{"id":80620,"date":"2015-11-28T17:45:56","date_gmt":"2015-11-29T01:45:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=80620"},"modified":"2015-11-28T17:45:56","modified_gmt":"2015-11-29T01:45:56","slug":"swedens-damn-jew-problem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=80620","title":{"rendered":"SWEDEN\u2019S \u2018DAMN JEW\u2019 PROBLEM"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><A HREF=\"http:\/\/www.tabletmag.com\/jewish-news-and-politics\/96146\/swedens-damn-jew-problem\">From Tabletmag.com<\/a>:<\/p>\n<p>Wearing a yarmulke is no longer safe in the city of Malm\u00f6. The mayor blames the Jews, while other Swedish politicians point to \u2018social inequality.\u2019<\/p>\n<p>The store window had been smashed many times before. The shoe-repair shop is located in one of the rougher parts of Malm\u00f6, Sweden, and the Jewish owner, a native of the city, had gotten used to this sort of vandalism. But in the spring of 2004, a group of immigrants just under the age of 15\u2014too young to be prosecuted by Swedish law\u2014walked into the store yelling about \u201cdamn Jews.\u201d The owner was hit in the face by one of the boys. Yasha, an 85-year-old customer and relative of mine, was struck in the back of his head. The doctor who received him at the emergency room concluded that he must have been hit with a blunt object. \u201cI left Poland to get away from anti-Semitism,\u201d he later told the police. \u201cBut at least there I never experienced any violence. That only happened to me here, in Sweden.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The Jews of Malm\u00f6, a community of about 1,500 in a city of 300,000, are living through a new form of anti-Semitism. This kind does not stem from neo-Nazis or right-wing extremists\u2014traditional perpetrators of European Jew-hatred\u2014but has come to the city through immigrants from North Africa and the Middle East and is part of a larger, countrywide problem of failed integration. According to the 2011 census, one in 10 Malm\u00f6 citizens comes from the Middle East and North Africa, and ethnic Swedes are no longer in the majority among 15-year-olds. In 2009, 60 hate crimes against Jews were reported in Malm\u00f6, ranging from hate speech to assault. The city\u2019s Chicago-born Chabad rabbi, Shneur Kesselman, estimates that he alone has been the victim of 100 incidents during his few years in the city. A dozen families have already left Malm\u00f6 for Stockholm, Israel, or the United States because of anti-Semitism, according to community leaders.<\/p>\n<p>If only this were the whole problem. But Malm\u00f6\u2019s mayor of 17 years, Ilmar Reepalu, has \u201cTourettes syndrome with respect to Jews,\u201d according to Kv\u00e4llsposten, a Swedish newspaper. Last week, Reepalu, a Social Democrat, made headlines across the country after I published an interview with him in which he said that Sweden Democrats, an anti-immigrant party with its roots in the Swedish neo-Nazi movement, had \u201cinfiltrated\u201d Malm\u00f6\u2019s Jewish community in order to turn it against Muslims. On Monday, he was publicly reprimanded by the head of his party.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>From Tabletmag.com: Wearing a yarmulke is no longer safe in the city of Malm\u00f6. The mayor blames the Jews, while other Swedish politicians point to \u2018social inequality.\u2019 The store window had been smashed many times before. The shoe-repair shop is &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=80620\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[605,139],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-80620","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anti-semitism","category-islam"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80620","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=80620"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80620\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":80621,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80620\/revisions\/80621"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=80620"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=80620"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=80620"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}