The Swedish news website The Local writes about The Holocaust: Sweden’s complex legacy. That’s great. Unfortunately, it quickly degenerates into bashing all those who oppose Sweden’s policies of mass migration. According to The Local, “Leading the campaign for Holocaust education is the Forum for Living History, a government agency commissioned to promote democracy and human rights, with the Holocaust as its point of reference. Reports and studies published by the Forum deal with various forms of modern intolerance amongst young Swedes, including Islamophobia.”

I know that people such as Swedish historian of religion Matthias Gardell claim that Islamophobia is perhaps the greatest threat to democracy in the Western world today. Personally, I subscribe more to the view of Hugh Fitzgerald of Jihad Watch that “‘Islamophobia’ is a word concocted to intimidate those who are rightly troubled, and more than troubled, by what they have learned of Islam largely through the observable behavior of Muslims not only in the West, but around the world.” Has the Forum for Living History asked the French teacher Robert Redeker about Islamophobia, after he had to quit his job and go into hiding following numerous death threats for criticizing Islam?

The Local continues: “More broadly, reports show that hate crimes against minorities – mainly gay people and immigrants – have risen during the last few years.” Well, all available information strongly indicates that the rising number of attacks on gays is largely caused by Muslim immigrants, and that goes for many other kinds of violence, too. I keep hearing claims that Muslims are the Jews of today, but from my point of view, it looks as if Jews of today are, well, Jews. Jews are suffering attacks across much of Western Europe at rates worse than at any time since the rise of the Nazis in the 1930s, and again, this is largely caused by Muslims.

The head of Muslim Council of Britain, Muhammed Abdul Bari, compared the British government’s treatment of Muslims with the Nazis’ persecution of Jews. Yet he also defended the council’s controversial decision to boycott Holocaust Memorial Day. In December 2006, the student union at the University of Leeds voted to gag the Jewish Society from complaining against an increasingly intense anti-Israel campaign by the university’s Palestinian society.

The second target of Islamic Jihad violence is Christians. In Bethlehem, the birthplace of Christianity, the town's Christian population has dwindled from more than 85 per cent in 1948 to 12 per cent of its 60,000 inhabitants in 2006. There are reports of religious persecution, in the form of murders, beatings and land grabs. This happens while European tax money is used to fund the Palestinian Authority, which again means that while European countries and EU authorities are warning against “Islamophobia,” they are indirectly funding the ethnic cleansing of Christians in the Middle East.

This offensive against Christians is now spreading to Europe itself, with the aid of Multiculturalists with an anti-Christian bias. A British schoolgirl has been barred from wearing a crucifix necklace in class in Gillingham, south-east England. She was told by teachers that it breached health and safety rules. Meanwhile, Muslim pupils can wear religious symbols.

Sweden has experienced a quadrupling of the number of rape charges in the space of one generation, parallel with mass immigration. The wave of robberies the city of Malmö is experiencing is part of a “war against the Swedes.” This is the explanation given by young robbers from immigrant backgrounds when questioned about why they only rob native Swedes. “When we are in the city and robbing we are waging a war, waging a war against the Swedes.” This argument was repeated several times. “Power for me means that the Swedes shall look at me, lie down on the ground and kiss my feet. There is a thrilling sensation in your body when you’re robbing, you feel satisfied and happy, it feels as if you’ve succeeded, it simply feels good. We rob every single day, as often as we want to, whenever we want to.”

Despite this, The Local continues: “Sweden’s most popular far-right political party, the Sweden Democrats (Sverigedemokraterna), seems to be coming closer to the mainstream. Yet while the Sweden Democrats’ rhetoric and racism of extremist demonstrators may bring uncomfortable echoes of the wartime past, there is one crucial difference: mainstream Swedish society today goes out of its way not to be indifferent.”

But they are indifferent. They are indifferent to the multitude of violent attacks and human rights violations the Sweden Democrats are subject to. As Bruce Bawer writes in While Sweden Slept:

Only one sizable party in the country, the Sweden Democrats, articulates most Swedes’ concerns about their country’s immigration and integration policies. Again and again, it has been the object of breathtakingly undemocratic treatment by the political establishment. […] Sweden Democrats have been the targets of events that recall China’s Cultural Revolution. Staged “people’s protests” by members of the ‘youth divisions’ of other parties have led to the firing of Sweden Democrats from their jobs. A few weeks ago, a junior diplomat was dismissed when it became known that he was a member of the party and had criticized his country’s immigration policy. On several occasions, thugs loyal to the ruling parties have broken up Sweden Democratic meetings and beaten up party leaders.

I have written about one such attack, which extreme Leftists later openly bragged about on the Internet, around 30 members of the Sweden Democrats were attending a private party outside the town of Växjö. “To clearly demonstrate that the Sweden Democrats are not welcome in our area, about 20 anti-Fascists chose to attack the party. The Sweden Democrats were attacked with knives, axes, iron bars and other weapons. After that, their cars were destroyed.” The brave Leftists then smashed the windows and threw tear gas into the building, forcing people outside, where they were again attacked and beaten with iron bars and axes. Several of the people were hospitalized after the attack. This was a peaceful, private party by unarmed members of a perfectly legal political party that just happens to be critical of the country's immigration policies. These brave Leftists or “anti-Fascists” do, for some curious reason, seem to behave pretty much like, well, Fascists, a bit like the Brown Shirts in the 1930s, physically assaulting political opponents to silence them.

The Swedish newspaper Expressen finally warned against the “low-intensity terrorism” conducted by extreme Leftists and neo-Nazis. But they were honest enough to admit that the extreme Leftists have tended to get away with their violence because it has been directed against the despised right-wingers. Now, their violence is increasingly aimed at established political parties and state institutions, too. Political scientist Peter Esaiasson has done research into every election movement in Sweden since 1866. According to him, the organized attempts at disrupting meetings during the 2006 elections had no parallels in modern history.

Moreover, the historical relations between Fascists and Socialists are a lot closer than many people seem to appreciate. Marcos Cantera Carlomagno in 1995 published a PhD thesis at Lund University describing a series of letters sent by Per Albin Hansson, leader of the Swedish Social Democrats who was Prime Minister between 1932 and 1946 and worked for the establishment of “Folkhemmet,” the People’s Home, as the Swedish welfare state model became known as. Hansson was a dear pen pal with Italy's Fascist leader Mussolini and praised the corporate, Fascist system where the entire economy and each individual were intimately tied to and subordinate to the state. Hansson was positively disposed to Fascism and saw his welfare state as a related concept.

After mentioning his work in a local newspaper, Carlomagno was called by his supervisor who stated in anger that his scholarship would be cut off. Carlomagno's work was totally ignored by the entire media and political establishment in Sweden when it appeared in the 1990s.

In the book The New Totalitarians, the British historian Roland Huntford in the early 1970s pointed out that it was easier to establish the Fascist model of the corporate state in Sweden than in Mussolini’s Italy for cultural and historic reasons, since Sweden had a centralized bureaucracy even before Marxism whereas Italians are skeptical of state authority. Put simply: Swedes have tended to trust their bureaucrats, which no Italian in his right mind would ever do.

He also noted that Socialist professor Gunnar Myrdal and his wife Alva, both highly influential ideologists in developing the Swedish welfare state, had intimate connections with the German academic world during the Nazi age. Gunnar Myrdal served as both a member of parliament and later as a government minister for the Social Democrats during this period. According to Huntford:

The professor was then a Nazi sympathizer, publicly describing Nazism as the movement of youth and the movement of the future. In Myrdal’s defence, it must be pointed out that, whatever his other propensities, Hitler did have advanced ideas on social welfare, and that the social ideology of the German Nazis and the Swedish Social Democrats had much in common. Until the mid 1930s, Nazism had considerable attractions for those who favoured a benevolent and authoritarian state.

Gunnar and Alva Myrdal promoted the idea of positive eugenics and forced sterilization programs against those with “weak genes.” Sweden was also among the first to sterilize the mentally ill, beginning in 1934. The newspaper Dagens Nyheter later contended that the ruling party at the time – the Social Democrats – “accepted the policy as an essential part of their overall philosophy.” The practice predated and outlived Nazi Germany. Sweden was far from alone in have such programs, however. Both Norway and Denmark had similar policies, as did many other Western nations.

This close ideological connection between Socialists and Fascists might surprise those who have been brought up to believe that these ideologies are polar opposites. But in fact, they have more in common with each other than either have with classical liberalism, above all the tendency to reduce the individual to an organic part of the state. Austrian professor F.A. Hayek commented on this in The Road to Serfdom:

Observer after observer, in spite of the contrary expectation with which he approached his subject, has been impressed with the extraordinary similarity in many respects of the conditions under ‘fascism’ and ‘communism.’ Even communists must have been somewhat shaken by such testimonies as that of Mr. Max Eastman, Lenin's old friend, who found himself compelled to admit that ‘instead of being better, Stalinism is worse than fascism, more ruthless, barbarous, unjust, immoral, anti-democratic, unredeemed by any hope or scruple,’ and that it is ‘better described as superfascist’; and when we find the same author recognising that ‘Stalinism is socialism, in the sense of being an inevitable although unforeseen political accompaniment of the nationalisation and collectivisation which he had relied upon as part of his plan for erecting a classless society,’ his conclusion clearly achieves wider significance.

Hayek continues:

In Germany and Italy the Nazis and the Fascists did indeed not have much to invent. The usages of the new political movements which pervaded all aspects of life had in both countries already been introduced by the socialists. The idea of a political party which embraces all activities of the individual from the cradle to the grave, which claims to guide his views on everything was first put into practice by the socialists. […] It was not the Fascists but the socialists who began to collect children from the tenderest age into political organisations to make sure they grew up as good proletarians. It was not the Fascists but the socialists who first thought of organising sports and games, football and hiking, in party clubs where the members would not be infected by other views. It was the socialists who first insisted that the party member should distinguish himself from others by the modes of greeting and the forms of address. It was they who by their organisation of ‘cells’ and devices for the permanent supervision of private life created the prototype of the totalitarian party.

The ultimate irony is that when Friedrich von Hayek in 1974 was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics, he had to share it with... Gunnar Myrdal. Alva Myrdal received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1982.

The idea that Fascism and Socialism are polar opposites is thus highly inaccurate from a historical and philosophical point of view. Convincing the public about this is one of the greatest stunts Socialists and left-wingers ever pulled off. The truth is that Socialists and Fascists share a great deal of the same totalitarian DNA, and that the line of separation between Socialists and Fascists, and between international Socialist and national Socialists (Nazis), was initially far less clear-cut than many observers today would like us to believe. They have more in common with each other than either of them has with liberal democrats.

The reason why Marcos Cantera Carlomagno’s work about the close personal and ideological connections between the Swedish Social Democratic Party and Fascists regimes at the time was repressed by Swedish authorities is that once revealed, it would be virtually impossible for Swedish authorities ever again to denounce all those critical of the country’s insane immigration policies as “Fascists.” It is a lie, and it always has been.

Jens Orback, former Democracy Minister in the Social Democratic Swedish government, said during a radio debate that: “We must be open and tolerant towards Islam and Muslims because when we become a minority, they will be so towards us.” Orback’s attitude is what follows once you declare that culture is irrelevant. Our culture, even though we try to forget it, is steeped in a Judeo-Christian morality based on the Golden Rule of reciprocity: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” [Luke 6:31] Muslims view lack of force as a sign of weakness, and they despise weakness, which is precisely why Adolf Hitler stated his admiration for Islam, and thought it would be a better match for Nazism than Christianity, with its childish notions of compassion.

Feriz and Pajtim, members of Gangsta Albanian Thug Unit in Malmö, explain how they mug people downtown. They target a lone victim. “We surround him and beat and kick him until he no longer fights back,” Feriz said. “You are always many more people than your victims. Cowardly?” “I have heard that from many, but I disagree. The whole point is that they’re not supposed to have a chance.” They didn’t express any sympathy for their victims. “If they get injured, they just have themselves to blame for being weak,” said Pajtim and shrugged.

Anti-Semitism, supposedly a feature of the “far Right,” is today at least as common among the hard Left as among right-wing parties. In Norway in 2005, the police issued a mobile security alarm to the right-wing Progress Party leader Carl I. Hagen. Hagen had criticized Islam, and could see no similarity with the concept of morality and justice found in Christianity. Hagen also said that if Israel loses in the Middle East, Europe will succumb to Islam next. He felt that Christians should support Israel and oppose Islamic inroads into Europe. In an unprecedented step, a group of Muslim ambassadors to Norway blasted Carl I. Hagen in a letter to the newspaper Aftenposten, claiming that he had offended 1.3 billion Muslims around the world. Other Norwegian politicians quickly caved in and condemned Hagen.

At the same time, the Socialist Left Party, a junior partner in the ruling government coalition, is leading the charge for an economic boycott of Israel, while the Mosaic Religious Community has advised its members against speaking Hebrew loudly on the streets of Oslo or wearing Jewish emblems.

As for which groups constitute a threat to Western democracy, this is frequently the ruling authorities in European countries, not those who oppose the Islamization of their nations through mass immigration. Former German president Roman Herzog warned that “Germany’s state of parliamentary democracy is under threat from the European Union which is slowly taking away all the national parliament’s powers.” He pointed out that between 1999 and 2004, 84 percent of the legal acts in Germany stemmed from Brussels. “EU policies suffer to an alarming degree from a lack of democracy and a de facto suspension of the separation of powers.” Despite this, the current German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and political leaders all over Europe, is pushing ahead with an EU Constitution that will be the final nail in the coffin of European democracy.

The European Union’s foreign policy chief Javier Solana has stated that Islamic terrorist organization Hamas wants to “liberate the Palestinians,” not to destroy Israel, thus ignoring decades of statements from Hamas leaders as well as the Hamas charter itself. As documented by brilliant scholar Bat Ye’or in her book Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis and confirmed by myself in The Eurabia Code this is all part of a concerted effort by EU authorities to radically alter the European continent in favor of an economic and cultural alliance with the Arab-Islamic world. The widespread use of the word “Islamophobia,” a concept which didn’t even exist a decade ago, should be seen in this light.

“Islamophobia” is the veil the new Fascists use to cover themselves and their agenda. It is a ridiculous word, and we should all refrain from using it in any serious fashion.