SWC To Swedish PM: Cancel 2020 International Conference On Anti-Semitism

November 5, 2019

Sweden permits open Nazi provocations and fails to act against anti-Semitism
 
LOS ANGELES-The Simon Wiesenthal Center (SWC), a leading Jewish Human Rights NGO dedicated to learning the lessons of the Nazi Holocaust, is calling on Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Löfven to cancel his country’s plans to host an international conference against anti-Semitism next year in Malmo, Sweden.
 
“The signals that Sweden’s politicians and police are consistently sending to the country’s tiny Jewish community is that inaction, apathy, and worse will continue unabated”, charged Rabbi Abraham Cooper, SWC Associate Dean and Director of Global Social Action Agenda.
 
“When neo-Nazis forced the closure of a Jewish community center in Umea, authorities did nothing,” Cooper added. “For nearly a decade, the City of Malmo failed to prosecute a single case of anti-Semitism despite hundreds of incidents targeting the local Rabbi. Sweden’s respected Karolinska hospital has failed to protect Jewish doctors from discrimination. Now, Nazis are permitted to gather and protest near Stockholm’s historic synagogue in a square named in honor of Raoul Wallenberg, the hero who saved tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews during the Nazi Holocaust.
 
“Synagogues continue to face violent attacks and threats in Europe and U.S., yet Swedish authorities continue to permit Nazis to gather in sight of the main Jewish house of prayer in the capital of its country. So the world knows that Sweden protects the rights of its Nazis to gather, march, and threaten. Until it shows that it respects and protects its Jewish citizens and institutions – under grave threat from Nazis and Islamist extremists -- Sweden has no right to score cheap PR points by convening a conference ‘bemoaning’ anti-Semitism.”

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The Simon Wiesenthal Center is one of the largest international Jewish human rights organizations with over 400,000 member families in the United States. It is an NGO at international agencies including the United Nations, UNESCO, the OSCE, the OAS, the Council of Europe and the Latin American Parliament (Parlatino).