The Nizkor Project: Remembering the Holocaust (Shoah)

Shofar FTP Archive File: places/sweden/stockholm.1192


Archive/File: fascism stockholm.1192
Last-Modified: 1993/10/26

Source: Boston Globe, 25 Nov 92

Jewish graves hit in Sweden

--------
Reuters
--------

STOCKHOLM - Vandals desecrated 52 graves and daubed some of them with
swastikas in an attack on a Jewish cemetary in Stockholm, police said
yesterday.

Leaders of the Jewish congregation on the Stockholm island of Sodra where
the cemetary is located said they believed Monday's attack was linked to a
"world anti-Zionist conference" scheduled to be held at a secret location in
Stockholm this weekend.

In Jerusalem, the foreign minister asked Sweden yesterday to ban the
conference, which is being arranged by an Islamic broadcaster, Ahmed Rami.

An Israeli official said the groups organizing the conference seek to revive
Nazism and to deny that the Nazi Holocaust that killed 6 million Jews
occurred.

=30=

Source: Jerusalem Post, Dec. 5 1992

`Anti-Zionist congress' moved from Sweden
Post staff and news agencies

STOCKHOLM -- a convicted racist who claimed to have invited 315 delegates to
an "anti-Zionist world congress" in Stockholm said last week he had decided
to move it, on two days notice, to another country.

The statement by Ahmed Rahmi, a Moroccan immigrant who has served a
six-month jail term for antisemitic radio broadcasts, came one day after
national news media began speculating that there was no congress.

Earlier in the day, Yad Vashem chairman Dr. Yosef Burg and director Dr.
Yitzhak Arad had cabled Swedish Prime Minister Karl Bildt denouncing the
congress. They said they were speaking in the name of Holocaust survivors
whose families perished in death camps the existence of which people like
Rahmi deny.

And Histadrut Secretary-General Haim Haberfeld wrote to Stig Malm, president
of the Swedish labor organization, urging him to pressure the government to
ban the meeting.

The organization of Children of Holocaust Survivors in Israel presented a
letter to the Swedish ambassador in which they described the event as "an
affront to every Jew in the world, and an insult to the host country."

Rahmi would not say where he intended to hold his congress. He said he was
moving it because it had been attacked in Swedish media.

Swedish police chief Bjorn Eriksson said last Wednesday he had "strong
doubts" that any congress was going to take place. He said police had no
indication that representatives from Hizbullah, Hamas, or any other group
Rahmi named were coming to Sweden. Only one person, Frenchman Robert
Faurisson, who argues that the Holocaust did not occur, had said he would
attend.

Salomo Berlinger, head of Stockholm's Jewish community, linked Rahmi's
announcement to two attacks on Jewish cemetaries last week, in which about
140 gravestones were toppled or painted with swastikas. Police reported an
unsuccessful attempt to break into a third cemetary.

Top Swedish politicians interruped a parliamentary debate to visit one of
the cemetaries, and condemned the proposed anti-Zionist congress.

Prime Minister Bildt, responding to requests to ban the affair or bar
delegates from entering Sweden, said after visiting the cemetary:   

"These people are sick. It is impostant that we rreact as people, and
repudiate them as  individuals... The government cannot act. It is the
police and the prosecutors who do that."

"Whether or not the conference of hate mongers and pseudo-scholars takes
place in Sweden, the damage has already been done," said Harry Wall, the
Anti-Defamation League's Israel director. "A Climate of intolerance is
sweeping Europe today which has fostered a wave of antisemitism and racism.
The possibility of an anti-Jewish, Holocaust-denying conference would not
have occurred just a few years ago."

=30=


Home ·  Site Map ·  What's New? ·  Search Nizkor

© The Nizkor Project, 1991-2012

This site is intended for educational purposes to teach about the Holocaust and to combat hatred. Any statements or excerpts found on this site are for educational purposes only.

As part of these educational purposes, Nizkor may include on this website materials, such as excerpts from the writings of racists and antisemites. Far from approving these writings, Nizkor condemns them and provides them so that its readers can learn the nature and extent of hate and antisemitic discourse. Nizkor urges the readers of these pages to condemn racist and hate speech in all of its forms and manifestations.