Sounds Familiar

Although rated as "Sweden's most eco-friendly city" by CNN, Malmo has undergone some significant changes.

Massive immigration has made Malmö today one quarter Muslim, and stands to transform it into a Muslim majority city within just a few decades. One of the most popular baby names is not Sven, but Mohammed. Pork has been taken off some school menus. Want to learn to drive? You can attend Malmö's own "Jihad Driving School."

But despite Malmö's usually placid appearance, this experiment in multiculturalism has not gone well. In the Rosengaard section of Malmö, a housing project made up primarily of immigrants, fire and emergency workers will no longer enter without police protection.

Unemployment in Rosengaard is reported to be 70 percent. An immigrant-fueled crime wave affects one of every three Malmö families each year. The number of rapes has tripled in 20 years.

But Malmö has been so accommodating toward immigrant Muslims that a local Muslim politician, Adly Abu Hajar, has declared that "The best Islamic state is Sweden!"

These changes, of course, are having predictable consequences.

Don't ask Malmö's Jews to give the city the same glowing assessment. Jews who dare walk the streets wearing their yarmulkes risk being beaten up.

"It's true. Jews cannot walk the streets of Malmö and show that they're Jews," said Lars Hedegaard.

Hedegaard lives across the water from Malmö in Copenhagen, Denmark, where he was a columnist for one of Denmark's largest newspapers. He says pro-Israel demonstrations in Malmö, like the ones during the fighting in Gaza earlier this year, were met with rocks, bottles and pipe bombs from Arabs and Leftists.

So, it should be no surprise when Ha'aretz reports that the Mayor of Malmo decries both Anti-Semitism and Zionism.

Swedish Jews are upset about comments made this week by the mayor of Malmo, who said anti-Semitism and Zionism were both forms of "unacceptable extremism," and urged local Jews to disassociate themselves from Israeli actions in the Gaza Strip.

"These statements and other events in Malmo are making the Jewish community feel very uncomfortable and some people, especially the young, are leaving the city," George Braun, the president of the Jewish community in Gothenburg, about 250 kilometers from Malmo, told Haaretz. Ilmar Reepalu, mayor of Malmo, Sweden's third largest city, spoke in an interview published in a Swedish newspaper on Wednesday, International Holocaust Remembrance Day. "We accept neither Zionism nor anti-Semitism," Reepalu said. "They are extremes who put themselves above other groups, seeing others as something lesser."

Wow. What an original idea. Anti-Semitism is equated with Pro-Semitism. Where have I heard this before?

Can a Great-Russian Marxist accept the slogan of a national Great-Russian culture? Of course not! Such a person would need to be placed among the nationalists, and not among the Marxists. Our business is to struggle against the national culture of the Great-Russians, the culture of the ruling Black Hundreds and bourgeoisie. Our task is to develop, in a purely international spirit, and in close alliance with the workers of other countries, those seeds of a democratic and working-class movement which are contained in our history also.

The same applies to the most oppressed and down-trodden nation, the Jews. Jewish national culture is the slogan of the Rabbis and the bourgeoisie—the slogan of our enemies. But there are other elements in Jewish culture and in the whole history of Jewry. Out of some 10½ million Jews in the world, a little more than half live in Galicia and Russia, backward and semi-barbarian countries which keep the Jews by force in the position of an outlawed caste. The other half live in the civilised world, where there is no caste segregation of the Jews. There the great and universally progressive features of Jewish culture have made themselves clearly felt; its internationalism, its responsiveness to the advanced movements of our times (the percentage of Jews in democratic and proletarian movements is everywhere higher than the percentage of Jews in the general population).

Whoever directly or otherwise puts forward the slogan of national culture (however well intentioned he may be) is the enemy of the proletariat, the defender of the old and caste element in Jewry, the tool of the Rabbis and of the bourgeoisie. On the contrary, those Jewish Marxists who join up in the international Marxist organisations with the Russian, Lithuanian, Ukrainian and other workers, adding their mite [sic] (both in Russian and in Jewish) to the creation of an international culture of the working-class movement, are continuing (in the teeth of Bundist separatism) the best traditions of Jewry, and struggling against the slogan of “national culture.”

Bourgeois nationalism and proletarian internationalism—here are two hostile and irreconcilable slogans, corresponding to the two great class camps throughout the capitalist world and reflecting two distinct policies—and, more than that, two philosophies—in the national question. By defending the slogan of national culture, and building upon it an entire plan and practical programme of so-called “cultural-national autonomy,” the Bundists in practice act as the propagators of bourgeois nationalism in the workers’ ranks.

The words of one V. Lenin, 1913. I guess Lenin forgot about the third half of the Jews who were living in the such parts of Terra Incognito like Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Egypt, Yemen, or Ethiopia. I wonder what Lenin would say about Russia playing footsies with the Mullahs (Islamic Rabbis) at the expense of the proletariat who dwell in Iran.

Meantime, I sure would like to hear the thoughts of the Mayor of Malmo on Jihadism or even Sha'ria. Fair's fair, nu?