I've written about the Swedish organization Expo before, but it seems I have to do so again. As most of my readers know, I have been involved, along with several others, in a very public debate with Charles Johnson of the major American "anti-Jihad" blog Little Green Footballs. If it can indeed be called a debate, I'm not so sure. I can personally testify that pretty much everybody on "my side" of this issue has been tired of it for a very long time. Yet recently LGF again publicly attacked Gates of Vienna and The Brussels Journal, and Johnson has continued posting negative remarks about the website Atlas Shrugs.

I was not mentioned by name, but since I publish essays regularly at GoV and TBJ and will probably publish occasionally at AS in the future, it is tempting to treat attacks on these websites as attacks on me personally. If I have been slow in responding, this is because I am so tired of this nonsense that the mere thought of getting involved once again almost makes me feel physically ill. After thinking about it, I have decided I will respond after all. First of all because it annoys me to see good, honorable and decent individuals being unfairly demonized in this way, but also because ignoring such attacks, which was my initial reaction, leaves the impression that you are an easy target for bullying. I'm not an easy target, and I will thus respond once again, against my better judgment, to give my side of the story.

The state-sponsored organization Expo has been treated as a credible source of information by LGF regarding Swedish politics, and was on at least one occasion linked to approvingly. One of the co-founders of Expo, Tobias Hübinette, wrote this in 1996:

To feel and even think that the white race is inferior in every conceivable way is natural with regards to its history and current actions. Let the Western countries of the white race perish in blood and suffering. Long live the multicultural, racially mixed and classless ecological society! Long live anarchy!

According to his CV, Tobias Hübinette worked for Expo until at least 1997. In other words, he continued doing research for this "anti-racist" organization after having publicly advocated the extermination of all whites and the violent destruction of an entire civilization. Hübinette has continued promoting "Multiculturalism," even received awards, and is currently working for the Multicultural Centre of Botkyrka, Sweden. To some, "Multiculturalism" apparently means "death to white people and their culture," nothing more and nothing less.

The founder and editor of Expo magazine from 1995 until his death in November 2004, Stieg Larsson, worked with Hübinette for years. Expo's material has been reprinted by leading newspapers Expressen and Aftonbladet. Larsson left behind three unpublished thrillers which have become major bestsellers after his death, in Sweden and beyond. And by bestsellers I mean a Scandinavian equivalent of the Da Vinci Code. I have read several articles in the mainstream media about Larsson's life, and they all left out his collaboration with Hübinette. Apparently, working closely with a person calling for the mass murder of your people is of such little significance that it doesn't even deserve to be mentioned in a single sentence.

Also in Sweden, Antifascistisk Aktion (AFA), a group that supposedly fights against "racists," openly brag about numerous physical attacks against persons with their full name and address published on their website. How come AFA gets away with their violent, extra-legal activities for years without being stopped by the authorities? Is it possible that the political elites find them to be a useful tool against dissidents who criticize mass immigration? The thugs of AFA in the spring of 2008 destroyed the car of a 90-year-old woman and wrote "nasse" (Nazi) on top of it. As it turned out, they picked the wrong car, but who cares? It's all for a "good cause."

Leading national newspaper Aftonbladet has close ideological ties to the Social Democrats, the country's dominant party for most of the past century. Helle Klein, political editor-in-chief from 2001 to 2007, is a former leading member of the Social Democratic Youth League. During a demonstration organized by Islamic and anti-racist organizations in December 2006, Klein stood in front of a banner which read "A Sweden for all – Stop the Nazi violence" and held a speech warning against Islamophobia in the media. Klein has voiced strong sympathy for terrorist organization Hamas in her editorials, while warning against the threat to world peace posed by Israeli aggression and the Christian Zionist Right in the USA. She still blogged at Aftonbladet's website as of April 2008.

One of her fellow columnists at Aftonbladet, the long-time Communist Robert Aschberg, is the publisher of Expo magazine. Leading Expo member Charles Westin in October 2007 published the book Brunt! ("brown," as in "Fascist"), where he let members of AFA contribute some of their intelligence regarding "right-wing extremists." In addition to Mr. Westin, the book was co-authored by Mats Deland, who is a journalist in Aftonbladet. Why is it considered OK that a representative of one of Scandinavia's largest newspapers, with close ties to the country's largest political party, thus cooperates openly with an organization known for physically assaulting members of a legal opposition party, even in their private homes?

News website The Local states that members of the only significant (but still small) party in Sweden critical of mass immigration live under constant threat of violence. Sweden is witnessing the greatest explosion of street violence in its history, and a woman is raped every two hours. The organization Expo, which receives backing from the media and the major political parties, has been campaigning against the party known as the Sweden Democrats for years. Expo's Daniel Poohl states that it's "not undemocratic" to deny the SD access to political influence.

Expo has ties to extreme left-wing organizations. For instance, one current member of their staff, Kenny Hjälte, was until recently an active member of the Left Party, the "reformed" Communist party. Just how "reformed" this party is has been a matter of some controversy. Their leader Lars Ohly called himself a "Leninist" as late as 1999, a decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall. A few years later, following media exposure regarding his party's links with the repressive regimes of Eastern Europe during the Cold War, he said that he would no longer call himself a Communist, but he still supported the Marxist ideals of a classless society.

The seminar "Arguments against the Sweden Democrats" in October 2007 was moderated by a person representing Internationalen, the newspaper of Socialistiska partiet, the representatives of Trotskyist Communists in Sweden. It was co-organized by Arbetaren ("The Worker"), a Socialist newspaper, with Kajsa Lindohf from Expo and journalist Mats Deland as participants. Several prominent Swedes have a background from Arbetaren, among them the author and columnist Liza Marklund. She cooperates professionally with journalist and author Jan Guillou, whose first book about the fictional character Arn Magnusson, placed during the Crusades (with a heavy and predictable anti-Christian and pro-Islamic bias), in 2007 was turned into the most expensive film production in Scandinavian history.

Jan Guillou refused to honor the victims of the Jihadist attacks of September 11, 2001 with three minutes of silence because the attacks were "an attack on U.S. imperialism." Responding to a study showing a vastly disproportionate amount of Left Party (former Communist party) supporters among journalists, the Socialist Jan Guillou admitted that "The statistics are true." Guillou has boasted about the fact that unlike their neighbors, Sweden doesn't have a significant political party critical of Muslim immigration. This is, according to him, because the intellectuals have stuck together to prevent such "Islamophobia and racism" from gaining ground. It is curious that he thus brags about curtailing freedom of speech regarding mass immigration, since from 2000 to 2004 he was the chairman of the Swedish Publicists' Association, which is supposedly dedicated to free speech in the mass media.

To provide some perspective on just how biased the Swedish political and media establishment is, here is a blog post from February 2008 by the Scandinavia-based American writer Bruce Bawer, author of the international bestseller While Europe Slept:

"Dagens Nyheter, Sweden's largest newspaper, contains a piece by Andreas Malm about While Europe Slept, Bat Yeor's Eurabia, Walter Laqueur's Last Days of Europe, and Mark Steyn's America Alone. (But mostly about While Europe Slept.) It's more of the usual mischief: instead of seriously addressing the facts and analyses in these books, Malm is regally dismissive and derisive, relentlessly mocking the authors and caricaturing their arguments."

Who is Mr. Malm? He's "a former member of Syndicalist Youth (no, it's not a Swedish boy band), a regular contributor to a syndicalist weekly called Arbetaren, and a founder of the Swedish branch of the International Solidarity Movement. A couple of years ago he wrote a piece for Expressen explaining why he supports Hizbollah. In this corner of the world, it's only par for the course for a major newspaper to invite a person with such a résumé to write about books like While Europe Slept."

The Syndicalist Youth see themselves as a part of the "revolutionary Left" and champion a "stateless and classless" society. They are passionate supporters of the Palestinian intifada because it "shows the way for the millions of workers in the West and for us revolutionaries who are fighting in the heart" of "US-led imperialism." As journalist Jens Tomas Anfindsen notes, it is difficult to believe that a person with such a history of revolutionary activism could be awarded a steady job in Sweden's "paper of record" unless they knew about his background and maybe considered it an asset. Dagens Nyheter is considered a "center-right" newspaper by local standards. An open supporter of the Islamic terrorist organization Hizbollah and of a global stateless world thus gets to write about "Islamophobia" in one of the country's leading "conservative" newspapers.

Notice that this rabidly anti-Israeli and anti-American individual has written extensively for the extreme left-wing newspaper Arbetaren. This newspaper was referred to as "recommended reading" by Expo's website as late as early 2008.

When Andreas Malm wrote about the "Islamophobia" of Bruce Bawer, Bat Ye'or and Mark Steyn, he was echoing an article written by Expo. Late in 2007, Expo released a publication [pdf, in Swedish] entitled "The war against Islam," in which they worried about an increasing trend towards "organized Islamophobia" in the West. They specifically singled out the Brussels anti-Jihad conference of October 2007 for attention, and compared criticism of Communism, which has killed perhaps one hundred million people, to criticism of Islam. Expo's founder Stieg Larsson was pro-Communist and met his future wife during a support meeting for the pro-Communist National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam.

The article continues with the description of Islamophobic blogs: "Texts that should be banned, about how Muslims cannot adjust [to our societies] and how politicians are doing Islam's bidding, are being published daily." Expo focuses their attention on Scandinavian blogs, but they do mention a few international blogs, especially Gates of Vienna and Little Green Footballs. LGF is described as a central website in a network of nasty, Islamophobic blogs with comments that should probably be banned. LGF responds by treating Expo as a credible source of unbiased information.

This is not the only time this has happened. The Norwegian blogger Øyvind Strømmen, a third-rate Islam apologist in the tradition of Karen Armstrong, has been repeatedly and enthusiastically linked to by LGF. The pro-Islamic writer Strømmen has ridiculed virtually every leading anti-Jihadist, from Ibn Warraq, Ali Sina, Daniel Pipes, Oriana Fallaci and Bruce Bawer to Robert Spencer's Jihad Watch and even Little Green Footballs for years. He has called Bat Ye'or an "enabler of Fascism" for her "Islamophobic" writings about Eurabian "conspiracy theories." He even repeated some of these allegations in comments at LGF, and received some support from Charles Johnson in his views on Eurabian "conspiracy theories."

Bat Ye'or in her book about Eurabia has documented how European leaders have for years been quietly planning to merge Europe with the Islamic world. This has been denounced as a "conspiracy theory," yet only a few months ago the British Foreign Minister David Miliband said openly that the European Union should expand to include the Muslim Middle East and North Africa. Now French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel are saying virtually the same thing. The greatest betrayal in European history is fact, not fiction. Does LGF stand by the claim that the deliberate creation of Eurabia is exaggerated?

Expo's website links to several EU organs and Eurabian networks that are specifically designed to stifle any debate about mass immigration in general and Muslim immigration in particular. Expo has received considerable funding from EU-sponsored institutions which cooperate with similar organizations all over Europe, from Britain via Germany to Italy and Portugal. In their article about Islamophobia, Expo says that "with a promise of respect for human rights and a clear pro-Israeli policy, right-wing populists and right-wing extremists are welcomed into the fold." So, one of the hallmarks of these "extremists" is that they have a pro-Israeli policy.

On the International Women's Day, March 8 2008, the columnist Marte Michelet in the left-wing pro-Multicultural Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet attacked "brown" Feminists. And no, by that she did not mean Feminists with a dark skin, but those championing "Fascist," racist and Islamophobic forces. Among those attacked was the organization Human Rights Service, led by Hege Storhaug. HRS has for years warned against the spread of sharia in the West and tirelessly championed the rights of Muslim immigrant women, and they are hated passionately by the left-wing intelligentsia for this. The person doing the country report for Norway during the Brussels counter-Jihad conference represented this organization.

After Ms. Michelet got many angry responses from readers who are fed-up with Islam, she wrote another article arguing that "Islamophobia is the most dangerous ideology of our time." She singled out the Brussels conference as a worrisome event and referred to Expo's work in Sweden. According to her, "The main speaker at last year's conference in Brussels was the amateur historian Bat Ye'or, the author of the Islamophobic Bible, the book Eurabia, which warns of a Muslim conspiracy against Europe. The book is probably as trustworthy as the anti-Semitic idea of the Jewish conspiracy ZOG."

Dagbladet's regular cartoonist Finn Graff in 2006 published a cartoon depicting Israel's PM Olmert as Nazi concentration camp commander Amon Göth. The scene came from the movie Schindler's List, in which the commander shoots down a Jew from his balcony. The same Graff refused to draw Muhammad, out of "respect." This newspaper has a position regarding the Brussels Conference which is similar to that of Little Green Footballs.

Columnist Marte Michelet is the daughter of the Communist writer Jon Michelet and was until 1998 the leader of the Red Youth, the country's "revolutionary youth league." For my part, I find it very interesting how many Marxist Feminists, who have for generations worked to break down Christianity and the nuclear family in the West, now passionately embrace Islam, the most repressive religion on earth. Marxists do not care about "women's liberty." They do not care about anybody's liberty. They support anything that can destabilize the West. The fact that a newspaper that has been at the forefront of radical Feminism for generations now suddenly warns against "Islamophobia" and "prejudice" against the world's most anti-female religion is highly revealing.

Sweden has witnessed an enormous rise in the number of rapes, in the ballpark of 400-500% in little more than one generation. In an article from June 2007 with the title "Summertime – rape time," left-wing newspaper Aftonbladet linked the spike in rapes during the summer to the warm weather. If this is true, I suppose the unprecedented Scandinavian rape wave is caused by global warming? The most common explanation for this cited by the media is that it is a technical increase due to the fact that more women than before report rapes to the police. Men from countries such as Algeria, Libya, Morocco and Tunisia dominate the group of rape suspects.

In a rare article published on the subject, a Muslim immigrant explained why. "It is not as wrong raping a Swedish girl as raping an Arab girl," says Hamid. "The Swedish girl gets a lot of help afterwards, and she had probably fucked before, anyway. But the Arab girl will get problems with her family. For her, being raped is a source of shame. It is important that she retains her virginity until she marries." It was no coincidence that it was a Swedish girl that was gang raped by immigrants in Rissne. "It is far too easy to get a Swedish whore…… girl, I mean;" says Hamid, and laughs over his own choice of words. "I don't have too much respect for Swedish girls. I guess you can say they get fucked to pieces."

In March 2007 during a rally supported by SSU, the youth league of the Social Democratic Party, a man carried a sign reading, "While Swedish girls are being gang raped by immigrant gangs the SSU is fighting racism." He was promptly arrested and later sentenced to a fine by the local court because he "expressed disrespect for a group of people with reference to their national or ethnic background." The court rejected the man's free speech argument because even free speech has its limits, and he had clearly acted in a too provocative manner.

It is "racist" and thus illegal to suggest that certain groups, for instance Muslim men, are worse than others. If you criticize oppression of women, you should be careful to state that all men are equally bad, and that Western men are at least as bad as Muslim men. The Marxist politician (from those "reformed" Communists again) Gudrun Schyman in a 2002 speech famously posited that Swedish men were just like the Taliban. A male columnist in newspaper Aftonbladet immediately agreed with her.

In 2005, a TV program which caused some stir quoted Irene von Wachenfeldt, chairwoman of ROKS, The National Organization for Women's Shelters, as saying: "…when war breaks out, it is fully ok to use violence openly. I sometimes say that we are involved in a civil world war, a gender war. Men are animals." In the organization's magazine, the extreme Feminist Valeria Solana was hailed in a review. She writes in her manifesto: "To call a man an animal is to flatter him: He is a machine, a walking dildo, a biological mishap." In the TV documentary, Irene von Wachenfelt was asked whether she agreed with Solana, and she did. ROKS has received millions of dollars in public funding. In Sweden, you cannot say that certain ethnic groups are more involved in crime than others. That's hateful and banned by law. But you can say that all men are animals, and you will get state support for doing so.

Regarding my own views, I have suggested that Ayaan Hirsi Ali should receive the Nobel Peace Prize. As alternatives I mentioned other former Muslims such as Ibn Warraq, Ali Sina and Wafa Sultan. I can also add Magdi Allam in Italy to this list, and I have great respect for Patrick Sookhdeo in Britain, whose book Global Jihad: The Future in the Face of Militant Islam should be considered required reading. Be sure also to read Ibn Warraq's excellent book Defending the West.

I have consistently been one of the most pro-Israeli bloggers on the European continent, and I will continue to be so. I have also suggested that Norwegian authorities should create a fund of a billion dollars or more (Norway is the world's third largest exporter of oil) earmarked for the defense of persons threatened for criticizing Islam. This fund could be called the Theo van Gogh Memorial Fund, or the Asma bint Marwan Memorial Fund after the poetess who was killed by Muhammad's followers 1400 years ago for mocking Islam, or perhaps the Charles Martel Foundation for Intercultural Understanding.

The irony is that at the same time as I was declared persona non grata at LGF and publicly compared to a well-known Nazi apologist by the blog owner, the German writer Udo Ulfkotte suggested that I am actually "an artificial figure (a team) created by the US Secret Service." Since I have such a colorful and diverse list of critics, I am considering putting up a hotline for all those who don't like me: "If you believe Fjordman is a closet Nazi, press 1. If you believe Fjordman is working for the CIA, press 2. If you're a radical Feminist and think Fjordman is a male chauvinist pig who is just as bad as the Taliban, press 3. If you're a Muslim and think Fjordman is an infidel Zionist pig and want to cut off his head, leave the death threats after the beep."

Finally, to the readers of Little Green Footballs, I would like to extend the following invitation: Andrew G. Bostom, author of the excellent The Legacy of Jihad, has asked me to do a review of his upcoming book The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism, which I will publish in early June. Before this, however, I intend to write about the causes of Christian anti-Semitism. I will publish the full essay about this at Atlas Shrugs, the website of the courageous Pamela Geller, but before I do that I will arrange a preliminary debate at the Gates of Vienna, most likely on Wednesday this week. You are welcome to join in.

 

See also:

Little Green Footballs and Racism in the United States, 1 November 2007