Tell the Swedish Government to Condemn The Blood Libel

The left-wing Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet published an article on August 17 by reporter Donald Bostrom alleging that Israeli soldiers were kidnapping and killing Palestinians in order to harvest organs to be used for transplanation. As documented in the Jerusalem Post, Bostrom freely admits that he has no evidence whatsoever to back up this blood libel, but indicted that it is up to Israelis to prove innocence in this matter. When the Swedish Ambassador to Israel rightfully condemned this hate speech hiding behind the curtain of "free speech", she was condemned back home in Sweden where some members of the government urged her recall.

This is not an isolated incident, but part of an insidious pattern of Swedish funding of anti-Semitism. As the Post article also noted, "Much of the material in Boström's article came from a book he published in 2001 Inshallah which was jointly financed by the Swedish Foreign Ministry and various other government-backed organizations." David Frankfurter reported on a 2004 government-funded conference in Sweden by radical pro-Palestinian groups with the aim of promoting "armed struggle" (eg the mass murder of women and children in buses and restaurants) and a total boycott against Israel. NGO Monitor issued a comprehensive report in June 2009 detailing the history of Swedish official support for NGO's that demonize Israel with the inflammatory rhetoric of “apartheid,” “ethnic cleansing,” and “massacres.”

However, the government of Sweden has refused to issue any criticism of Aftonbladet or Bostrom; one shouldn't be surprised, given that they have been funding this sort of propaganda directly! Fortunately, not all Swedes agree with their government's decision to support, in their name and with their tax dollars, the Palestinian rejectionist movement and the various lies that it continues to spread about Israel and Jews.

It is time now for Israel's supporters around the world to let the government of Sweden know that we are demanding the barest minimum of decency, which is an official condemnation of this pseudo-journalistic hate crime. Enough is enough.

In San Francisco, the Swedish Consulate can be reached at (415) 788-2631 and sf@consulateofsweden.org. A list of consulates in other cities in the US can be found here.