Sweden and the 1930's Revisited

From the European Jewish Press :

It is a crime in Sweden to express derogatory statements about ethnic, racial, national, religious and sexual minorities or to incite hatred and violence against them
....
At the beginning of this year, the Chancellor of Justice*, Goran Lambertz, discontinued his preliminary investigation against the great mosque in Stockholm. Cassette tapes had been sold in the bookshop of the mosque with a violently Anti-Semitic contents. After a couple of broadcasts on the 26 and 27th November last year, the Stockholm mosque was reported to the police.

In his decision to discontinue the preliminary investigation Lambertz wrote that “the lecture at hand contains statements that are strongly degrading to Jews, among other things, they are throughout called brothers of apes and pigs.” Furthermore a curse is expressed over the Jews and “Jihad is called for, to kill the Jews, whereby suicide bombers - celebrated as martyrs - are the most effective weapon”.
...
Lambertz thought that the “recently mentioned statements in spite of their contents are not to be considered “incitement against an ethnic group according to Swedish law”. His conclusions were that the preliminary investigation should be discontinued because this case of incitement against Jews could be said to originate from the Middle East conflict. That is, in spite of the calls for ”killing the Jews”, these statements are not a crime in the legal sense in Sweden, because of the current conflict in the Middle East, according to the Chancellor of Justice.

The same argument would have applied during WWII of course.

The hate website Radio Islam continues to spew forth its coarse Anti-Semitism, spread lists of Jews (real or imagined) and conspiracy theories on its site without the security police or the prosecuting authorities doing anything about it. When the radical right-wing party the Sweden Democrats on the other hand, had one of the Muhammed cartoons on its web-site, it was closed down after a quick and direct intervention by an official from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

That's different.

The Chancellor of Justice is the Government's counsellor in legal matters. It is not a political post. One of his tasks is to ensure that the limits of the freedom of the press and other media are not transgressed and to act as the only public prosecutor in cases regarding offences against the freedom of the press and other media.

It's not the Government, nor even the bureaucracy. It's the European Neuveau Aristocracy. The EuroSocialist Nomenklatura. inheritors of the mantle of the Chattering Classes and the Cliveden Set.

As Glen Reynolds said in an uncharacteristic outburst :

Europe, except maybe Germany to some degree, is in the hands of a political class that is morally leprous, intellectually bankrupt, and financially corrupt. Antisemitism seems to come naturally to such people.

Well, yes. 'Twas ever thus.

The `Cliveden Set' was not pro-Nazi, yet neither was the MP in Hyde Park entirely wrong in complaining that foreign policy was decided not in Cabinet any more but at Lady Astor's country home. Waldorf and Nancy Astor and their friends (including the editors of both the The Times and the Observer) were idealists, believing that once the more reasonable of Hitler's grievances had been sorted the unreasonable could be despatched more forcefully - if they still remained.

But Winston Churchill was unimpressed. He could see, from the way the Führer was swallowing up the small states surrounding the Fatherland that there would be no appeasing Hitler, and once the popular press realized the same they turned on `Cliveden' with the self-righteous fury peculiar to those who feel they have been conned.
...
Nancy's political career was successful enough and her Christian Science faith - or her personal version of it - kept her in good health and spirits. She campaigned on social issues, particularly Prohibition which proved a great election liability, and she enjoyed it immensely, but one can't help feeling that it was an absorbing hobby for her. Her great friend and Cliveden habitué George Bernard Shaw described her approach: `She has no political philosophy and dashes at any piece of kindly social work that presents itself, whether it is an instalment of socialism or a relic of feudalism...'
Searching the Thames

No doubt she meant well. As do much of the Left these days.

From the NY Sun :

It looks like a political oxymoron, but Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front is poised to strike an alliance with France’s large immigrant Muslim community. A generation after France’s rightwing party began its surge with a tough anti-immigration campaign tinged with both racism and anti-Semitism, three factors are coming into play that could spell a strategic realignment.

These factors, which are still little grasped outside political circles in France but will have an enormous impact, include:

• The Islamicization of France is largely a fait accompli. It is assumed that 6 to 8 million citizens or residents of France, 10% to 13% out of a global population of 62 million, are Muslim by now. And that the Muslim community, being more prolific, is much younger than the rest of the population: As much as 25% of French citizens or residents under 20 is Muslim, with the number reaching 40% or 50% in the big cities.
• The National Front is surprisingly popular among Muslim immigrants or second-generation Muslim citizens. For all its campaigning about immigration, Mr. Le Pen’s party has always extended support to Arab and Islamic causes abroad, from Saddam’s Iraq to Arafat’s or Hamas Palestine, and from Al Qaeda to Iran. And it is as firmly anti-American and anti-Jewish as the Muslim community itself tends to be.
• The attraction of the French far left, which accounts for another 20% of the national vote, toward Islam, rabid anti-Americanism, and even anti-Semitism, a phenomenon underscored by the emergence of Dieudonné, a former liberal music-hall humorist who has turned into an enormously popular French equivalent of Louis Farrakhan. Dieudonné, the son of a black Camerounese father and a white French mother, claims that Jews were the main European slave traders in the 17th and 18th centuries. He refers to civic and educational programs about the Holocaust as “memory pornography.” He has welcomed the electoral victory of Hamas in Palestine. According to the philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy, he is in moral terms “Le Pen’s son.”

Mr. Le Pen’s inner circle seems to have entertained such a strategy for quite a time. Back in 1999, Samuel Maréchal, one of Mr. Le Pen’s sons-inlaw, stated that France was becoming “a multiethnic and multireligious society,” and that “Islam was now France’s second religion.”

At the risk of being repetitious, the picture on the right is from The Command Post in November 2003.

It's a Belgian Nazi Propaganda Poster from 1944.

Well, a lot of things have changed in the intervening two and a half years. But this one would still not be out-of-place in many Leftist demonstrations these days in Europe.

Meanwhile, in Sweden, it's open season on the Jews, and increasingly, in the rest of Europe.

Again.

UPDATE :
Thanks to the author of Sweden and the Jews, who should know, being both Swedish and Jewish, this little item, from The Local : Sweden's News in English :

Five percent of Swedes are anti-Semitic, according to a report published on Tuesday.

'Anti-Semitic attitudes and perceptions', a joint project between the National Council for Crime Prevention and the Forum for Living History, was based on the responses of around 3,000 Swedes aged 16 to 75.

The results, which appeared in Dagens Nyheter, showed that 26% believe that there is a 'Jewish influence' over the world's economy, and 15% consider that influence to be 'too great'. It also emerged that 14% believe that Jews use the Holocaust for political or economic ends.

One out of four of those questioned said they were negative towards the idea of a Jewish prime minister.

"What has long been a problem is the fact that antisemitism has in many ways been denied or trivialised, or that the problem has been seen as peculiar to marginal right wing groups," said historian Henrik Bachner, one of the report's authors, to Swedish Radio.

"What we now see, clearer than ever, is that that is absolutely not the case - rather it's partly general prejudice."

5%? I'd say more like 25%. One in 4, if you look at the mythical Jewish World Bankers so popular with the Nazis.

It's worse than I thought.