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Malmö Sweden Tag

Malmö, Sweden, is in the news again, and a lot of people are paying attention, because of chants of "Shoot the Jews" at protests against American recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital. Along with the firebombing of a synagogue in Göteborg, and chants of “Jews, remember Khaybar, the army of Muhammad is returning” in Malmö, Berlin and London, there is shock at the rise of Islamist-driven anti-Semitism in European cities.

Antisemitic demonstrations erupted over the weekend in major European cities, with Muslim groups staging violent and angry protests under the pretext of the US decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. A gang of 20 masked-men fire-bombed a synagogue late Saturday in the Swedish city of Goteborg. The assailants threw several molotov cocktails at the synagogue while a youth event was underway. Jewish children were forced to take shelter in a cellar during the attack, German broadcaster DW News reported.

Professor Jacobson has written about what's happening in Sweden many times over the years. He recently wrote a detailed post about the liberal narrative vs. the reality in which he concluded Malmo was the warning. Last night on the Tucker Carlson show, Daily Mail reporter Katie Hopkins described a recent visit to Sweden which confirmed that many women live in fear. Here's an excerpt of her recent article in the Daily Mail:
Where females fear to tread: KATIE HOPKINS reports from Sweden, the Scandi-lib paradise where terrified women have vanished from the streets and a conspiracy of silence and self-censorship on immigration buries the truth I didn't come to Sweden for the riots. Or because of Trump. In fact, I was supposed to be here in December — before airline strikes stood in my way. I came because I was asked. Repeatedly.

Donald Trump's offhanded comment about immigration problems in Sweden was met with two reactions. First, deception. Much of the media and many political opponents invented the fake claim that Trump referred to a terror incident that happened the night before. It was a lie, as the transcript showed, NBC Falsely Suggests Trump Talked of ‘Terror Incident’ in Sweden. While Trump may not have used the most clear language, he clearly didn't mention either specifically or in general a terror incident happening the night before. I understood what he was referring to when he mentioned something last night -- it was a Fox News report on a video about immigration problems in Sweden. Second, Trump was attacked, including by the Swedish government, for relying on a video report that allegedly exaggerated the problems. As we reported, the filmmaker stood by his video, Filmmaker Confirms Numbers on Refugees And Crime in Sweden. Here is the original video, which featured Swedish Jewish reporter Annika Hernroth-Rothstein:

Huffington Post hates Donald Trump. Af first, it refused to cover his primary campaign in the Politics section, putting coverage instead in the Entertainment section. Of course, the joke was on HuffPo, since that move proved it wasn't a serious news organization. Then, HuffPo added a "disclaimer" to the end of each column about Trump: "Note to our readers: Donald Trump is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, birther and bully who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims -- 1.6 billion members of an entire religion -- from entering the U.S.” That didn't stop Trump from winning the presidency. How far will HuffPo go to hurt Trump? Far enough to delete a post that credited Trump with being right in his comments about Sweden having problems due to mass immigration and migration.

Trump was chided for his remarks on the immigrant problems in Sweden. Just days after his comments, violent riots erupted in Stockholm's immigrant-filled suburbs, forcing law enforcement officers to open fire.

On March 1, 2016, the Australian Broadcast Corp. reported that a '60 Minutes' crew from Australian was attacked while interviewing migrants in Sweden:
Masked men attack 60 Minutes crew in Sweden Veteran reporter Liz Hayes and a small Australian crew were travelling through the Rinkeby district of Västerort, Stockholm, one of the poorer neighbourhoods in which 89.1 per cent are first or second generation migrants, when a group of unnamed assailants turned on the television crew. Channel Nine last night confirmed early reports out of Stockholm that the group was confronted by a group of locals, some reportedly masked, who had objections to 60 Minutes filming in the region. “Liz Hayes and a 60 Minutes crew are currently on assignment in Europe where they are reporting a story about the migrant crisis,” a Nine spokesman said. “In a suburb of Stockholm yesterday (Monday) they were confronted by a group who objected to them filming. There was a series of scuffles and the police were called.”

James Traub writes in Foreign Policy on the situation facing Sweden in its attempt to absorb the recent wave of Syrian/Iraqi/Afghan newcomers. At the outset of the article, the author may seem to be leaning towards blaming Europe for not being more magnanimous, and to be making a false analogy to WWII refugees---who may indeed have been from other countries, but who nevertheless were part of the same basic Judeo-Christian culture as the Swedes and held pretty much the same values. But that's actually not at all the direction in which the article ultimately goes, nor is it the way a lot of people in Sweden seem to be going at this point. And the trend may continue. But it's hard to talk about it in Sweden:
Diana Janse, a former diplomat and now the senior foreign policy advisor to the Moderate Party (which Swedes view as “conservative”), pointed out to me that some recent generations of Swedish refugees, including Somalis, had been notably unsuccessful joining the job market. How, she wondered, will the 10,000-20,000 young Afghan men who had entered Sweden as “unaccompanied minors” fare? How would they behave in the virtual absence of young Afghan women? But she could barely raise these questions in political debate. “We have this expression in Swedish, asiktskorridor,” she said. “It means ‘opinion corridor’ — the views you can’t move outside of.” Merely to ask whether Sweden could integrate Afghans today as it had Bosnians two decades before was to risk accusations of racism.

Something maddening is happening in the European and Nordic countries which have opened their doors to millions of refugees from Muslim countries. Women of the host countries were sexually assaulted in numerous cities during holiday celebrations by refugees and it's being ignored in some cases and even covered up in others. In Sweden, these attacks have allegedly been going on for months. The Times of Israel reports:
Swedish police take flak for covering up refugee sex attacks Swedish police were criticized on Monday after admitting they failed to release information about alleged sexual assaults against women by young immigrants at a Stockholm summer music festival over the past two years. There were 38 reports of rape and sexual assault filed after the We Are Sthlm festival, which uses the postal abbreviation for Stockholm, in 2014 and 2015, according to police.

The news of the week is that Sweden faces "collapse" from the unrestricted flow of migrants, as the Swedish foreign minister Margot Wallström recently acknowledged in an interview:
“I have to admit that there have been moments recently of very great disappointment. I have heard statements from member states that have been completely astonishing and very discouraging,” Wallström said in the interview which was published on Friday morning. An unprecedented number of people are expected to seek asylum in the Nordic nation in 2015 and while Prime Minister Stefan Löfven has widely praised his country's response to the crisis he has said that Sweden is "approaching the limit" of its reception capacity. “I think most people feel that we cannot maintain a system where perhaps 190,000 people will arrive every year – in the long run, our system will collapse. And that welcome is not going to receive popular support,” said Wallström, echoing her Social Democrat colleague's comments.
In Malmö, Sweden's third largest city, that migrant crisis resulted in a Roma shanty town that was just torn down by police. For the Jews of Sweden, and Malmö in particular, the collapse came many years ago, long before the current migration crisis.

This is the third in our series revisiting our coverage of the 2014 Gaza conflict. In the first post, we reported how the war did not start the way the anti-Israel propagandists content, with an Israeli attack in retaliation for the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teens by a Hamas-affiliated cell in the West Bank. To the contrary, the kidnapping resulted in an Israeli crackdown in the West Bank, but it was relentless Hamas rocket fire from Gaza into Israel that precipitated Israeli air attacks on Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza, Gaza July 8, 2014 – Hamas Rockets Ignite War. Having debunked (again) the myth that Israel started the Gaza conflict, we debunked another myth, that the thousands of deaths and injuries were the result of Israel's desire to assault Gaza. In fact, after the first week of air attacks and Hamas rocket fire and infiltrations, Egypt proposed a ceasefire. Had both sides accepted that ceasefire, there would have been no Israeli ground invasion, and the deaths and casualties a small fraction of the ultimate total. Israel accepted the ceasefire, Hamas rejected it. The result was more Hamas rocket fire, and an Israeli ground invasion. Gaza July 18, 2014 – Ground War After Hamas Rejects Ceasefire. Now another myth busted -- that protests in Europe and elsewhere were merely anti-Zionist, not anti-Semitic, and in any event, isolated. In fact, virtually everywhere there was a major "pro-Palestinian" rally, there was blatant anti-Semitism accompanied by threats and violence. And not just overseas. In Miami, Boston and San Francisco as well. Here are the events we covered. It's not an exhaustive list, by any means.

Marie Brenner, writing in Vanity Fair, explores whether Jews should leave France. The French language version of the article is titled Paris En Flammes. With my distant recollection of high school french, that translates as Paris in Flames. But the English language version has a more descriptive title, The Troubling Question in the French Jewish Community: Is It Time to Leave?:
How can anyone be allowed to paint a swastika on the statue of Marianne, the goddess of French liberty, in the very center of the Place de la République?” That was what the chairman of one of France’s most celebrated luxury brands was thinking last July, when a tall man in a black shirt and a kaffiyeh leapt to the ledge of Marianne’s pedestal and scrawled a black swastika. All around him, thousands of angry demonstrators were swarming the square with fake rockets, Palestinian and Hamas flags, even the black-and-white banners of ISIS. Here, barely a mile and a half from the Galeries Lafayette, the heart of bourgeois Paris, the chants: “MORT AUX JUIFS! MORT AUX JUIFS!” Death to the Jews. It was Saturday, July 26, 2014, and a pro-Palestinian demonstration turned into a day of terror in one of the most fashionable neighborhoods of the city.
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=e7b_1420820113 We covered those riots last summer (some of the videos in the posts have gone bad):

Is this officially a series now? We've done Paris, Britain, Copenhagen and Malmö, where people walking the street dressed in attire indicating they are religious Jews face street harassment, mostly by Muslim young men. We also did Montevideo, where the reaction was positive. Here's Cairo, as the Jerusalem Post reports:
An Egyptian journalist conducted an experiment in which he dressed up as a Jew and asked passersby on the streets of Cairo for directions to a nearby synagogue - with nearly serious consequences for his physical safety. The Cairo-based Internet news site DOTMSR sent the journalist to the streets of Cairo dressed in overtly Hassidic garb - sidecurls, skullcap, beard, and a hat. The “Jewish” journalist was then subjected to threats of violence, epithets, slurs, and shoving from hostile locals.... DOTMSR is an Arab-language Internet news site “that broadcasts high-quality news items in Arabic.” It describes itself as a news outlet that “believes in openness, innovation, and an obligation to accepting those who are different.”

We've featured many videos of the street harassment that accompanies Walking While Jewish in many European cities, including Paris, Copenhagen, Malmö and parts of Britain. So here is a change of pace. Chabad, the Lubavitch Orthodox Jewish organization, has emissaries and houses on campuses and locations around the world. It is not a proselytizing group. It doesn't seek to convert anyone, focusing instead on bringing Judaism to Jews.
"Everything in this world was created for a divine purpose. All forms of modern technology can and should be harnessed to make the world a better place and, in the case of Jews, to spread Judaism in the widest possible manner." as quoted in The New York Times "No Jew should ever be lost to the Jewish people, no Jew must ever be lonely." as quoted in The Jewish Week
The campus Chabads are particularly fantastic, in my experience. Non-judgmental, welcoming, and enthusiastic (that's an understatement). Major shout out to the folks at Cornell Chabad and the recently opened Chabad of Clinton (NY), servicing my alma mater, Hamilton College. Chabad produced a video of one of its Rabbis spending 10 hours walking through Montevideo, Uruguay.