Tuesday, March 17, 2015

Sweden: "I did not hear critiques of Israel’s occupation policies, I heard complaints about the Jews’ baleful influence on the world"

Jeffrey Goldberg calls this 'conflation and exaggeration'.  It sounds to me like run-of-the-mill antisemitic hatred and conspiracy theories.

Via The Atlantic:
I spent one afternoon interviewing people in the main shopping mall of the Rosengård district, which is predominantly home to immigrants. Several of the Muslims I interviewed expressed benign feelings toward Jews. They knew of Malmö’s reputation for anti-Semitism, and regretted it. A couple of others expressed objections to Israel’s existence, but absolved “the Jews” of collective responsibility. But more common was conflation, and exaggeration. I asked several people to tell me where they find information about Jews and Israel. Television stations such as Al Jazeera and the Hezbollah station, Al-Manar, were cited, as was the preaching of Scandinavian imams. One Danish imam, Abu Bilal Ismail, became famous last year for urging worshippers in a Berlin mosque to kill Jews: “Count them and kill them to the very last one. Don’t spare a single one of them.” He later explained to a Copenhagen newspaper that he “never meant all Jews.”

One man, an Iraqi refugee, told me, “The Jews have too much power everywhere.” Another man, of Sudanese background, explained that the Koran itself warns Muslims to fear double-crossing by Jews. “They killed the prophets and tried to poison the Prophet Muhammad,” he said. I did not hear critiques of Israel’s occupation policies. I heard, instead, complaints about the Jews’ baleful influence on the world.


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