Sweden was concerned the sanctions would endanger a
lucrative deal between its mammoth communications company Ericsson and Iran, the
Haaretz report said on Sunday.
A Foreign Ministry official said that
Bachman clarified that the report was based on an “unauthorized, anonymous
official,” and that it did not represent Israeli government policy.
One
Israeli official familiar with the matter said of the Swedish summons of the
ambassador that “things are never as painful as when they are
true.”
According to the report, pressure from inside the EU was placed on
the Swedish government over the past week to drop its opposition to the
ratcheted-up sanctions, with some of the pressure aimed directly at Foreign
Minister Carl Bildt.
According to Haaretz, “Israeli diplomats said that
several European officials have wondered about any personal interests Bildt
might hold in Iran that could cause him to object to sanctions.”
Not long
after Bachman was called in, Bildt tweeted from the meeting of EU foreign
ministers in Luxembourg that there was “great concern among EU FM’s about
continued Israeli occupation and settlement activities as well as total
standstill in peace process.”
Bildt wrote about the meeting on his blog (in Swedish). Reader Mikael G, who is Swedish, sent me the following account:
The Swedish foreign minister Carl Bildt was in Brussels yesterday. A day full of conferences and meetings, the last one with your FM. As usual he wrote about the events on his blog, (carlbildt.wordpress.com) but in the end it just did not come out right. (The blog is in swedish, so my translation below.)
"At the end of the day we had a dinner in a smaller group of ministers with the Israeli foreign minister.
Our positions regarding the peace process with the palestinians - not least the settler policy - are very different, but it was useful to be able to discuss also the wider regional events.
They are important to us, and to Israel.
And we had the opportunity again, to express our forceful condemnation of the terror attack in Burgas against the Israeli terrorists." [sic!]
("Dagen avslutades med middag i en mindre krets av ministrar med den israeliska utrikesministern. Våra positioner när det gäller fredsprocessen med palestinierna – och inte minst bosättningspolitiken – är starkt skilda, men det var i alla fall av värde att utöver den diskussionen också kunna utväxla olika synpunkter på den vidare regionala utvecklingen. Den berör oss, och den berör också Israel. Och vi hade på nytt möjlighet att uttrycka vårt kraftiga fördömande av terrorattacken i Burgas mot de israeliska terroristerna.")
The blog is corrected now, but I downloaded the cache before the change.
There is organ theft in our region and it goes on along the Egyptian-Israeli border. You knew it all along, didn't you? Oh wait - you didn't because you listened to Carl Bildt and Donald Bostrom and you thought it was the Jooos who steal organs. Well, it's not. It's the Arab Bedouin residents of the Northern Sinai peninsula. And they're stealing organs from African refugees.
Let's go to the videotape. Warning - this is graphic.
Bedouin smugglers involved in people trafficking are also believed to be stealing organs from refugees who are unable to pay their demands for large amounts of cash to take them into Israel.
...
The Sawarka Bedouin tribe, one of the largest in the Sinai, was named by one Bedouin source as being involved in organ thefts.
A Sawarka leader said he was aware that people trafficking was going on in Sinai and that in some cases refugees were held in bonded labor and tortured. But he added only rogue elements of his tribe were involved.
According to rights groups, refugees -- from places like Ethiopia, Eritrea or Sudan -- are enslaved and tortured and the women raped if they cannot come up with the large sums of money the Bedouin try to extort from them and their families to smuggle them into Israel.
Among Bedouin leaders in the Sinai, no one was willing to speak openly about the organ theft. Tribal leaders said they knew nothing about it or had only heard rumors.
...
"Organ trade is the second most profitable trade behind only weapons trade," he said. "It brings in more money than drug dealing and prostitution."
One Bedouin tribal chief did put CNN in touch with a Bedouin who used to be involved in people smuggling and who was close to the organ theft scheme. The source spoke on condition of anonymity but offered insights into the scheme.
"The doctors deal directly with the Sawarka family, and they buy the organs starting from $20,000," the source said in a phone interview.
He offered further details of the logistics required to keep the organs fresh for the transplant into their new owners' bodies: "The doctors come with some sort of mobile fridge where the organs can be stored for six to eight hours and resold in Cairo or elsewhere."
The source claimed doctors from Cairo are involved in the organ theft, a claim that has proved impossible to verify.
"It's like spare parts for cars," the Bedouin, who later agreed to meet one member of the CNN crew in person, said sarcastically toward the end of the interview.
A second Bedouin, who also refused to be identified, later gave a similar account.
The police general in charge of security in Northern Sinai tells CNN that his forces are aware that organ trafficking and theft are going on in their area of operations but that the authorities have not identified who is behind the schemes.
I trust we will hear howls of protest about this from the Swedish government.... On second thought, we probably won't. There are no Jews involved.
The taxpayers of Sweden have just funded a visit to their country of 'Palestinian' terrorist Leila Khaled.
In 2002, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, The European Union through its European Council decided to include the PFLP on its list of terrorist groups.
The people of Israel are all too familiar with the savagery of the PFLP. It took responsibility for the 2001 assassination of Tourism Minister, Rehavam Zeevi. On Friday night, March 11th 2011, two PFLP members butchered the Fogel family in Itamar, including four-and eleven-year-old children and a three-month infant.
Ms. Khaled sits on the PFLP Central Committee and has not expressed regret for her involvement in terrorism. Because of her history of aiding and abetting terrorism, a police complaint was recently issued against her in Sweden for gross violations of international law.
But that came too late. During her tax-payer funded visit to Sweden, Khaled spoke at the May Day demonstrations of the Stalinist Swedish Communist Party and the Anarcho-syndicalist Trade Union Federation. She held publicly funded lectures at an Art Gallery and spoke on developments in the Middle East at the publicly- funded Södertörn University College.
Incredibly, Khaled also participated at a seminar on political activism arranged by the Left Party represented in Sweden’s Parliament.
The organizers of her appearances had nothing but praise for the PFLP leader. Anna Ahlstrand, Project Manager at Konsthall C, which is funded by the government’s Arts Grant Committee, declared “she is an icon for many people”. Jonatan Habib Engqvist, Project Manager at the Governmental Arts Grants Committee that financed her tour described the arch terrorist as “a very established feminist thinker.”
...
Unfortunately, Leila Khaled isn’t the first member of a Palestinian terrorist group to get special treatment from Stockholm. In 2006, the Swedish consulate in Jerusalem, in contravention of EU regulations, granted a Schengen visa to Hamas’ Minister of Refugees, Atef Adwan. Such a visa makes it possible for the bearer to travel across 15 European Countries. That decision provoked protests from Israel, which said it lent legitimacy to Hamas, and from France, which had rejected earlier visa requests by Hamas leaders.
So far Sweden’s decision to grant entry to Khaled – a leading representative of an organization deemed a terrorist group by more than 30 countries, including Sweden, all EU Member States and the United States – hasn’t spurred protest from the US or other European countries.
But the decision to allow her into Sweden could have broader consequences. It comes at a time when many European nations want to take back direct control of their national frontiers. Indeed, the European Commission is currently debating the re-imposition of border controls within the so-called Schengen region.
Leila Khalid’s taxpayer-funded trip comes even as Swedish authorities continue to turn a deaf ear to repeated calls from the Jewish Community and the Simon Wiesenthal Center to fund security for Jewish institutions facing increasing anti-Semitism and global Islamist threats.
The irresponsible behavior of Swedish authorities will likely doom any future role in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. Back in 2000, following a more even-handed Middle East policy under then Swedish PM Goran Persson, Stockholm did help facilitate Israeli Palestinian negotiations.
I doubt that anyone in Israel would accept a mediation - or any other - role for the current Swedish government in Middle East 'peace process.' We already know too well where the Swedes stand. But Khaled's visit is yet another nail in the coffin of Swedish-Israeli relations.
Sweden returns five asylum-seeking Iraqi Christians
How low can one government go? Sweden is trying to show us. They have decided to return five asylum-seeking Iraqi Christians to Iraq because there is 'relative peace' in that country. This, about a month after a massacre in an Iraqi Christian church.
Even the UN called them out on this one. "Five Iraqi Christians seeking asylum returned from Stockholm. UN protest," from AsiaNews, December 18:
Baghdad (AsiaNews / Agencies) - Harsh criticism of the Swedish government by the United Nations Commission for Refugees after they forcibly returned five Iraqi Christians seeking asylum in Sweden. The five were part of a group of at least 20 people from Iraq. Thousands of Christians have sought a safe haven outside the borders after the massacre of 31 October in the Syrian Catholic Cathedral of Our Lady of Salvation. According to unofficial sources the authorities justify the refusal by citing a situation of relative peace in the country.
Perhaps those authorities would like to go for a field trip and enjoy the "relative peace" the remaining Christians are living in.
"We have heard many stories of people fleeing their homes after receiving direct threats. Many new arrivals explain that they left Iraq for fear of an attack, after what happened on October 31," says Melissa Fleming, spokeswoman for the UN body in Geneva.
One of the people I follow on Twitter often retweets Sweden's infamous foreign minister, Carl Bildt. In one tweet on Sunday, Bildt wrote:
Disturbing reports of security forces gathering in the centre of Minsk. The rights of everyone must be respected also in Belarus!
How about respecting the 'rights of everyone' in Sweden, including the rights of Jews and the rights of those who are foolish enough to arrive in Sweden hoping to escape persecution? Ought that not to be the first concern of the Swedish foreign minister?
I am an Orthodox Jew - some would even call me 'ultra-Orthodox.' Born in Boston, I was a corporate and securities attorney in New York City for seven years before making aliya to Israel in 1991 (I don't look it but I really am that old :-). I have been happily married to the same woman for thirty-five years, and we have eight children (bli ayin hara) ranging in age from 13 to 33 years and nine grandchildren. Four of our children are married! Before I started blogging I was a heavy contributor on a number of email lists and ran an email list called the Matzav from 2000-2004. You can contact me at: IsraelMatzav at gmail dot com
