Patience...

I see that the traffic continues on the blog, and I haven't updated it since I got back from New York almost a week ago. Don't despair - the blog is alive! The reason that I haven't updated it is

1. that I'm overwhelmed with work.
2. that no really hot news showed up that I felt I just had to comment on.

In the meanwhile you can read some material from the summit I attended in New York.

In a few hours I will go to Gamlestaden (a neighborhood in Gothenburg) to once again participate in a TV quiz show, something I am quite familiar with by now. This time it's the show Besserwisser on Kanal 9, with Lennart "Hoa-Hoa" Dahlgren as host.

I'll return as soon as I can!

Pause

I'm going to New York for a week, and the blog will probably not be updated in the meanwhile. I'm also hopelessly behind in translating my Swedish posts into English. This is due to a heavy work load. Hopefully I will be able to do something about this soon. Keep your eyes open!

Whose responsibility?

In SvD I read that Amnesty demands that Lebanon should stop discriminating Palestinian refugees. Is this news? No. Furthermore Amnesty says

that the responsibility for the refugees situation lies not only with the Lebanese government, but also with Israel, other countries in the region and the international community

Is this news? No. Noone is surprised that Amnesty, as usual, thinks that Israel is to blame. Somewhat surprising is that they for once blame not only Israel.

Now I just wonder...what exactly is Israel expected to do? What should Israel have done differently in the past?

Scenario 1) Israel is expected to let Palestinian refugees return to Israel. The original 726.000 refugees have become millions. Hence the effect of this scenario is that the Jewish state is turned into yet another (the 57th I believe it is) Muslim state, and thereby we're back to square one - Jews in minority are persecuted for religious reasons. Precisely that was the reason that Jews fled to Israel 100 years ago.

Justice demands that the Palestinian refugees either are allowed to return or get compensated for lost property. Of course! But it is about time for the world in general, and the racist left in particular, to view the conflict in its entirety. It didn't originate with the expulsion of Arabs in 1948, it goes back much further in time than that.

There are three refugee problems in this conflict:

• Jewish refugees from Europe. Over two millions.
• Jewish refugees from the Arab world and Iran. Approx. 900.000.
• Arab refugees from Israel. Approx. 726.000.

All of these have been forced to leave all their belongings and all of them should have the same rights, and those who claim that justice is the way to peace (which I unfortunately believe is an illusion) should realize that all these rights in that case must be satisfied simultaneously. Israel can only gain from justice being made, but it's not going to happen. My fathers parental home in Hungary was plundered when his family was deported to Auschwitz, and he never received a penny compensation. In Poland the value of the real estate alone, that was stolen from Jews during the war, is estimated to $30 billions. Not a nickle there either. In the Arab world huge assets were confiscated, especially in Baghdad. Guess how much compensation has been paid from there...

Scenario 2) Israel is to blame because they should never have expelled the Palestinians. After 28 years of Arab terror, in the middle of a fierce war, in which the Arabs brag about the bloodbath they're about to make, when the largest Jewish city (Jerusalem) is surrounded and besieged and the Jews there lack necessities, when Jews are thrown out of Hebron and Gaza, when Israel for its mere survival is forced to depend on voluntary crews flying in disassembled howitzers and Messerchmitts from Czechia, then you're expected to...well, what? To set up courts and try each Arab individually?

And why war in the first place, you think? The brown (after the colour of the nazis shirts) left is fond of picturing the UN partition plan of 1947 as being deeply unfair. The Jews were given 55% of Palestine. Lucky for the brown left, not many people have the energy to read the partition plan. The Jewish state (not the Jews) was allotted 55%, of which most was (and is) unarable desert. But the important thing is that no land at all was to change owners. The borders were drawn with respect to demography. Arabs in Israel were to stay and keep their land, Jews in the Arab state were to stay and keep their land. Does that sound unfair? Maybe the Arabs were afraid that the Jews would treat them the way Jews were treated in Arab countries...

So forgive me for not being upset when Amnesty reports:

...there are families of 10 who are forced to live in a single room. The homes often consist of barracks out of corrugated sheet metal without proper roofs, ventilation or sanitary facilities.

Here is a picture of a Jewish refugee camp in Israel in the 50s:

I mentioned in an earlier post that Israels former president, Moshe Katsav, is a refugee from Iran. He lived in a tent camp like this, and his baby brother, Zion, drowned two months old, when the tent camp was flooded. But who knows about such things in Sweden? Hardly anyone, because Jews are never refugees in the eyes of our leftist media.

Saving the oceans

Markus Hoffman, agronomist at LRF, wrote in Brännpunkt about the Baltic Marine Environment Protection Commissions meeting.

The oceans are severely threatened. I mentioned some measures that I think ought to be included in the debate:

• Construct wetlands! They are a good way to capture nitrogen, particles and phospor before the water reaches the ocean. Wetlands also have a high biodiversity.
• Cultivate mussels! Mussels clean the ocean water, and they are nutritious.
• Harvest filamentous algae! By removing the algae before they are degraded, we can counter the problem of oxygen depletion. The algae can also be used in various ways.
• Less fishing! Of course.

Sicko Gothenburg

I realize that translating everything I write is too time consuming. Therefore I will shorten some parts here and there.

Roland Poirier Martinsson in todays Expressen discusses Michael Moores film Sicko, the American health insurance system and, above all, the (non-)reporting about Moores film that goes on in Swedish media.

If you disregard the most one-eyed fans, it's today commonly accepted that Michael Moore uses lies too eagerly for his films to be trustworthy. This observation has nothing to do with his political standpoint. That his role has switched from that of the debater to that of the joker and is moving towards that of the clown is entirely a consequence of Moores juggling during the cutting of his films. It's strange that this development seems to have gone unnoticed by Swedish journalists. You get the impression that they, instead of critically examining the bluffer Moores contribution to the debate, rejoice over it and want to spread it.

Martinsson thinks that what should have been reporting about a film (that should have been a documentary), instead has become a splendid opportunity for the leftist Swedish media elite to argue against privatization in the health care sector.

Hear a few examples from the news:

SvDs Anna-Lena Haverdahl writes that Moores
film ”should send shock waves” to Europe, since it shows how bad it can ”get if private profit-making entirely rule health care”.

Aftonbladets Wolfgang Hansson
is afraid of a Swedish import of the sickest health care in the world - if it comes here "we're in trouble".

Expressen directs a question to Social minister Göran Hägglund in connection to the opening of the film: ”What do you have to say to those who are worried that Sweden is moving in the direction of the USA?"

SVTs Agenda claims that Sicko ”shakes up the debate about public or private health care in Sweden”.

Kalla Fakta, TV4, makes a note that Sicko ”with its disclosures of the flaws in the private health care has shook the USA”.

TT describes the topic of the film as a "struggle between good and evil" - guess where you find the evil?

The same drift is repeated almost everywhere. I left many examples out.

The problem with American health care is, according to Martinsson, not in the privatized health care, but in the health insurance system (read his article).

I myself have in several rounds worked in the Swedish health care (as late as this year). In the Swedish post I give a glimpse of what it looks like where I worked the last time, at a home for 7 mentally handicapped people in Gothenburg.

What I expose is

• ineffectivity. Most of the day you actually do nothing at all.
• laziness. Some things that need to be done are left unattended, just because the personnel is lazy.
• chaotic lack of personnel. People call in sick very often, due to private problems.
• nonchalance. Sometimes they don't call in sick, they just don't bother to come.
• fraud. Some persons are entitled to personal assistance by the Social Insurance of Sweden. Money is paid to the care administration from the Social Insurance of Sweden, in compensation for the personal assistance that these persons have received. In order to improve the economy, false reports of personal assistance are produced. Money received for no work performed...

I give three suggestions on how to improve the situation:

• Higher salaries, to get personnel.
• Cut down on personnel. There is very low work load.
• Fire people who don't do what they're being paid for. Unfortunately this can't be done in Sweden, because of our employment regulations.

I also give two links about Michael Moore:

Moorelies

Moorewatch

Selimovic is lying in our face

In todays editorial blog in SvD the director of the Radio Theatre, Jasenko Selimovic, replies to an earlier post by Per Gudmundson. It's about the radio play Between This Breath and You, by Naomi Wallace. The play is about a Jewish woman who has had lungs transplanted from a Palestinian killed in battle.
Gudmundson claimed that this is yet another variant of the ancient myth about Jews performing ritual murder. Selimovic denies this, saying:

Gudmundson has (according to what he says himself) not listened to the play, but is sure that this is an ”antisemitic play”. How can he be if he hasn't listened to it?

[...]

Nowhere, not in a single place, not in a single sentence does the play say anything about organ theft, nor does it say who would in that case do the stealing. The donated lungs of the main character might equally well have been donated perfectly legally as they might have been stolen, bought or whatever. The play just doesn't tell.

The very point with Wallaces Between This Breath and You, is namely to leave a hole for the listener to fill. And when information is left out, people usually fill that information gap with their own prejudice and worldview, just like Gudmundson does. By putting together some second-hand information and other peoples interpretations of the play with his own worldview, he draws bizarre conclusions and sees ghosts where there are none. His way to approach this play is a perfect example of how prejudice arises. A piece of information, that never was uttered, about where the organs in the play came from, is turned into ”organ theft”, background information about the origin of the play is turned into ”a story of how Israel steals organs from Palestinians”, and everything ends in accusations of ”antisemitism”. Shouldn't Gudmundson demand of himself to check the material before he makes such wide interpretations and accuses somebody like he does?

[...]

The Radio Theatre has, on its web page, somewhat clumsily and misfortunately formulated the background of the play, and has therefore removed the sentence. Not because we discovered that we're antisemitic, but because a misfortunate formulation should be corrected. This still doesn't give Gudmundson the right to blindly drop accusations of antisemitism in a play he hasn't listened to.

Apparently no claim has been made about organ theft. That part has been fantasized by Gudmundsons subconscious antisemitism!

...or?

This is what could be read at SRs web page (link removed by SR) on October 7:

Between This Breath and You is about the conflict between Israel and Palestine and is based on the disclosure that corpses of Palestinians killed in battle have been transported away and secretly used for organ donations to Israeli patients.

And this is what Selimovic calls "clumsily and misfortunately formulated", but not at all a claim of organ theft.

Lessing as roundabout dog - The Academy in rage!

I venture to publish a cartoon with Doris Lessing as a roundabout dog. What a sacrilege, huh?




Now i expect to see the Swedish Academy run amuck, with Horace up front!

Benny Morris on a visit to Sweden

The Israeli professor of history Benny Morris will hold an open lecture in Gothenburg on Tuesday. Morris is both loved and hated for his historic research on the Arab-Israeli conflict. He has revealed truths uncomfortable for both Israeli and Arab official versions of history. This will be interesting!

Gothenburg: Tuesday October 16

Time: 6.15 PM – 8.00 PM
Göteborg University, Room: Linnésalen in Mediahuset (=Media house),
Open lecture: Recent Israeli-Palestine history (Camp David, the intifadas).
Seminariegatan 1B Göteborg

Stockholm: Wednesday Oktober 17

Time: 2.30 PM-3.30 PM
Stockholm University, Dep. for Middle Eastern Studies
Invites to an open discussion with Benny Morris
Place: Kräftriket House 3 Room 3:239

For trade: Alliance minister for Opposition policy

In yesterdays SvD and DN Peter Eriksson says that his first hand choice in the next elections will be an alliance between the Green Party and the Social Democratic Party, that is without the Left Party. The reason is that Peter Eriksson has been touched by a little common sense, and realized which unpleasant characters that the Left Party consists of, which is reflected in their politics.

I willingly admit that I have earlier voted for the Green Party, for the simple reason that they have the best environmental policy, and environmental issues are the most important ones. Unfortunately a sound environmental policy often goes hand in hand with unsound policies in other areas, and this is an international phenomenon. With lunatics such as Per Gahrton in the party, I no longer can vote green with a good conscience. Since more than a year I have been a member of the Liberal Peoples Party.

Peter Eriksson comments on the energy policy that is needed in order for the world not to go down the pan:

–It takes political decisions. We're talking about a gigantic change, rather like when we took the step from an agricultural to an industrial society.

He's quite right there. On the other hand he overestimates the previous governments environmental policy in his comment on the "climate package" with increased taxes on carbon dioxide that the Alliance for Sweden has presented:

–There's a difference between moving ahead against the wind, like we did, and standing still when there is no wind, like they do now.

There is no reason why a sound environmental policy should be monopolized by foreign political maniacs. Therefore the Alliance for Sweden hereby wishes to do a trade:

For trade: Alliance minister for Opposition policy

We have: A Minister who went astray into the wrong political block. Shows all signs of fitting the Social Democrats like hand in a glove:

• Bribable
• Dismisses the islamist threat with the words"And far away in the mountains of Waziristan sits – so I'm told – a sheik and urges hatefully to violent terror against all the forces of openness, democratization and globalization that threat to undermine the nostalgic world of his closed ideas." (The Swedish Institute of International Affairs, December 19 2006)
  
• Wants to continue to shower the Palestinians with money
• Gladly makes business with nasty regimes, such as Sudan and Russia

We want: An environmental policy worthy of the name. Like the Green Partys, preferably even better.

English version

This English version of my Swedish blog has just been released. Earlier posts have been translated, but the dates differ from the Swedish version. To go to the Swedish blog, follow the link to the right.

Dead week?

For the moment I'm in California, and therefore I'll probably not write anything until next week, unless som really hot topic turns up. On request I'll soon launch an English verion of the blog. Keep your eyes open!

Boycott Iran!

Today there are reports about Iran's president Ahmadinejad's speech at Columbia University. Tickets to the event apparently disappeared like butter in sunshine. So, what did he have to say to enrich the students? Well, he informed them that there are no homosexuals in Iran. It would probably be premature to contradict him on that point without having proof for the opposite (in that case Bulten i Bo [infamous Swedish blog stalker] would probably appear out of nowhere and demand evidence for the existence of Iranian gays and/or lesbians)...let's just state that the two Iranian boys in the below picture, 16 and 18 years old, who were executed in the city of Maashad for being homosexual, might have been the last gays in Iran.

Further he informed us that Iran's nuclear technology program solely has peaceful purposes. A couple of months ago I listened to the member of parliament for the party Moderaterna, and member of the Council of Europe Göran Lindblad. He told us that he, at a meeting with the IAEA, had met a French expert in nuclear technology who explained what differs civilian nuclear technology from military, and that Iran's program is 100% military.

Ahmadinejad also admitted that the Holocaust might have happened. There was such an uproar over some cartoons in the Danish Jyllands-Posten a while ago, anybody remembers? Since it was so obvious that Jews were behind this horrible provocation, an international cartoon contest was announced in Iran on the Holocaust topic. Now Ahmadinejad claims that he only wonders what the Holocaust, if it really happened, has to do with the Palestinians.

On April 24 2006 Ahmadinejad said in a speech that the Jews of Israel should return to their fatherlands in Europe. Many, among them islamologist Jan Hjärpe, thought that Ahmadinejad made a good point there. For those who are aware that half of Israel's Jewish population has it's roots in Muslim countries, and that Ahmadinejad's Israeli presidential colleague at the time of his speech, Moshe Katsav, himself is a refugee from Iran, the comment made no sense at all.

Not a day too soon!

Both DN and SvD report that Israel has decided to regard the Gaza strip as a "hostile entity".

- This move will prepare the groundwork for sanctions against Gaza, such as the interruption of gas, electricity and water supply, which will occur in a gradual process, said an unnamed Israeli government official.

It's about time! Let someone else supply the Gaza strip. The entire world (except for the oil-rich Arab countries) stands in line to shower the Palestinians with economic aid. The Palestinians are the No. 1 receivers of foreign aid per capita throughout history, without ever having been close to the economic bottom layer. And the consequences? Well, have a look at the following graph from CAMERA (Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America).

These statistics do not mean that foreign aid causes violence; but they do raise questions about the effectiveness of using foreign donations to promote moderation and combat terrorism. The graphs reveal that the increased budgetary aid to the Palestinian government after the start of the second Intifada in September 2000 was accompanied by a corresponding increase in the number of Palestinian homicides in 2001 and 2002. After mid-2002, Israeli countermeasures against suicide bombers began to reduce the number of Israeli dead. By August 2003, the first portion of the security barrier was in place, leading to a rapid decline in homicides in 2003. The appointment of Salam Fayyad, a moderate technocrat, to the finance ministry in late 2002 also resulted in reduced aid as Israeli tax revenue was restored to the Palestinian government. While Israeli countermeasures reduced the number of Israeli victims, Palestinian factional violence took an ever increasing toll. When including Palestinian victims of Palestinian violence as well as Israeli victims, the correlation between aid and homicides continues beyond 2003.

Is anyone surprised? Can it be so simple that it takes money to acquire weapons, like for example the rockets that rain over Sderot every day, fired from the Gaza strip?

There are no longer any Jews in the Gaza strip. The long Jewish presence there was broken for the first time in 61 C.E., when the Romans expelled the Jews from the Gaza strip. They returned, but disappeared again in 1799, when Napoleon's forces brought with them a plague. Jews returned again in the 19th century, but were deported by the Turks during World War I. After the war Jews returned once more, but had to flee during the Arab persecutions of Jews in 1929. In 1946 the kibbutz Kfar Darom was founded, but the Jews had to flee again when the Gaza strip was occupied by Egypt in 1948. Israel occcupied the strip in the Six-Day War 1967, and the building of Jewish settlements started three years later. All these were evacuated in 2005.

The news values of nazis

All nazis aren't equally interesting in news reporting. If this is caused by the preferences of the editorial staffs, or of the news consumers, or both is best left unsaid. Yesterday SvD reported that a gang of nazis has been arrested in Israel.

Picture of the Israeli nazi gang.

A similar case was news bill material in Metro about a year ago. The nazis are Russians who immigrated to Israel and received citizenship in accordance with the Law of Return, which guarantees Israeli citizenship to Jews and persons with at least one Jewish grandparent.

It's obvious that the law leads to absurdities, but its purpose is honorable, and to abolish it would be madness. Israel's primary raison d'être is to protect Jews from the persecutions they are exposed to in Christian and Muslim countries. Similar Laws exist in Armenia, Bulgaria, China, Croatia, Finland, Germany, Greece, Hungary, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Kiribati, Lebanon, Poland, Romania, Russia, Rwanda, Serbia, Slovakia, South Korea, Spain, Turkey, and Ukraine.

Jackie Arklöf - ironic nazi.

The irony of nazis of Jewish origin as a phenomenon is hardly unnoticed by anyone, but it is not at all unique. Who doesn't remember the Swede Jackie Arklöf, who was a nazi and far from the Aryan ideal? And sure I can understand that it is amusing to revel in these absurd phenomena, even if they are marginal. Blond nazis with blue eyes are not as hot news material.

Unfortunately nazis aren't a marginal phenomenon in the Levant. They did de facto get an absolute majority in the Palestinian parliamentary elections. Read for example an excerpt from Hamas Charter, where the Jews (here only called "the Enemy") are accused of being behind both World Wars:

"Article Twenty-Two: The Powers which Support the Enemy
The enemies have been scheming for a long time, and they have consolidated their schemes, in order to achieve what they have achieved. They took advantage of key elements in unfolding events, and accumulated a huge and influential material wealth which they put to the service of implementing their dream. This wealth [permitted them to] take over control of the world media such as news agencies, the press, publication houses, broadcasting and the like. [They also used this] wealth to stir revolutions in various parts of the globe in order to fulfill their interests and pick the fruits. They stood behind the French and the Communist Revolutions and behind most of the revolutions we hear about here and there. They also used the money to establish clandestine organizations which are spreading around the world, in order to destroy societies and carry out Zionist interests. Such organizations are: the Freemasons, Rotary Clubs, Lions Clubs, B’nai B’rith and the like. All of them are destructive spying organizations. They also used the money to take over control of the Imperialist states and made them colonize many countries in order to exploit the wealth of those countries and spread their corruption therein. As regards local and world wars, it has come to pass and no one objects, that they stood behind World War I, so as to wipe out the Islamic Caliphate. They collected material gains and took control of many sources of wealth. They obtained the Balfour Declaration and established the League of Nations in order to rule the world by means of that organization. They also stood behind World War II, where they collected immense benefits from trading with war materials and prepared for the establishment of their state. They inspired the establishment of the United Nations and the Security Council to replace the League of Nations, in order to rule the world by their intermediary. There was no war that broke out anywhere without their fingerprints on it"

Fatah's lively youth movement.

Hezbollah have the same salute...

...as do Arafat's supporters.

This party got more than half of the votes. The second largest party, Fatah, isn't much better. The Hitler salute has been adopted by their youth movement, as well as by Hezbollah.

After World War II many nazis found a refuge in Arab countries. Worst was Syria, where Alois Brunner is still believed to live and prosper.

But Nazism had a stronghold in the Arab countries even before the war. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, assisted in recruiting Muslims in the Balkans to the SS during the war.

On June 1-2 1941 several hundreds of Jews were murdered in Baghdad in a nazi (Arab) pogrom, known as the Farhud.

There are more examples that all have one thing in common - they occurred long before there was a single Palestinian refugee.

One should respect each others religion and exterminate the Jews

During Friday prayer in the mosque in Södermalm, imam Ben Mahmoud Rahmeh preached, apropos roundabout dogs, that "God has a humiliating punishment prepared for those who smear the prophet". Most of the mosque visitors that SvD talks to want to legislate against mocking with the prophet Muhammad.

Actually it shouldn't be necessary. One should respect each others religion and show concern for each others feelings. But the caricatures show that legislation is necessary, says Sofia el Masry.

This demand is heard from the very same mosque that sold cassette tapes with requests for genocide. Among other things, the cassette tapes said (in translation):

”Oh, God, exterminate the Jews, Oh God, exterminate the Jews, Oh God, exterminate the Jews! Oh, God, curse them and expel them and let them be whipped by suffering. Oh God of heaven and earth!”

This was not illegal, according to Chancellor of Justice, Göran Lambertz. Roundabout dogs are of course a more serious issue, since the billion Muslims who feel insulted control most of the worlds oil resources.

Continued rocket rain over Jewish refugee camp

It's been awfully quiet concerning Mona Sahlins PR tour in the Middle East. What is she doing there? Nobody knows...least of all herself, I'd guess. The only report I saw is that MS at first refused to say whether she would meet with representatives of Hamas during her trip, and later said that she wouldn't.

Until she ended up in the never-ending rocket rain over Sderot.

Sderot was originally a tent camp that in the 50s housed Jewish refugees mainly from Kurdistan. Later on the camp had a majority of Jewish refugees from North Africa, especially from Morocco.

Sahlin had the same experience as a group of Muslim leaders from India, who recently visited Israel, who also ended up in the rocket rain over Sderot.