Former Israeli finance minister Yair Lapid slammed the government of Sweden at a pro-Israel rally in Stockholm on Sunday, criticizing their and other European countries’ “disturbing obsession about Israel and the Jews.”
Lapid was especially critical of Swedish foreign minister Margot Wallström, who has blamed the Israeli government for the recent wave of Palestinian terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians; sought investigations into whether police shootings of Palestinian terrorists who were in the midst of carrying out attacks constituted extrajudicial killings; and implied that the Islamic State terrorist attacks that devastated Paris in November were rooted in the frustration of Muslims in the Middle East, including Palestinians, who she said “must either accept a desperate situation or resort to violence.”
Responding to these comments, Lapid said:
If the Swedish foreign minister is concerned about human rights in the Middle East, she needs to talk about the use of children as terrorists or human shields, about the discrimination against the LGBT community in the Palestinian Authority, about the incitement going on there against Jews, about the exploitation of women in Gaza, and about the human rights situation in Iran.
“If attacks on Jews are completely removed from facts and based on prejudice, there is already a name for it – it’s called anti-Semitism,” Lapid added.
He contrasted the Swedish government’s actions and statements with that of Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat who saved the lives of thousands of Jews in the Holocaust and in whose memory the square in which the rally took place was named. Wallenberg “saved my father from being murdered by the Nazis,” Lapid said, adding that the diplomat “had the courage to love and protect the Nation of Israel. Your government, especially your foreign minister, stand on the wrong side of history and the wrong side of morality.”
Later in the speech, Lapid explained that the number of condemnations that the United Nations Human Rights Council issued against Israel surpassed the combined total of condemnations it adopted against authoritarian regimes including Syria, which has killed more than 400,000 of its own citizens; Sudan, whose president is wanted by the International Criminal Court on charges of genocide and war crimes; Iran, which the U.S. State Department deems the world’s largest state sponsor of terror; and terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah. The UN’s singular focus on Israel, Lapid said, “is not criticism, this is anti-Semitism.”
Lapid’s comments about the UN echoed those he made in a June speech, in which he said that the world body, with its one-sided approach to condemning Israel, had “lost credibility, lost common sense, and more than anything lost its most important asset – its integrity.”
In October 2014, Wallström ordered all of Sweden’s diplomatic missions to refer to the Palestinian Authority as the State of Palestine, prompting Israel to recall its ambassador. Six months later, a court found that Wallström’s initiative had violated Sweden’s constitution.
[Photo: Yonatan Sindel / Flash90]