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Wednesday, March 18, 2015

Gangs of haters intimidating Swedish store-owners to drop Israeli products

From Sweden's "Isolate Israel" BDS site:

Join Malmö’s Apartheid Inspectors when they visit stores and companies around Malmö to investigate dangerous levels of apartheid-supporting products! Support the inspectors to inform shop-owners and consumers on how they through consumer-boycott can push for apartheid-free zones.
What comes next - death threats? Firebombs?

Luckily, Swedish commentators are coming out against this.

Luke Berggren writing in Varlden Idag says:

Scary rhetoric is being used, which is unfortunately reminiscent back to the 30s. "Support inspectors in their efforts to inform shopkeepers and consumers about how they can promote the apartheid-free zones through consumer boycott." In practice, this will disadvantage Jewish businesses in Israel. There seems to be no distinction between Israel Criticism and pure hatred of Jews. Talk about apartheid.

Many shopkeepers will be pressured to not buy Israeli goods. Let us do the opposite. Ask your retailer for Israeli goods. And buy Israeli goods. Boycotts of this kind suffered by Jews and is another worrying sign of the growing anti-Semitism. We can not accept this.

And more:

Member of Parliament Hanif Bali says that he hopes that the BDS movement's various operations in Malmö should not threaten the city's Jews.

"I can only hope that their different opinions do not go out to Malmö's Jewish population, which has happened before. Historically, the left has had difficulty distinguishing criticism of the state of Israel with pure racism against Jews...".

Hanif Bali also questioned what designates Israel as an "apartheid state".

"Apartheid is based on an ethnic specific legislation, that it would treat the Israelis by Palestinian background differently, and that does not happen. Certainly there is discrimination, but we have that in Sweden too, but we do call it apartheid."

(h/t @eu_jew)