Sweden: 'Sweden's biggest threat'

The headline for the article is "The Muslims are our greatest foreign threat", though this was probably thought up by Aftonbladet. The Local decided to headline its article "Islam 'Sweden's biggest threat': far-right leader". But Åkesson doesn't actually say either.

In his article Åkesson rejects the idea that Islam is similar to Christianity and points out that Muslim youth are radicalizing. The article ends as follows:

Twenty years ago, I think that most Sweden would have found it difficult to imagine that Islam would become Sweden's second largest religion, that Swedish artists who criticize or joke about Islam would live under constant death threats, that a dozen Muslim terror organizations would establish themselves in Sweden, that leading Muslim representatives would make demands about imposing Sharia laws in Sweden, that Swedish county councils would use taxpayer's money to circumsise fully healthy little boys, that Sweden would have the most rapes in Europe and that Muslim men would be highly over-represented among the perpetrators, that Swedish pools would introduce separate swimming times for men and women, that Swedish municipalities would consider introducing sex-segregated swimming classes in the schools, that the freezer sections in our grocery stores would offer ritually slaughtered meat while Swedish preschools would stop serving pork, that Swedish schools would introduce new vacations to celebrate the end of Ramadan while Church graduations would be banned in more and more schools and so forth.

All this is today a part of Swedish reality. The question is how it would look a few more decades from now, when the Muslim population, if the current pace continues, will multiply in size and many of Europe's major cities, including Malmö, would almost certainly have a Muslim majority.

The multicultural social elites might see this future as a colorful, interesting change for a Sweden and Europe, which all too often denies ever being 'Swedish' or 'European'.

As a Swedish Democrat I see this as our greatest foreign threat since WWII, and I promise to do everything in my power to change the trend when we go to the polls next year.

Read more here,,,,

Source: Islam in Europe

Jihadist lies about Israeli organ theft keep spreading

by Robert Spencer
Indeed -- they've even spread to me. An update on this story. "Anatomy of a Swedish Blood Libel: Allegations of Israeli organ theft are ugly, false, harmful--and they spread," by Andrea Levin in the Wall Street Journal, October 14

Allegations that Israel plunders and trafficks Palestinians' organs are ugly, false, and harmful to peace efforts. No less dangerous--such libels spread.

The Aug. 17 story by Donald Bostrom in Aftonbladet, Scandanavia's leading daily, has quickly metastasized to mainstream Muslim media, spawning cartoons of Jews stealing body parts and drinking Arab blood.

These have been published in Syria, Qatar, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman, to name a few.

In early September, Algeria's al-Khabar newspaper echoed Mr. Bostrom in a new fantasy claiming Jewish-directed gangs of Algerians and Moroccans round up Algerian children, spirit them into Morocco and thence to Israel to have their body parts harvested and sold. On Sept. 17, Iran's PressTV breathlessly declared "an international Jewish conspiracy to kidnap children and harvest their organs is gathering momentum."

Hate-filled Web sites have also taken up the theme. Almost invariably, wherever such permutations on the idea of Israeli organ theft appear, Aftonbladet is cited.

Of course, Mr. Bostrom has enjoyed newfound acclaim in some quarters for his article. As the fresh rumors of child-snatching and organ theft circulated in Algeria, the National Federation of Algerian Journalists welcomed him last month to bestow an award for excellence, and promised support for his work.

Meanwhile, editors at Aftonbladet have neither acknowledged nor corrected any of the factual errors that litter the article, and instead react with indignation to charges of misconduct.

In a perversion of journalistic standards, Editor-in-chief Jan Helin admitted on his own blog on Aug. 19 that Aftonbladet had no evidence for the incendiary charges against Israel. Nevertheless, according to another Aftonbladet editor cited in Israel's Ha'aretz newspaper on Aug. 20, Mr. Helin's publication "stands behind the demand for an international inquiry" into Israeli actions....

Hopeless dhimmis.

Source: JihadWatch

Swedish FM Backs Goldstone Report

by Maayana Miskin

Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt expressed support for the controversial Goldstone Report on Thursday.

The report, in which Israel is accused of war crimes in connection to the Cast Lead counterterror offensive, is an “independent” and “serious” investigation that should be taken seriously by the world, he told Swedish Radio.

Bildt also gave his backing to Goldstone on a personal level, praising the South African judge's “credibility” and “integrity.”

The report should be discussed in the United Nations Human Rights Council, Bildt said.

The UN Security Council said Wednesday that it would not hold an emergency session on the report, as requested by Libya, but would move up a monthly meeting on the Middle East to October 14 and allow the report to be discussed then.

Israel did not cooperate with Goldstone's investigation, fearing that the UN delegation was biased against Israel and would not accurately portray the Gaza conflict. Bildt described Israel's lack of cooperation as “a mistake.”

Israel Weighs Recalling Ambassador
Israeli officials, who have rejected the Goldstone report as biased and inaccurate, responded to Bildt's interview by accusing the Swedish FM of lacking “reading comprehension skills.” The report's bias is clear to anyone who reads it, they said.

On Thursday evening, the Hebrew-language daily Yediot Aharonot reported that Israel is considering recalling its ambassador to Sweden. “We have no interest in clashing with Sweden, but the time has come to reassess our relationship,” explained Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon.

Bildt Refused to Condemn Blood Libel
Bildt last clashed with Israel's Foreign Ministry less than two months ago, when he refused to condemn an article in the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet that accused Israeli soldiers of shooting Arabs and harvesting their organs. Israeli officials slammed the article as a modern-day blood libel.

At the time, Bildt argued that criticizing the article would deal a blow to freedom of speech and freedom of the press.

Source: INN

Swedish "Report" Harms Palestinians, Journalists

By Khaled Abu Toameh

The article in the Swedish tabloid that suggested that Israel has been killing Palestinians to harvest their organs has caused huge damage to the Palestinians’ cause and the profession of journalism.

If the tabloid’s goal was to help the Palestinians, then it is clear that the article has had a boomerang effect.

As one Palestinian journalist put it, “This is a nice story, but it’s harmful to the Palestinians because it’s not based on any evidence. Who’s going to believe us the next time we cry ‘Wolf!’”

The “investigative report,” which is based on a rumor that has been circulating among Palestinians for many years, makes it more difficult for Palestinians to market their perspectives and views to the world.

The journalist who wrote the report has since admitted that he does not have any proof to back up his allegations.

Even the family at the center of the article, the Ghanems from the village of Imattin in the West Bank, say that they do not recall that they had ever complained to a Swedish journalist that the organs of their son, Bilal, had been removed after his death. Read more ...

Source: Hudson NYAftonbladet
Latest recipient of the Yellow Rag Award

Bildt cancels Israel trip amid tensions between nations

Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt has cancelled a planned trip to Israel this Friday, against the background of Israeli anger at the Swedish government's refusal to condemn an article in a Swedish newspaper accusing IDF soldiers of killing Palestinians and harvesting their organs.

While Swedish officials told The Jerusalem Post late last week that the visit was in doubt, Israeli diplomatic officials said Saturday night that the visit had definitely been cancelled.

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu was considering not meeting Bildt unless he condemned the article in the tabloid Aftonbladet, something the Swedish government - citing freedom of the press - had adamantly refused to do.

Netanyahu gave vent to Israel's disappointment over the matter during a meeting last week in Jerusalem with visiting EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana.

During that meeting, Netanyahu said that no one was expecting the Swedes to restrict freedom of the press, but that it was reasonable to expect the government to speak out against the type of defamation that in the past had led to the mass murder of Jews.

Sweden currently holds the rotating presidency of the EU, and Bildt's failure to visit here will have an impact on the country's ability during its term as president to have any real say on the diplomatic process.

Ironically, while the Swedes continued to refuse to condemn the article, Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Moratinos said Saturday in Stockholm that he regretted the Spanish newspaper El Mundo's decision to run an interview Saturday with Holocaust denier David Irving as part of a retrospective on the start of World War II 70 years ago.

"The foreign minister, while maintaining the most absolute respect for freedom of expression, regrets that space was given to a historian who denies one of the biggest tragedies for humanity in modern history," a spokesman for Moratinos said. "These types of statements deeply hurt the Jewish people."

Read more here,,,,

Source: JPost

Test case looms for Europe’s stance on anti-Semitism as EU foreign ministers are pushed into statement on Swedish bigotry scandal

The recent eruption of anti-Semitic bigotry in Sweden, amid lurid allegations published in the country’s top selling newspaper about Israeli soldiers conspiring with American Jews in harvesting the organs of Palestinian children, has now been pushed to the top of the European agenda.

According to a report in Israel’s Haaretz newspaper today, Italian foreign minister Franco Frattini has brokered an agreement with his Swedish counterpart Carl Bildt that a statement will be issued condemning anti-Semitism at a European Union foreign ministers meeting later this week.

However, given the Swedish government’s dissembling on the affair what matters now is whether the statement is as clear and unambiguous as Frattini would like it to be or whether it will be watered down. Frattini told Haaretz that the allegations in Aftonbladet were: “terrible conclusions, lying and hurtful, and they have the power to assist all those who seek to incite against Jews or who oppose the existence of the State of Israel.” Sweden, by contrast, has adamantly refused to condemn the allegations.

The issue arises following allegations in the Aftonbladet newspaper that Israeli soldiers routinely kill Palestinian children to cut out their bodily organs and sell them on the international black market.

The reporter of the story himself admitted that he had “no clue” whether the allegations were true, as has the Palestinian source of the allegations, suggesting that the editorial team at Aftonbladet had simply ignored basic journalistic standards in order to smear the Jewish state in a manner reminiscent of medieval blood libels.

The affair has sparked a major diplomatic row between Sweden, the current holder of the EU’s rotating presidency, and Israel. The Israeli foreign mininstry said it would be watching how the EU handles the situation closely.

Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor was quoted by Haaretz as saying: “Every initiative against anti-Semitism is welcome… But if the declaration is general and does not specifically relate to the article in Aftonbladet, it will not resolve anything.”

To read the full article, click here:

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1111229.html

Source: Robin Shepherd

Palestinian family: We never told 'Aftonbladet' organs were taken

Aftonbladet editor Jan Helin

By Khaled Abu Toameh

The family and relatives of Bilal Ahmed Ghanem, the Palestinian at the center of the organ-theft story in the Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet, said on Monday that they didn't know if the accusations were true or not.

The family lives in the tiny village of Imatin in the northern West Bank. Ghanem, 19, was killed by IDF soldiers during the first intifada on May 13, 1992.

He was a Fatah activist who was wanted by the IDF for his involvement in violence.

His mother, Sadeeka, said he was shot by an IDF sniper as he walked out of his home. "The bullets hit him directly in the heart," she said.

Ghanem's younger brother, Jalal, said he could not confirm the allegations made by the Swedish newspaper that his brother's organs had been stolen.

"I don't know if this is true," he said. "We don't have any evidence to support this."

Jalal said his brother was evacuated by the IDF in a helicopter and delivered to the family only a few days later.

The mother denied that she had told any foreign journalist that her son's organs had been stolen.

However, she said that now she does not rule out the possibility that Israel was harvesting organs of Palestinians.

Jalal and two cousins who claimed that they saw the body said the young man's teeth were missing. They also said they saw stitches that ran from the chest down to the bottom of the stomach. Read more here ...

Source: JPost

Jan Helin
Aftonbladet
Latest recipients of the Yellow Rag Award

Israel hits back over Swedish organ harvesting article

JERUSALEM (CNN) - Israel on Sunday withheld the press credentials of a Swedish newspaper in retaliation for a controversial piece that suggested the Israeli army kidnapped and killed young Palestinians to harvest their organs.

The journalists need the credentials to report from Gaza.

"We have no duty to supply them with press cards immediately; (we) have 90 days to decide about their status," said Danny Siman, the head of the government press office.

The article, "Our sons are being stripped of their organs," appeared Tuesday in Aftonbladet and was an opinion piece written by freelance journalist Donald Bostrom.

Bostrom told CNN he had no proof that Israeli soldiers were stealing organs, and that the purpose of his piece was to call for an investigation into numerous claims in the 1990s that such activity was going on in the West Bank and Gaza.

Even though the Swedish embassy distanced itself from the report, the country's foreign ministry refused to condemn it -- saying Sweden has a "free press."

The refusal has rankled Israel, which said it will submit an official complaint.

"This is an anti-Semitic blood libel against the Jewish people and the Jewish state. The Swedish government cannot remain apathetic," said Israel's Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz.

"We know the origins of these claims. In medieval times, there were claims that the Jews use the blood of Christians to bake their Matzas for Passover. The modern version now is that the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) soldiers use organs of Palestinians to make money."

He continued: "It makes no difference whether this comes from a neo-Nazi organization or from an honorable newspaper. The Swedish government must renounce itself from this anti-Semitic publication."

The article centers around the case of Bilal Ahmed Ghanem, a 19-year-old Palestinian man who was shot and killed in 1992, allegedly by Israeli forces, in the West Bank village of Imatin.

Bostrom, who witnessed the man's killing, said Ghanem was taken away by Israeli forces while he was still mortally wounded. His body was returned five days later with a cut in his midsection that had been stitched up.

Ghanem's family said they believed that his organs had been removed.

After that incident, at least 20 Palestinian families told Bostrom that they suspected the Israeli military had taken the organs of their sons after they had been killed by Israeli forces and their bodies taken away -- presumably for routine autopsies.

Bostrom said he balanced those claims in his article by including a reaction from an Israeli military spokesman who told him that the Israel Defense Forces routinely carries out autopsies on Palestinians killed by their troops.

But, as he stated in his article, Bostrom said he has doubts about the necessity of the procedures if it is clear how the person died.

Last week Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman compared the Swedish Foreign Ministry's hands-off position to the country's neutrality during World War II.

"It's a shame that the Swedish Foreign Ministry fails to intervene in a case of blood libels against Jews," Lieberman told Sweden's ambassador to Israel on Thursday evening. "This is reminiscent of Sweden's stand during World War II, when [it] had failed to intervene as well."

Source: CNN

Donald Bostrom
Aftonbladet
Latest recipients of The Goebbels-Warner Award

Outrage: IDF Accused of "Harvesting Palestinian Organs"

A Swedish newspaper publishes disgraceful accusations.

Charging a mainstream media outlet with anti-Semitism is not something that we do lightly. Sometimes, however, an article appears that is so outrageous that we have to question the motivation or agenda behind the writer and the media that chooses to publish it.

Ha'aretz reports:

A leading Swedish newspaper reported this week that Israeli soldiers are abducting Palestinians in order to steal their organs, a claim that prompted furious condemnation and accusations of anti-Semitic blood libel from a rival publication.

"They plunder the organs of our sons," read the headline in Sweden's largest daily newspaper, the left-leaning Aftonbladet, which devoted a double spread in its cultural section to the article.

(Click here for the original article in Swedish)

The report quotes Palestinian claims that young men from the West Bank and Gaza Strip had been seized by the Israel Defense Forces, and their bodies returned to the families with missing organs.

"'Our sons are used as involuntary organ donors,' relatives of Khaled from Nablus said to me, as did the mother of Raed from Jenin as well as the uncles of Machmod and Nafes from Gaza, who all had disappeared for a few days and returned by night, dead and autopsied," writes author Donald Boström in his report.

Boström's article makes a link to the recent exposure of an alleged crime syndicate in New Jersey. The syndicate includes several American rabbis, and one Levy Izhak Rosenbaum, who faces charges of conspiring to broker the sale of a human kidney for a transplant. ...

But the liberal Sydsvenskan - southern Sweden's major daily - had harsh criticism for the rival paper, running an opinion piece under the headline "Antisemitbladet" (a play on the name Aftonbladet).

"We have heard the story before, in one form or the other. It follows the traditional pattern of conspiracy theory: a great number of loose threads that the theorist tempts the reader to tie into a neat knot without having been provided with any proven connection whatsoever," writes leading columnist Mats Skogkär of Sydsvenskan.

"Whispers in the dark. Anonymous sources. Rumors. That is all it takes. After all we all know what they [the Jews] are like, don't we: inhuman, hardened. Capable of anything," the opinion piece says. "Now all that remains is the defense, equally predictable: 'Anti-Semitism' No, no, just criticism of Israel."

Read full coverage of this story in Ha'aretz.

This latest blood libel joins an all too long list of false charges and accusations against Israel and the IDF and would not look out of place on a neo-Nazi website or the pages of the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

While this article may have been published in Swedish, previous experience shows that even such outlandish stories take on a life of their own as translations appear on the Internet preserved for Israel's enemies to dig up in the battle to delegitimize and demonize the Jewish state.

Even though credible rebuttals may appear, as was the case with the Jenin "massacre" and The Independent's "secret uranium bombs" (see HonestReporting's Big Lies interactive resource), these stories continue to fester online and, sadly, it is likely to be the case with Aftonbladet's disgraceful article.

Source: Honest Reporting

Aftonbladet
Latest recipient of the Yellow Rag Award