Swedish national broadcaster SVT has unpublished an opinion piece penned by a person attached to the Stockholm Jewish Assembly after the author and his family were threatened with violence, the Swedish news outlet Samhällsnytt has reported.
In the article, the writer criticized Center party leader Annie Lööf and the Swedish media for focusing on alleged Nazi anti-Semitism in connection with the her speech at Almedalen Week, a political gathering. She claims to have been disrupted by booing right-wing extremists. The author argued that today the Jew-hating Muslims constituted a more palpable threat for Swedish Jews than Nazis. The piece bore the self-explanatory headline "Nazism is not the greatest threat to Jews" and pointed out a "deeply indoctrinated hatred" among many Muslims.
After a while, visitors to SVT's page discovered that the link to the article no longer worked. Instead, the message "Oops, the page does not exist" was displayed. No explanation for why the article was removed was presented.
READ MORE: Sweden Perturbed by Surge of Islamic Anti-Semitism
However, when readers contacted SVT's editorial board, they confirmed that no technical error had occurred.
"Right, the link does not work anymore and the opinion piece has been removed altogether. Our responsible editor has chosen to unpublish the article post based on the threats against the author and the writer's family. / Editor," SVT tweeted in response to an inquiry from user Peter Sellei.
Hej Peter!
— SVT Opinion (@SVTOpinion) 12 июля 2018 г.
Ja, länken fungerar inte längre och debattartikeln är borttagen. Vår ansvarige utgivare har valt att avpublicera inlägget på gund av hotbilden mot skribenten och skribentens familj. /Redaktionen
This revelation proposed strong reactions from Swedish users, who asked why SVT had chosen to put the lid on this story instead of shedding more light on it. Some argued that had the threats come from right-wingers, it would have doubtlessly triggered an outcry about "hate storm."
"And where were these threats coming from? Yes, from the very same group, which is the biggest threat to Jews in Sweden, as the journalist highlighted — Muslims. But you'll never dare to go out with it. So go ahead, keep mum, sing kumbaya and pretend it's raining," one user tweeted.
"When will SVT do a proper series of reviews about this new societal development? Or is it just Nazis, Nazis and Nazis who get highlighted as a threat to Jews in Sweden? For many years, the Jews have been moving from Malmö because of threats from the city's Muslims (who are the majority)," another one tweeted.
READ MORE: Norwegian Jews Signal Fiercer Anti-Semitism From Growing Muslim Diaspora
In Sweden, which has the EU's seventh largest Jewish diaspora of about 20,000 people, has recently seen a rise in anti-Semitism amid snowballing immigration from predominantly Muslim countries. Previously, members of the Jewish community in Malmö, including rabbis and spiritual leaders, have experienced threats.
Jews have been fleeing Malmö for years; Jewish individuals are regularly attacked and harassed and both the synagogue and the Jewish burial chapel have been attacked numerous times https://t.co/iy40JmqJHk https://t.co/WqM2nLdDHV
— Avi Mayer (@AviMayer) 11 декабря 2017 г.
By contrast, the number of Muslims in the country has been estimated at 800,000, or 8.1 percent of Sweden's population of about 10 million.
READ MORE: 'Intifada' in Sweden: Firebombs Hurled at Jewish Sites Amid Anti-Semitic Upsurge
