Swedish Blood Libel Update

There seem to be developments in the Swedish Blood Libel story almost every day. I originally posted about it a couple of weeks ago here (and updated that twice), then posted another new development yesterday here.

The latest news now is that the newspaper Aftonbladet has been officially reported to the Swedish Chancellor of Justice Goran Lambertz, who is the only prosecutor with the power to take legal action in cases concerning freedom of speech and the press. The written request asks the Chancellor to consider whether the article constitutes racial agitation, which in Sweden is defined as a crime involving the public dissemination of statements which threaten or express contempt for one or more identified ethnic groups.

Sweden’s The Local reports on this news and the Aftonbladet‘s response to it:

“Is that true? I am perplexed,” Åsa Linderborg, Aftonbladet’s culture editor, said after being informed by the The Local of the report on Tuesday.

“I think it is a shame that whenever solidarity is shown for the Palestinians and criticism is directed again Israel, someone cries anti-Semitism.”

“One has to have the right to ask questions”…

First of all, there is a world of a difference between “asking questions” and publishing a two-page spread accusing a country of systematic organ trafficking as a matter of government policy, covert or otherwise.

More importantly, the fact that the article in question took advantage of the recent story of an American rabbi indicted for selling a kidney as some sort of “proof” of the Palestinian claims belies her supposed innocent intentions. After all, if she is just directing this against “Israel” and not necessarily “Jews”, then what does an American rabbi have to do with the IDF?  That obviously would provide no proof or relevance at all… unless she is playing the Jewish card.

Her shameless lies are so transparent, and it’s really sickening that the state of anti-Semitism in the world today is actually so bad that she knows she can tell bald-faced lies like that and fully expect to be believed by most people because she knows that she’ll get that wink-and-a-smile from them.

To paraphrase a popular slogan: anti-Zionism is racism.

This is perfect proof of that: someone hiding behind the old “anti-Israel, not anti-Semite” line, while pulling in American rabbis, basing entire stories on the hearsay of notoriously untrustworthy Palestinians, etc.

Nils Funcke, one of Sweden’s leading experts on legislation pertaining to freedom of speech, said he expected the Chancellor of Justice to reject the case.

“The article can hardly be construed as racial agitation. There is no ethnic group targeted; the article focuses on the Israeli army, and Israel is not made up solely of Jews,” Funcke told The Local.

Even had the article concentrated on a single ethnic group, Funcke did not believe it would be considered “agitation” under the law.

“It was more a description of events and certainly did not agitate against a particular group.”

How can it be called a “description of events” when none of it was substantiated and it was all based on hearsay and conjecture on the part of the newspapers employees themselves?

That would be like me saying “every black (or non-Scandinavian) girl in Sweden is systematically raped by a covert agency of the Swedish government at least once before her 8th birthday“… and then calling it a “description of events” just because I thought it was a good, provocative story that would “raise questions”, even though all of the “events” are unfounded and made up. Same thing.

As popular Israeli journalist Ayala Hasson told Army Radio, reported by Arutz 7: “Freedom of the press means that one may comment as one sees fit – but it does not give license to report made-up ‘facts.’”

In another crazy development, the Jerusalem Post has interviewed the very family mentioned in the Aftonbladet article, and they themselves dubiously contradict the assertive statements attributed to them in the original article!

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.”

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

Jalal said that he and other villagers recall that a Swedish photographer was in the village during the funeral and that he managed to take a number of pictures of the body before the funeral. “That was the only time we saw this photographer,” he recounted.

Ibrahim Ghanem, a relative of Bilal, said that the family never told the Swedish photographer that Israel had stolen organs from the dead man’s body.

“Maybe the journalist reached that conclusion on the basis of the stitches he saw on the body,” he said. “But as far as the family is concerned, we don’t know if organs were removed from the body because we never performed our own autopsy. All we know is that Bilal’s teeth were missing.”

Interestingly, The Local writes about the Aftonbladet’s response to this development as follows:

Åsa Linderborg told The Local on Tuesday that Donald Boström is responsible for his own sources but added that staff from Aftonbladet had met the family concerned over the weekend and, she claims, had gained confirmation of the allegations.

So, now, obviously someone is lying. Either the Swedish newspaper or the Palestinian family. Despite the abundant anti-Semitism in Sweden, it still gets trumped by the even-more robust Palestinian history of bald-faced lies. So, if I had to pick out the liar, I’d bet on the Palestinian family.

One last issue I want to address: I’ve seen many blogs and commentators reference the Mohammed cartoons in Sweden’s recent journalistic history as a comparison, as in: “the Swedish government bent over backwards to accommodate Muslims during the cartoon controversy, so why do they keep toeing the ‘we-don’t-get-involved-in-matters-of-the-press’ line now?”

For example, The Local describes the Swedish government response now as:

In response to pressure from the Israeli government to condemn the newspaper Sweden’s prime minister Fredrik Reinfeldt, and foreign minister Carl Bildt, have emphasized that it is not the government’s role to comment on the content of newspapers.

I’ll withhold judgment of the Swedish government’s response until after Lambertz’s inquiry. But, until then, I have to say that, granted, Reinfeldt did ultimately go a bit further in setting up meetings with Muslim leaders to calm them down, but even then he still stressed the same sentiments he is stressing now, as reported at the time by the AFP:

Sweden’s prime minister and envoys from 22 Muslim nations held talks Friday that both sides termed as constructive to defuse a row over a newspaper cartoon depicting Prophet Mohammed as a dog…

Reinfeldt said the talks were “a dialogue” between both sides, but warned it was too early to tell whether Muslim anger had been quelled.

“I told them Sweden is an open country and an open society. Muslims and Christians live side by side in mutual understanding for each other and we care very much for this model of living,” he said.

“I described the Swedish constitution, which does not permit politicians to interfere with how the media (works) and what it chooses to publish,” he said.

So, I wouldn’t be too quick to reference the Mohammed cartoon controversy as evidence of any major Swedish government departure from their normal policies.

However, there are other reasons for criticizing the Swedish government. Namely, the fact that the Swedish government actually funded these allegations! As Arutz 7 reports:

Antagonism between Israel and Sweden over Swedish media accusation that IDF soldiers sold Arab body parts is heating up, in light of evidence that Sweden’s government funded the “research” for the story. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is expected to demand a Swedish government condemnation of the accusations.

News of the funding was broken Sunday morning by Maariv/NRG. Maariv’s correspondent in Sweden, Liran Lotker, reports that most of the material in last week’s controversial article is old, having appeared in a book written in 2001 by the author of the article. The book, entitled Inshallah, was funded by various bodies, including the Foreign Ministry of Sweden, Swedish labor unions, and some organizations based in the Palestinian Authority-controlled areas.

So, skip the cartoon comparisons and focus on the other apparent hypocrisy here, where the Swedish government claims “hands-off policy” with regard to this story, yet their own Foreign Ministry put up some of the money to plant the seeds for these rumors 8 years ago.

Tags: Blood libel, Israel, Israel Defense Forces, Palestinians, Sweden

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 25th, 2009 and is filed under Featured, Politics, Religion, World Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.