Bloodthirsty Liberal

Not the Apartheid State you might be thinking of:

[NB: Video's a little creepy, just so you know.]

Sweden’s culture minister was feeling the heat Wednesday after a weekend art exhibit in which she cut up a cake baked into the shape of a cartoonishly stereotyped African woman.

A group representing Swedes of African descent has called for Lena Adelsohn Liljeroth to resign over that it called a racist caricature. But Liljeroth defended her participation, saying the cake was designed to “challenge the traditional image of racism.”

“While the symbolism in the piece is despicable, it is unfortunate and highly regrettable that the presentation has been interpreted as an expression of racism by some,” Liljeroth said in a statement issued by her office. “The artistic intent was the exact opposite.”

The artist who designed the cake, Makode Linde, is of African descent himself and said the piece was aimed at condemning the practice of female genital mutilation. Pictures from the Sunday exhibition showed Liljeroth slicing into the cake from the “genitals” and feeding it to Linde, who told CNN he made himself the head of the figure and screamed in pain when it was cut.

“I didn’t intend for anyone to feel singled out or embarrassed,” he said. “But we’re talking about female genital mutilation — is there any comfortable or cozy way to talk about it?”

Fair enough. But to take such obvious and inappropriate pleasure in mutilating a black woman? Sorry, Sweden, you’re disqualified from speaking out on anything.

UPDATE: As Aggie observes in a comment, YouTube has pulled the vid (though I found it playing on another site.) It’s just as well; I felt icky about putting it up here.

But that means I get to post another picture of indifferent Swedish people:

Again, artists do crazy things. They think that makes them “relevant”. But white culture ministers should refrain from sawing away at the private bits of racist caricatures. As a rule.

The title is even more of an oxymoron than you can imagine:

When Europe’s finance ministers meet for a group photo, it’s easy to spot the rebel — Anders Borg has a ponytail and earring. What actually marks him out, though, is how he responded to the crash. While most countries in Europe borrowed massively, Borg did not. Since becoming Sweden’s finance minister, his mission has been to pare back government. His ‘stimulus’ was a permanent tax cut. To critics, this was fiscal lunacy — the so-called ‘punk tax cutting’ agenda. Borg, on the other hand, thought lunacy meant repeating the economics of the 1970s and expecting a different result.

Three years on, it’s pretty clear who was right. ‘Look at Spain, Portugal or the UK, whose governments were arguing for large temporary stimulus,’ he says. ‘Well, we can see that very little of the stimulus went to the economy. But they are stuck with the debt.’ Tax-cutting Sweden, by contrast, had the fastest growth in Europe last year, when it also celebrated the abolition of its deficit. The recovery started just in time for the 2010 Swedish election, in which the Conservatives were re-elected for the first time in history.

Liberals often point to the welfare states of Scandinavia as an alternative to the stricter free market economies.

Yeah, right:

‘Sweden was a textbook case of European economic sclerosis. Very high taxes and huge regulatory burden.’ An economic crisis in the early 1990s forced Sweden on the road to balanced budgets, and Borg was determined the 2007 crash would not stop him cutting the size of government.

‘Everybody was told “stimulus, stimulus, stimulus”,’ he says — referring to the EU, IMF and the alphabet soup of agencies urging a global, debt-fuelled spending splurge. Borg, an economist, couldn’t work out how this would help. ‘It was surprising that Europe, given what we experienced in the 1970s and 80s with structural unemployment, believed that short-term Keynesianism could solve the problem.’ Non-economists, he says, ‘might have a tendency to fall for those kinds of messages’.

Oh my, whoever could he mean?

He continued to cut taxes and cut welfare-spending to pay for it; he even cut property taxes for the rich to lure entrepreneurs back to Sweden. The last bit was the most unpopular, but for Borg, economic recovery starts with entrepreneurs. If cutting taxes for the rich encouraged risk-taking, then it had to be done. ‘In most cases, the company would not have been created without the owner,’ he says. ‘There would be no Ikea without [Ingvar] Kamprad. We would not have Tetra-Pak without [Ruben] Rausing. They are probably the foremost entrepreneurs we have had in the last few decades, and both moved out of Sweden.’

But they were not rich, I say, when they were starting out. ‘No, but they were becoming rich. If you have a high wealth tax and an inheritance tax, people emigrate because it becomes too costly to own a company. Ownership is a production factor. Entrepreneurs are a production factor. Yes, these people are rich and you can obviously argue that we want to encourage social cohesion. But it is also problematic if you drive out entrepreneurs from your country, because they are the source of job creation.’

For pete’s sakes, Obamabots, even Sweden has wised up. Obama’s alleged smarts are anything but—and they’re forty years out of date. He sounds like the Ramparts magazines of my youth. He is President Bell-Bottom, the Sideburn-in-Chief of the United States.

First Abba, now this:

Danish prosecutors on Friday charged four people with terrorism for allegedly planning a shooting attack on a newspaper that had printed cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.

The four men — Swedes living in Denmark — wanted “to seriously frighten the population” and destabilize Denmark by planning a shooting spree inside the Copenhagen offices of the Jyllands-Posten newspaper, Svend Ulrik Larsen, Denmark’s top prosecutor, said.

The paper published 12 cartoons of the prophet in 2005, sparking riots in Muslim countries and calls for revenge against the Danish publishers and cartoonists.

Larsen said the group traveled to Copenhagen with arms and ammunition, aiming to kill “a larger number of people.”

I realize Swedes are a humorless people (I’ve seen my share of Bergman movies), but all this over a few cartoons? I’m a little annoyed that they still run Calvin & Hobbes, since the cartoonist “retired” years ago, and Doonesbury hasn’t been funny or relevant since the Nixon administration—but you don’t see me aiming to “kill a large number of people”. I don’t even blog about it—and I have a blog!

So, chill out, Sven.

The Danish Security and Intelligence Service described some of the suspects as “militant Islamists with relations to international terror networks.”

…

The men also were charged with possession of illegal weapons. Police said they found a submachine gun, a handgun and ammunition in raids in Copenhagen.

Oh-h-h-h. Those kind of Swedes. Why didn’t you say so?

It’s not my business to tell terrorists how to conduct theirs, but you don’t need a lot of planning to “kill a large number of people”. You can just go do it. I’m no expert, but it seems to me you can just take your submachine gun and ammunition any time you want and “kill a large number of people”. Sure, make a martyr video if you like, turn your thermostat down, cancel the papers—but then you’re free as a bird. A very nasty bird that plans to “kill a large number of people”.

Hope this helps.

So, a Norwegian madman shoots up the seat of his government and then massacres kids at a socialist youth camp. Who does a Swedish academic blame?

[Jeopardy theme music]

The Jews!

A Swedish professor suggested Israel was behind the bloody terror attacks committed by Norwegian terrorist Anders Behring Breivik this past July, stirring up controversy in the country.

Research professor Ola Tunander of the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) published an article in the Norwegian academic journal Nytt Norsk Tidsskrift in which he called to further examine Brevik’s motives.

According to Tunander, it is possible that some country was behind the terror attacks, hinting that Israel might be that country.

The guy must be a subscriber to the NY Times (see below).

Tunander claimed that in order to carry out a terror attack of such magnitude the involvement of state forces is needed, “and we can’t rule out that being the case this time too,” he wrote.

While quoting the controversial article, the Swedish news site The Local presented the professor’s theory. Tunander mentioned the political tensions between Oslo and Jerusalem in the months prior to the terror attacks in light of Norway’s intent to recognize a Palestinian state.

He goes on to link between July 22, the date of Breivik’s killing spree, and the significance of that date in Israel’s history. Tunander brings up the Lillehammer affair of 1973, when Mossad agents accidently killed a Moroccan waiter in the Norwegian city believing he was Ali Hassan Salameh, the chief of operations for the 1972 Munich massacre of Israeli athletes. One of the agents was arrested the day after the murder, on July 22nd.

The Norwegian professor also discussed the bombing at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem carried out by the Irgun on July 22, 1946.

And after dumping all that circumstantial goo all over Israel’s reputation, he declares:

Tunander said that it was unfair to conclude from his article about any intention to link between Israel and the most murderous event in Norway’s history since World War II.

Sweet!

PS: Does the Swedish accent sound as silly in Norwegian as it does in English? Just wondering.

I want to publish a 40-page booklet that accuses Liv Ullman of bestiality and Bjorn Borg of being a Scientologist. Will someone give me $100,000?

Sweden has funded the publication of an anti-Israel booklet titled “Colonialism and Apartheid – the Israeli occupation in Palestine,” Yedioth Ahronoth reported Sunday.

According to the report, the Swedish government transferred NIS 390,000 (roughly $104,600), under the guise of humanitarian aid, to a Swedish-Palestinian solidarity group for the creation of the ornate 40-page booklet.

The brochure’s authors accuse Israel of racist legislation, ethnic cleansing, racial segregation, establishing an Apartheid regime in the territories, and bombing Palestinian civilian homes. Furthermore, the brochure calls for a boycott of the Jewish state.

And your meatballs suck.

Yesterday, we reported on the four Swedish “people” arrested on suspicion of terror. It was enough for us to know that they were people, and not Gila monsters, say, or koalas.

But you know the media, always poking and prodding:

Four terror suspects arrested over the weekend in Sweden’s second-largest city are being questioned and remain under suspicion of preparing a terror attack, prosecutors said Monday.

Authorities are being tightlipped about the arrests in the west coast city of Goteborg, which came on the eve of the 9/11 anniversary, and were followed by the evacuation of about 400 people from an arts center.

…

Prosecutors and police won’t say whether the suspects are suspected of links to Islamist terror groups or other extremist networks. The prosecutors’ statement said they were arrested without incident and noted that “the investigation is still in an early stage.”

Whoa! Who said anything about Islam?

Swedish tabloid Expressen, citing an unnamed police source, said investigators suspect the men belong to a terror network with links to al-Qaida, and that they had acquired, or were trying to acquire, firearms, explosives and hand grenades. Security police declined to comment on the newspaper’s information.

That means nothing. You can have links to Al Qaeda and be Methodist or Presbyterian. Take your time, Bjorn. Don’t jump to any conclusions.

Four “suspicious” people, thought possibly to be carrying out “terrorist” acts.

Hmm, with so little to go on, one wonders how the cops found them? The marvels of Swedish detective work!

“Safezone”, huh?

Sweden’s National Security Service (SAPO) said on Sunday it had arrested four people on suspicion of planning a terror attack on Gothenburg, the country’s second-largest city.

Ulf Edberg, spokesman for the Vastra Gotaland police in west Sweden, said a culture and arts arena had been cordoned off after information was received about a potential threat.

“We decided to clear the area because of a threat that could have involved serious danger to life, health or extensive destruction of property,” Edberg said.

The area was reopened at 0400 GMT on Sunday, the tenth anniversary of the Sept 11 attacks in the United States.

“Four people were arrested on suspicion of the preparation of terrorist acts,” said Sara Kvarnstrom, press secretary at SAPO.

Whoever these “people” were, they have some nerve attempting something like that on 9/11!

PS: Perhaps this case gave them the clues they needed:

A man who is suspected of trying to rape a 21-year-old woman in an apartment in Malmö over the weekend was left nursing a partially severed tongue as his would-be victim fought back.

The woman was at home in her apartment in the early hours of Sunday morning when the doorbell rang. She opened the door to find a middle-aged man who then forced his way in, according to the local Skånskan daily.

The man is reported to have told the young woman in broken English that he wanted to be her “friend” and proceeded to force himself on her, taking a stranglehold on her neck.

But when the man tried to kiss the woman she bit hard on his tongue, severing the tip.

“He is bleeding profusely and in the end he gives up. According to the woman he is furious and he kicks her before he leaves the apartment,” Anders Lindell at Malmö police told the newspaper.

…

According to the woman the man is aged 35-40-years-old with short, black hair, brown eyes and ugly teeth.

PPS: Another clue to the genius of Swedish policing:

Police who patrol Malmö’s Rosengård district are being offered a special Arabic language class to help them better understand and communicate with local residents in the predominantly immigrant area.

So far 45 officers have signed up for voluntary twelve-week class, which will provide training on a number of common greetings and pleasantries in Arabic, the local Skånska Dagbladet newspaper reports.

“It’s about dealing with immigrants in a more dignified and little more civil manner,” local police chief Bengt Hersler told the newspaper.

According to Hersler, the course was arranged at the request of officers who have pushed the department to provide them with the tools to better communicate with Rosengård’s residents, many of whom are immigrants and have Swedish as a second language.

In addition to teachings in basic Arabic, the tailor-made course will also offer lessons on Muslim culture and traditions to help officers better understand some of the cultural differences that can lead to misunderstandings in dealings with local residents.

Circle March 10th on your calendar, Malmo cops—Osama bin Laden’s birthday. Passing out sweets seems to be the traditional observance of such dates.

Seriously, what’s another Nazi, more or less?

Sweden’s Queen Silvia is investigating her late father’s activities in Germany and Brazil during World War II to clarify reports about possible ties to Nazis.

Walther Sommerlath’s alleged links with Germany’s Nazi party were first reported in 2002 by Swedish media, which claimed he joined the party in 1934 and took over a business from a Jew in 1939 under unclear circumstances.

And it only took her nine years. Sweden makes a lot more sense now.

From a related story:

A series of mountain crags called “Swastika” and “Himmler” have caused uproar in Sweden after a climber publicized the Nazi-inspired names given to the popular climbing area, the Telegraph reported Saturday.

According to accepted climbing practice, the first person to tackle a route has the right to name it, but concerns have been raised after it was revealed that routes in the popular Järfälla climbing area outside Stockholm had been given names inspired by the Third Reich, the British newspaper reported.

According to the report, between 1987 and 2001, climbers christened new routes “Kristallnacht”, “Crematorium” and “Little Hitler”.

Another was named “Zyklon B”, after the cyanide gas the Nazis used to murder the Jews.

“I thought it rather unpleasant to climb through the ‘Crematorium’ or say that ‘now I am going to do ‘Kristallnacht’,” Cordelia Hess, a climber, told Stockholm’s Dagens Nyheter newspaper.

Too bad. What a [bleeped]-up little country.

We’ve spent a little time trying to figure out Norway’s deep, broad, and virulent Jew-hatred.

Now, how about Sweden?

A Swedish trade union has invited convicted Arab terrorist hijacker Leila Khaled to speak at its upcoming May Day celebration.

A post on the SAC-Syndikalisterna Facebook page proudly announces that “Palestinian freedom fighter Leila Khaled” will be one of the speakers at the Stockholm LS of SAC – Syndikalisterna celebration, set for May 1.

So, what did this latter day Norma Rae do? Demand higher wages and safer conditions? Not as such:

She became the first woman in history to hijack an airplane as a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) terrorist organization. Khaled led the terrorist cell that hijacked a TWA flight from Los Angeles to Damascus on August 29, 1969. Two Israeli passengers were held hostage for 44 days by the terrorists.

Khaled also participated in one of four simultaneous hijackings carried out by the PFLP on September 6, 1970.

Known as the Dawson’s Field hijackings, the attacks on Jordanian soil infuriated then-King Hussein and triggered the 10-day “Black September” massacre of Palestinian Arabs.

Not only did she commit the crimes she committed, they led to the deaths of thousands of people. (How come nobody ever remembers those events?)

Leila dropped out of sight for many years, but she’s back, showing the wisdom of her age:

In general, people always find the means of resistance. After 1967, we were using hijackings. Then our people used stones to express their resistance, then what is called suicide bombers, which have stopped. Then the use of rockets from Gaza, because the Israelis left and there were (new spaces opened up), while in the West Bank it is silenced.

Indiscriminate shelling of Israeli civilians from a “liberated” (more like abandoned) Gaza constitutes “resistance”. It’s easy to see why a Swedish labor union was eager to snap her up. Helen Thomas must have had a previous engagement.

We wouldn’t bother you with just another story about anti-Semitism in Malmo Sweden. That’s dog bites man.

But man bites dog—that’s news:

The past couple of years have been turbulent for Malmö’s Jewish community. A spike in anti-Semitic attacks in 2009 prompted a number of Jews to leave the city altogether, concluding they would never feel accepted there.

Controversial comments by the town’s long-serving Social Democratic mayor Ilmar Reepalu also put Malmö in the spotlight, drawing criticism from within his own party, as well as from influential Jewish organisations aboard.

And in December 2010, the US-based Simon Wiesenthal Center issued a warning urging Jews to exercise “extreme caution” when traveling in southern Sweden.

I was about to lose my patience with this story—we know, we know, Malmo is one of the most hostile cities to Jews in all of Europe—when I ran face first into this:

Last October a group of about 20 teenagers attacked the Jewish community’s residential education centre during a youth retreat.

“The first night they shouted vicious, nasty slurs. The next night it escalated and they broke down the fence and were banging on windows and doors,” Sieradzki explains.

“It was quite frightening.”

Sieradzki, who applauded the nearby municipality of Vellinge for its swift response to the incident, also points out that the teenagers in the attacking group were not Muslim as many are quick to assume.

“These boys were not Arabs. They were all Swedish. And I assure you the Jewish people are not attacking anybody.”

It had been my understanding that almost all of the Jew bashing in Malmo had been carried out by its sizeable Muslim population. I had thought that true of Europe in general. Whether these boys were skin-heads, neo-Nazis, whatever, they were ethnically Swedish, not Arab.

Though perhaps I can be forgiven for jumping to conclusions:

“I can understand that Jewish people feel threatened in Malmö,” hate crimes specialist Gosenius explains.

“We have a huge population from the Middle East, West Bank and Gaza and most (Jewish) victims describe their perpetrators as young Muslim men.

I don’t blame Jews for leaving any country where they are mistreated. But I think the country is poorer for having chased them out. If “the Jewish people are not attacking anybody”, and they are still persecuted, who is safe? In all of Europe, who is safe?

Some you expect:

A reporter tagged in a Facebook image that mocked the Palestinian president said Saturday he faces trial for insulting a public figure, raising concerns about freedom of speech in the Western-backed Palestinian Authority.

Mamdouh Hamamreh, who works for the pro-Hamas Al-Quds TV, said security forces detained him in September, just hours after the image appeared on his Facebook feed. The picture showed President Mahmoud Abbas, a Hamas rival, standing next to an actor who plays a villain on a popular Syrian soap opera, the reporter said.

Hamamreh said he was held for more than 50 days in a Palestinian lockup after the picture appeared on his feed. He said he had nothing to do with the image. He was released in November and says a hearing has been set for next month.

“I censor myself now,” Hamamreh said. “I’m careful of what I say.”

And some you don’t, but should:

Sweden has explained that it was justified to expel 26 Iraqis seeking asylum because its courts have ruled “you have to show an individual threat directed towards you as an individual” in order to qualify for asylum.

Swedish Minister for Migration and Asylum Policy Tobias Billstrom added, “We are returning only the Iraqis who have failed to meet the asylum requirements.”

…

Israel has been faced with a similar problem, but on a larger scale. Tens of thousands of Africans, mostly from Sudan, have sneaked or have been smuggled in across the Egyptian border to Israel the past two years, creating a social and demographic threat to Jewish society.

Liberal groups have taken up their cause and have objected to Israeli attempts to deport them, claiming they are refugees. Israeli officials have said that only a tiny number of the Africans are from Darfur and that nearly all of the illegal immigrants travel across Egypt and to Israel for better social and economics conditions.

Egypt has killed dozens of the immigrants.

What’s the matter, Sweden? You can’t take in a measly 26 Iraqis? Don’t you have a whole city, Malmo, set aside for Muslim immigrants? Are you some kind of Apartheid State?

If it’s really such a big problem, why don’t you pay Norway or Denmark to employ the “Egyptian Solution”? When word gets back to the home country that the road to Sweden is littered with corpses shot in the back, they’ll think twice before setting out.

Here is a hopeful sign

After 9/11, it was commonly assumed that future terrorism would resemble Al Qaeda’s meticulously planned destruction, with its coordinated conversion of hijacked planes into instruments of mass murder. But this week’s arrest of three terrorist suspects in Denmark and a fourth in Sweden suggest the latest threat comes from smaller-scale but more frequent attacks. They are undertaken not by sleeper cells but by people who are radicalized on extremist websites, where they also learn to make bombs and handle weapons.

The head of Danish intelligence said Wednesday that the four indicted suspects were preparing to “carry out a Mumbai-style attack’’ on the Danish paper that published cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed in 2005. A skein of recent plots here and in Europe suggests that the 2008 Mumbai assault, in which terrorists staged low-tech attacks on hotels and other sites, is becoming the new terrorist norm. It must be fought with timely intelligence, sound police work, and a determination to win a war of ideas against the irrational doctrines of Islamist extremism.

You know how we’ll know if they have woken up? If there is another terror attack in Israel, and if the MSM are able to write about it as a terror attack, in other words, if even people that Westerners feel comfortable scapegoating have rights, are fully human, then we will have turned a corner. If, on the other hand, some terror attacks (those against Westerners) are terror attacks, and others are political responses in a very complex and nuanced world, John Kerry/Barack Obama/Hillary Clinton gibberish, then we will know that we still haven’t learned our lesson.

- Aggie