losing their Nordic cool

The cartoon jihad has pulled back the curtain on political tensions in Scandinavia. Agora has been doing a fine job of covering the depressing events in Denmark as the imams who stoked the controversy continue to behave like thugs and to intimidate the Muslim community, and all other Danes.

Now there’s confusion at the top in Norway as a government minister says that the Norwegian government will meet with Hamas…while the prime minister says it will not.

Things get really hot in Sweden, however, where an open letter to that country’s “Chancellor of Justice” indicates that he metes out a very special kind of justice indeed–the kind where it’s okay for Muslims to refer to Jews as “brothers of apes and pigs.”

Earlier this year you decided to discontinue your preliminary investigation against the mosque at Medborgarplatsen in Stockholm. At the mosque, audio cassettes with highly inflammatory anti-Semitic content were being sold. After radio programme Dagens Eko’s reports on the contents of the cassettes on 26-27 November 2005, a charge of racial incitement was filed with the police against the Stockholm mosque.

In your decision to close the pre-trial investigation into this charge, you write that “the lecture under consideration featured statements that are highly degrading to Jews; among other things, they are consistently referred to as the brothers of apes and pigs”. Furthermore, a curse is pronounced on the Jews and the audience are encouraged to participate in Jihad (holy war) against the Jews, mentioning suicide bombers as an effective weapon and praising suicide bombers as martyrs.

You ask yourself whether these statements “should be judged differently – and be regarded as permissible – because they were used by one side in an ongoing and far-reaching conflict where calls to arms and insults are part of the everyday climate in the rhetoric that surrounds this conflict”.

You state that owing to the Middle East conflict, “these expressions, despite their content, cannot be regarded as racial incitement according to Swedish law”.

Your conclusion was thus that the preliminary hearings should be discontinued since hatred of Jews can be linked to the conflict in the Middle East. This means, in other words, that according to your interpretation of the law, these statements did not constitute inflammatory incitement of an anti-Semitic nature despite the insults and the direct appeal to “kill the Jews”.

Nice.

Let us recall that in the meantime, the EU is busy drawing up a new lexicon in order to separate the word “Islam” from the word “terrorism,” because of the rising threat of Islamophobia. (See “Islamofascists, Islamofascists, motherfucking Islamofascists.“)

I really don’t want to believe all the “Europe is eating away at itself” stuff. I love Europe too much. But it becomes increasingly difficult to believe that they will be able to pull themselves out of this downward spiral.