Editorial: Gust of Swedish jew-hatred

Not much about the Boström-scandal in the Norwegian media as of yet. There’s one cautious NTB article which has just started to do the rounds and a mention in Stavanger Aftenblad – a regional daily.  DagenMagazinet doesn’t mince words however, here’s an unauthorized translation of their editorial (today):

A gust of Swedish jew-hatred

Donald Boströms article in Aftonbladet 10.08.09 is a gust of old, bigoted Jew-hatred. The article has this last drawn horrified attention in all the larger Israeli newspapers.The Swedish ambassador in Tel Aviv, Elisabet Bonniers, has publicly regretted the anti-semittic article. But Boström himself, and his editor, do not have the sense to regret anything at all.

Aftonbladet is Sweden’s largest newspaper. Daniel Boström is presented as a journalist, photographer and the author of among others the book “Inshallah”. In the first paragraph of the disgusting article it says that “a Palestinian” is accusing the Israeli army of stealing organs from their victims. Thereafter it says: “Here Donal Boström tells of the international transplant scandal – and of how he himself was witness to transgressions against a 19 year old boy”.

In the mile-long article one however reads something quite different. For the first Boström sums up the findings from a bundle of alleged suspicions from police investigations in Brooklyn, USA, where an aging rabbi, identified by name, supposedly is involved. Boström does not refer to any legal verdict. The history of legal courts is well known for being full of examples of how such suspicions are invalidated. Boström writes as if suspicion has already become fact, and as if Israel subsequently is a key player in an “international transplant scandal”.

Then Boström continues with a lengthy narration of events he in 1992 heard “on the Westbank”. The narration makes it crystal clear that Boström never at any time himself was an eye witness to theft of the organs of a named 19 year old arab boy. He was only shown the deceased in order to photograph it. And the photo looks exactly like what autopsied bodies look like. The allegation of organ theft on the other side, are only insinuations which Boström quote from arab sources.

Boström writes in macabre detail (og kildemessig dypt anfektbart) about the different bullets impact on the 19 year old body that he ought to have been able to ask himself if there were any undamaged organs left to “steal”. The entire article reeks of uncritical hearsay-journalism. Boström does not ask how it could be that UN-employees helped him to the site. He does not question how the alleged gunshot wounds are reconcilable with nighttime visibility and the witnesses distance from the site. And he does not ask for any evidence whatsoever.

But the worst thing is how Boström’s naivite goes hand in hand with the entire, millennium old tradition of anti-Semitism. For it is characterized by how one gladly believes any lie directed at jews: “They poisoned our wells so we got Black Death”, “They stole our infants and drank their blood”. “They murdered a communion wafer” (NIJ ?). “They are to blame for swine flu”.

We do not know whether Sweden has a counterpart to paragraph 135a of the Norwegian penal code. But in a decent and lawabiding society this disgusting article should have been examined in the context of criminal law.