Originally Posted by signatory
There is not enough popcorn in the world for such an event.
Who, the hell, gave to a private bank the right to be a judge in a territorial dispute between some other counties? Is it the bank's busines to decide what land is Israel and what land is non-Israel? And according to this decision to press its partners to break ties with others?
And yes, it is very on topic.
Pblications of this sort, the scandal around tennis match, behavior of this bank, theese are the links of the same chain.
Before trying to find a rationale in somebody's behavior, try to do it with yourself.
Can you give a rationale explanation of this swedish campaign of hostility toward Israel?
People can claim that this paper is not taken seriously, but when it is highly circulated a lot must like its content and political slant. Combine that with anti-Israel atmosphere in that country's media to begin with, I wouldn't dismiss such outrageous articles all together and just be silent about them. I'm sure you'll find enough Swedes who would give benefit of the doubt to such reports if all they get is hostile news on Israel/IDF v. Palestinians.
Having lived through a revolution in Romania and following five years in Egypt, I rejoiced when my husband Zvi was named ambassador to Sweden.
Indeed, I looked forward to what was to be our last posting in a friendly Western country. This time we would not be isolated, I thought; there would be glittering functions, invitations to Royal events, and we would bask in a friendly atmosphere.
Ah, well. It did not quite happen that way. This was the time of the second Intifada and nobody - nobody - loved us.
Thus, for instance, when a massive demonstration was held against the United States before its 2003 invasion of Iraq, people marched by the tens of thousands under our window on their way to the US Embassy. Among the many banners prominently displayed, one was particularly striking: "Bomb Tel Aviv, not Baghdad," it said in bold black letters.
A FEW WEEKS later, the University of Stockholm Student Union decided to hold a "Palestine Day" which was to end with a debate to which the Israeli ambassador was invited.
Zvi gave a nice diplomatic speech about the need for compromise and reconciliation which was met with silence. Then the Palestinian representative took the floor and launched into a diatribe about the savage Israeli soldiers: "When they spy a pregnant Palestinian woman these beasts start betting on whether it's a boy or a girl and then CUT OPEN THE WOMAN to know who won. Furthermore", he went on, "no young Palestinian woman is safe from them. If she is pretty, they will strip her naked and force her to walk through the streets of Jerusalem."
I can still remember the shock I felt. We were after all in the auditorium of a university in a modern Western country, not in Ramallah or in Teheran.
The audience duly hissed and booed the hated Israelis. And why not? We were daily pilloried in the press. But it got worse. Soon enough some of this hatred turned to the Jewish community. In October 2003, one Jan Samuelsson, a so-called expert on religion and religious history published an article in one of the leading dailies - Dagens Nyheter, a morning paper with a circulation that equals that of Aftonbladet - explaining that it was legitimate to hate Jews as long as Israel occupied Arab territories.
Here are some choice quotations out of that article: "Muslim hatred of Jews is justified", "hatred of Jews is primarily a modern phenomenon sparked by the violations that the State of Israel commits against Arabs in the Middle East." Incidentally, the Israeli Embassy protested, but guess what? The sanctity of the freedom of the press prevailed and nothing was done.
Swedish Jews were quick to understand the message. Hillelskolan, the Jewish school, received police protection and its pupils were advised to take off their head coverings and Stars of David when they left the premises. Their parents got the same advice. To this day, religious envoys from Israel are told to wear a hat, not a kippa.
TO BE SURE, some of this can be attributed to the sizable Muslim community living in Sweden today - some 500,000 out of a total of nine million.
In Stockholm, elderly Jews, most of them Holocaust survivors, were invited every Friday to an "Oneg Shabat" in the community building. I had participated a few times and went there in early March 2004 to say goodbye. A very old man with a strong Polish accent took a newspaper from his pocket. "It says there," he told me, "that in the great mosque of Stockholm they give out leaflets and cassettes calling to get rid of the Jews, sons of pigs and monkeys. It also says that a government spokesman declared there was no ground for intervention. What do you say about that?"
There was not much I could say.
Once again the embassy protested; once again the hallowed mantle of the sanctity of freedom of speech had been thrown over what can only be described as blatant anti-Semitism. It was left to another elderly woman to put in words the fear they all felt: "You may be too young to remember, but this is how it started in Germany." I hastened to point out that the situation was completely different inasmuch as the Swedish government would protect its citizens and was indeed committed to fighting anti-Semitism. Hadn't the then Prime Minister Goran Persson convened not one, but three international seminars on the issue of the Holocaust?
I am not sure they believed me.
A scant month before, that same Swedish government had paid for the now-infamous exhibit glorifying the Palestinian woman who had blown herself up among the lunch crowd of a busy Haifa restaurant in October 2003, killing 21 people. This "work of art" showing a photo of her made-up, smiling up face floating on a sea of red water made to look like blood had been chosen for the official opening ceremony of the new international seminar, dedicated to the worthy cause of "preventing genocide."
And when the Israeli ambassador, having vainly protested, took matters in his own hands and hurled the spotlights illuminating that monstrosity into the water, all three leading newspapers protested this intolerable attack on the freedom of art and artistic expression.
The following day the exhibit was restored in all its glory.
When a year later Muslims protested against a painting in a Gothenburg museum they found insulting, they did it with far greater efficiency. An anonymous letter spelled what would happen to the wife and the children of the curator if the painting was not removed forthwith.
This was promptly done.
The writer is the wife of former ambassador Zvi Mazel. She is the author of Ambassador's Wife published in 2002, a personal account of the eight years she spent in Cairo with her husband.
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satelli...cle%2FShowFull
^Eye opening article(or not so..).
Thank you JJC.
Its only when the hooligans start raging, then its OK to bend the law.
Again, 'freedom of speech' my ass.
- Dagens Nyheter as well as the majority of media in Sweden is in the control of the Bonnier family who are Jews. Aftonbladet is owned by a Norwegian company called Schibsted ASA.
- The art exhibit with the suicide bomber theme that the Israeli ambassador crashed was in fact the work of an Israeli (I wonder why they didn't mention that in the article?).
- It was certainly not right of the Curator of Gothenburg Museum to take down that painting. He should have gotten support from his superiors and the police, but I think it's understandable that he didn't want to make his family martyrs.
How should this be interpreted? A Jew owns some paper thus the anti-Jewish message is o.k. or tolerable? The artist was some left wing Israeli thus it was fine for Swedish government to pay for the exhibit? Sounds like a good tactic for defense but it doesn't fly.
I suggest Israel invade Sweden
LOL I nearly choked on my sandwich
What campaign of hostility?
Seems more fitting to take it up with the almighty Bonnier family than somehow get the Swedish government involved. In fact it makes the whole thing very strange. Provocation?
So the Israeli government should somehow hold the Swedish government responsible whenever Israelis do something they don't like?
Museums and such work autonomously and do whatever they can to get some media coverage. Sometimes it's very hurtful to certain groups. Like for example when they had a photo exhibition of Jesus Christ and the disciples as a homo******s.
This misses the point.
The Danish government could have released a statement (I can't remember what they actually did) which said that the cartoons were crass, offensive and juvenile, while at the same time arguing that they wholly support the right of the newspaper to publish them, and that people shouldn’t get angry about some trivial cartoons.
In this case, the Swedish politicians are free (or should be if Swedish law wasn’t stupid) to say that they think that the article is stupid, uncannily like a historical blood libel, and not worth worrying about, while at the same time defending the right of the newspaper to publish such things.
The Swedish ambassador to Israel did in fact say something like that. And the Swedish government retracted the statement on the basis of “free-speech”. But the principles of free speech, as they’re understood everywhere else, would allow anyone to say whatever they think about the article. So in retracting the statement, they actually opposed free-speech. This is the interesting thing about the case.
I don't really care what other people personally think about Israel so why would you? There is no Swedish campaign of hostility towards Israel as "Swedish" in that sense would imply a official campaign. Individual people and firms all over the world including people of Israel make their own decision how how to behave - and alot of people do not want to support Israeli expansions into non-Israeli land. There's alot of other Swedish firms who invest on Israeli land otoh. You seemed upset that a private bank didnt want to invest on occupied territory. That says more about you than on the bank IMO.
@Ssandro
Sigh. No. Swedish laws is not generic or simple one-liners. They specify what papers, officials or private people can and can not do. In this case a offical person can not condemn a press article and in fact she has since been reported for abusing her powers.
The law is otoh very simple on what gov and officials can't do and that is to act against freedom of speech. By this way, on accepting an official position they agree to restrictions in their own otherwise private rights.
It would set a very unfortunate precedent if the government starts condemning publicized material. It would result in a situation where they can be seen as supporting anything that has not been condemned. It's not the government's role to put a "government approved/condemned" status on every article out there, and it's wrong of the Israeli government to demand them to do this.
Besides, in the off chance that a seemingly libelous article turns out to contain truth, they'd look pretty stupid.
And that sounds like a weird law. So politicans aren't allowed to say "this piece of writing is nonsense" about anything? Even if it was claiming that talking lizards had overrun new york, or that black people were all cannibals.
I'm sure it can't be the same in any other country.
Not really. It's obvious that this is a relatively rare incident (like less than once in a decade), and that all the other articles in the world, which don't stir up such international incidents, are not thereby to be taken as invariably "government approved". People are not that simple-minded.It would set a very unfortunate precedent if the government starts condemning publicized material. It would result in a situation where they can be seen as supporting anything that has not been condemned. It's not the government's role to put a "government approved/condemned" status on every article out there,
They'd lose nothing by saying that they think the article is stupid (if it weren't for the weird laws). It's called a diplomatic statement. Thousands of far more serious diplomatic statements occur every day.
Correctand it's wrong of the Israeli government to demand them to do this.
Last edited by Ssandro; 08-24-2009 at 07:48 PM.
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