‘Sex Offender Network in the Swedish Elite’ -Truth, mistake or lie?

mainstream Sweden chooses to stay with its past libelous lies

 and to keep silent about the truth

Some stories below are not new, but the question revives again and again, particularly about reports about Israel: what is the due diligence required from the media before publishing a capital accusation? Is this due diligence properly done? How corrections should be published?

What would you think while reading this in your paper: ‘A sex offender network consisting of prominent members of the Swedish elite has been revealed recently in Stockholm. In a country where child molesting had happened too many times in the past, as reported then by daily news and artistic literature alike, it still comes as a shock when undisclosed sources reveal a sex offender network consisting of parts of the Swedish elite, possibly involving past and present cabinet ministers, top Socialist Party functionaries and senior media figures - such as Aftonbladet editors.  Members of the network have allegedly organized and committed numerous child molestations, sexual offenses against children, and even rape of minors, down to the age of nine.'

Is it true; is it a mistake or a lie, or simply a different point of view? Answer: the details in the previous paragraph are totally unfounded, or to put it simply: are not true. The truisms in it would be true for any country. So this paragraph would actually be a lie. Fortunately this untrue statement would never be published as actual news in any responsible Swedish publication, such as a major daily paper, unless substantiated by evidence, at last partly.   Had it been published though, it would receive wide condemnations and huge, easy to win libel claims in Sweden. No judge, no government official, no journalist, only the craziest anarchists would protect such an unfounded libelous accusation in the name of ‘freedom of expression'.

But unfortunately this law-abiding self-constraint and commendable self-control do not seem to be norm for some in Sweden in case the objects of the accusations are not Swedes, but some lower species like once Jews used to be, and neo-Jews - Israelis - are seemingly considered until today in Sweden.  On 2009 August 18 the Swedish socialist paper Aftonbladet published an article by a certain Donald Boström, an extreme left pro-Palestinian activist - as is its section's editor herself - about Israel killing Palestinians in order to sell their organs.  Another large Swedish daily, Dagens Nyheter, qualified Aftonbladet's article as a scandalous unprofessional libel lacking any evidence. But the Swedish government and Foreign Minister Carl Bildt declined to condemn the unfounded accusations "in the name of freedom of expression".  We'd like to consider this as a naïve mistake, committed by a misled first-timer in this field. But the same pattern has been repeated too many times in Sweden to take it still for a naïve mistake.  First comes always a loud accusation of Israel with a capital crime.  Then, after the accusation slowly, amidst the defamation and moral agony of Israel turns out to be a mistake or a deliberate lie, comes a Swedish - silence; or hardly audible partial correction. The victims of the libel are left besmirched and broken, the offenders walk away unharmed and can start to organize their next campaign.  

Let's see two major past examples out of great many similar cases.

In April 2002 most of the Swedish media and politicians distributed widely the unchecked accusation of Israel with ‘the Jenin massacre of 500 Palestinian civilians'. The world soon realized that this accusation was a straightforward Palestinian lie picked up irresponsibly by rating-greedy media - and stopped the campaign. Swedish media and politicians were among the last ones in the world to do so. Even after the UN's Jenin report published in August 2002 stated beyond doubts that "there was no massacre whatsoever in Jenin... 52 Palestinians were killed, mostly young men in arms" - Swedish denials of previous accusations remained weak, apologies unheard, and a Swedish soul-search why they served a blood libel so diligently - has never been done.

Another example is the Swedish Muhammad Al-Dura story. Sweden was very active all along since 2000 to air and spread the tragic short Mohammed Al-Durra video which seemingly showed the heart-breaking death of a Palestinian boy and declared as if it was done by Israel. For years the first publisher France-2 TV effectively obstructed the truth, but in 2007 the Paris Court of Appeals demanded to see the full raw footage behind the known 1-minute long video. Not a single frame in the raw footage showed any involvement of Israelis! The published video was found heavily manipulated, the sole eye-witness Palestinian cameraman unreliable, and so on May 21, 2008 the Court decided that the Muhammad Al-Dura video can be lawfully called a "forgery", a "lie", a "fully staged fake" by the defendant.  However, Swedish media and public figures did not report about this dramatic finding; the collapse of one more libelous anti-Israeli lie. After millions of repetitions of the false accusations of Israel in Swedish, as Google searches show, very few only reported in Swedish - the writer of these lines among them - about the Paris Court revelations that the Al-Dura video was a forgery. Mainstream Sweden has chosen to stay with its past libelous lies and to keep silent about the truth.

In the present case of medieval style Swedish blood libel of killing for organ sales, Israel is unduly besmirched again by a huge lie. Sweden likes to speak about its humanist traditions, and individual heroes like Raoul Wallenberg provided good reasons for that. But as Sweden used to be the greatest foreign supplier of arms and steel to Nazi Germany once, in recent years Sweden provides most generous funding and moral support to all Israel-demonizing NGO-s.

After Israel's recent painful but inevitable military operation against Hamas terror attacks the deceitful witch dance of some Swedish media has started again. So the question inevitably arises: are all the above libel cases merely random mistakes, or do they represent a systematic pattern of Sweden's complicity in blood libelous lies against Israel?

Sweden owes to Israel - and to itself - a thorough, sincere self-examination.

Endre (Andre) Mozes is founder chairman of Take-A-Pen, a fully volunteer international grass-roots organization acting for the truth about Israel in 19 languages, incl. Swedish.