authorities had the right to repeal the village’s autonomy. From one day to the next, Christians and Jews in a city could lose their status as protected “People of the Book,” because one person had done something wrong. Another crime that was considered very serious, was “public outrage against the Islamic faith,” for example, displaying objects such as crosses, wine or pigs in public so that Muslims could see them.

If a person chose to convert to Islam, full amnesty was immediately given, even if he had been sentenced to death. Bostom writes:

“A legal opinion given by a mufti from al-Andalus in the ninth century is very instructive: a Christian dhimmi kidnapped and violated a Moslem woman; when he was arrested and condemned to death, he immediately converted to Islam; he was automatically pardoned, while being constrained to marry the woman and to provide for her a dowry in keeping with her status. The mufti who was consulted about the affair, perhaps by a brother of the woman, found that the court decision was perfectly legal, but specified that if that convert did not become a Moslem in good faith and secretly remained a Christian, he should be flogged, slaughtered and crucified…”

Thomas Wolff, of the magazine Jewish Chronicle (Judisk krönika), commented on fear and how it makes many Jews stay silent: “We live behind locked gates with armed guards. Because of this, we lay low,” Wolff told us. ” You cannot tar all of Islam with the same brush. People do not flee because it amuses them, but because they are in danger.”

Kent Ekeroth, a Jewish Member of Parliament for the Sweden Democrats, has long been aware of the reluctance among Swedish Jews to criticize the Islamization — even though it might be their own undoing:

“It is very difficult to understand,” Ekeroth told Gatestone. “In part, it has to do with Jews seeing themselves as a minority, thus thinking they have to side with other minorities, a naïve liberalism that does not serve them. The talk about Jews hating the Sweden Democrats is not altogether true. Many say that in public, but in private, they admit to voting for us.”

Ekeroth simply laughs at being called a sick Muslim-hater and person with ADHD [attention deficit hyperactivity disorder] who might as well be a criminal.

“That is actually a first! Seriously, I am sure they too will wake up one day, but as usual, by then it will be too late. They will realize what they have done, but it will be too late. Here we have all these nationalist movements in Europe who have realized what Islam is doing to our communities, and are friends of Israel… This is really the same mechanism that is at work among all Swedes who want mass immigration. I do not know why they do it and I cannot explain it. There is no logic to it and nothing to suggest it will do anybody any good.”

Many Swedish Jews who have realized the dangers of Islamization have emigrated — or are planning to emigrate — to Israel.

The final question is, when Sweden has been completely Islamized, where will the non-Jewish Swedes go? We do not have another homeland to run to.

Ingrid Carlqvist is a journalist and author based in Sweden, and a Distinguished Senior Fellow of Gatestone Institute.