A Swedish journalist donned a “kippah” (skullcap) and walked the streets of Malmo to get a first-hand account of what it was like to be a Jew in Sweden. The results were extremely disturbing.
A Swedish journalist who went to Malmo, Sweden, to check the attitudes there towards Jews was forced to flee after he was cursed and assaulted.
Petter Ljunggren walked the streets of Malmo wearing a kippah, a head covering that identified him as a Jew. The result was a 58-minute-long documentary, titled “Jew-Hatred in Malmo.”
Shmuel Goldberg, a Jew originally from New York who runs a restaurant in Malmo, described to Ljunggren what it was like to be a Jew living there. He is often spat at, and shouts of “Jew” and “Palestine” are regularly hurled at him.
Goldberg recounted an incident in which he was almost physically attacked. The attack was thwarted at the last moment by a woman who told him: “You’re going to get killed if you wear a kippah here.”
Ljunggren, after hearing these accounts, decided to test the waters himself, and he encountered similar treatment, walking the streets wearing a kippah and a Star of David necklace.
In one incident, while sitting in a cafe in Malmo reading a newspaper, several passersby began shouting anti-Semitic insults at him. Later, he saw a man beating his fist into his palm in a threatening gesture.
Ljunggren traveled to two different areas known to be anti-Jewish. At Lindangen Center a man, shocked to see a Jew in the area, warned him to leave. When he did, another person called him a “Jew swine.”
In Rosengard, a neighborhood heavily populated by Muslims, dozens of men screamed anti-Semitic slurs while throwing eggs at him from windows.
Ljunggren noted in the documentary that most of the perpetrators of these anti-Semitic incidents and attacks in Sweden were Muslims of Middle Eastern descent, and they used the Arab-Israeli context as a pretext for their anti-Semitism.
The journalist concluded that Jew hatred has become accepted practice in Sweden. One Muslim interviewee summed it up when he said: “It’s only basic to hate Jews.”
By: United with Israel Staff
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