On Yom Kippur.
The Gothenburg Jewish Community has always enjoyed an excellent, warm and professional relationship with the police, both the uniform branch and the security police. We have never hesitated to turn to the police with our security-related concerns over the years, and the police have always responded with the utmost attentiveness, flexibility and consideration.
Not this year, however. When the Jewish Community leadership pointed out that the date of the march and its route posed a particular security concern owing to their overt anti-Semitic symbolism, the police responded that they had taken into consideration the “security aspects” of the Nazi march and demonstration, explaining they are not concerned with the religious niceties of the Jewish religion on this or any other particular day. From the point of view of a security operation, the police say, this route allows them to keep everything under control.
Despite our decades of close and smooth cooperation, this response seems to suggest that the Gothenburg police have learned little over the years. The Gothenburg Jewish Community is not asking the police to reroute the march because we are upset that Nazis are insulting our religion or upsetting our emotions.
We are requesting that the march be rerouted because Jews both young and elderly will be coming to and from the synagogue all day long. As such, having a Nazi demonstration route that takes a few hundred uniformed racists close to our main doors is very much a security issue. Not an emotive one. It is not our sensibilities that are under threat, but our physical well-being.
Sweden is still thankfully a democracy. As such, even Nazis, Islamists and other equally intellectually challenged racists have the right to march and demonstrate. It is not this right that the Jewish Community of Gothenburg wishes to curtail. It is not even the deliberately provocative choice of date on which to hold their racist demonstration that is at issue – because Sweden is still nominally a democratic country.
It is the route, the venue, that is a serious security risk. A security risk to Jewish worshippers who will be entering and leaving the synagogue all day long.
It is a risk that the Gothenburg police are refusing to acknowledge.
And a refusal that is raising more than a few eyebrows here on Sweden’s west coast.
Because in all the moral debacle that this issue is spotlighting, there is actually one issue that everyone is aware of but that nobody will dare mention because in Sweden, Political Correctness is the state religion.
Here it is: the planned Nazi NMR demonstration is just one (1) overtly anti-Semitic event that is grabbing the headlines to the exclusion of all else. All of Swedish society – politicians, the media, private citizens – are in touching agreement that the beliefs of these racists are morally indefensible but that they have a legal right to hold a demonstration. These racists are by and large fair-haired, fair-skinned, blue-eyed, they shout their slogans in Swedish – the typical Aryan ideal of racial superiority and overt offensiveness against Jews. With a sigh of morally indignant relief, Swedish society has gratefully embraced the opportunity to express its collective repugnance against the Nazi racists, while upholding their legal right to demonstrate in our democracy.
Yet that same society – the same politicians, the same media, those same private citizens – maintain a tight-lipped silence when identical and even far worse anti-Semitism is expressed in Gothenburg and elsewhere. On a daily basis.
Of course, that anti-Semitism is not expressed by fair-haired, fair-skinned, blue-eyed racists shouting slogans in Swedish, but by largely dark-haired, swarthy-skinned, dark-eyed racists shouting slogans in Arabic and other languages from the non-Jewish part of the Middle East and North Africa.
That anti-Semitism – which is expressed on a daily basis – in sometimes far viler ways such as calls to “slaughter the sons of apes and pigs” from Swedish mosque pulpits, that anti-Semitism remains ignored by Swedish society.
The Nazi NMR demonstration, no matter where it is held, no matter which route it eventually takes, has come as a godsend to Swedish society. Swedes will now be able to salve their consciences by wholeheartedly, proudly and loudly condemning the anti-Semitic Nazis – while shamefacedly, abjectly and resolutely ignoring the anti-Semitic Islamists.
In Sweden, one (1) single Nazi anti-Semitic event is gratefully embraced as a means of absolving Swedish society from the responsibility of dealing with 365 Islamist anti-Semitic events a year.