'No Israel for Us': Swedish Star Journalist in Hot Water Over Comparing Europeans With Jews

Journalist Ivar Arpi, who suggested that unlike Jews Europeans have nowhere to flee, described his tweet as a reference to French writer Michel Houellebecq. He also said he received praise for it from Isaac Bachman, former Israeli ambassador to Sweden for "taking Israel as an example in the struggle against international terror".

Сonservative opinion-builder and Svenska Dagbladet journalist Ivar Arpi has sparked controversy with a recent tweet in which he compared Jews and Europeans.

"Jews are fleeing Europe, and Sweden, and moving to Israel. When the rest of us are attacked, where should we go? When the majority population in Sweden, Britain, or France is terrorised? There is no Israel for us", Arpi tweeted, commenting a publication by the newspaper Dagens Nyheter on "Jewish flight" from Malmö, Sweden's third-largest city, due to harassment and anti-Semitism.

Judar flyr Europa, och Sverige, och flyttar till Israel. När vi andra blir attackerade, vart ska vi ta vägen? När majoritetsbefolkningen i Sverige, Storbritannien eller Frankrike terroriseras? Det finns inget Israel för oss.

— Ivar Arpi (@Ivarpi) October 9, 2021

Arpi's wording, however, made the Swedish Committee Against Anti-Semitism, SKMA, see red.

"Ivar Arpi provides a good example of how the Jewish experience and history is falsified and instrumentalised, here for xenophobic and Islamophobic purposes. The minority of Jews are also portrayed as privileged compared to the majority populations in France, Great Britain, and Sweden. It is a sad and dangerous rhetoric", SKMA tweeted.

Minoriteten judar framställs dessutom som privilegierade jämfört med majoritetsbefolkningarna i Frankrike, Storbritannien och Sverige. Det är en sorglig och farlig retorik. 2/2

— SKMA (@kommitten) October 9, 2021

Furthermore, SKMA chairman Svante Weyler penned a rebuttal in the newspaper Aftonbladet titled "Arpi's nonsense is dangerous enough to be taken seriously".

According to Weyler, Arpi normalises "particular patterns of thought in the western context", including the idea of "The Great Exchange". Weyler described it as "an idea that there is a kind of war going on against the 'majority populations' in Europe whose purpose would be to 'exchange' Christians for Muslims. Weyler described these ideas as "common in right-wing radical circles".

"It is not always easy to find out who is at war. Arpi also owes us the answer. On the Hungarian stage, it is clearer, where it is the Jewish financier George Soros who is behind it", Weyler wrote, taking a jab at Hungary, who evicted the Soros-founded Central European University.

Weyler additionally suggested that Arpi alludes to "broad efforts to relativise the Holocaust and its significance".

"And we are not talking here in Sweden about the small, pathetic crowd of deniers or the approximately 5 percent die-hard anti-Semites, or even about the Nazis, but about people from both right and left who seem to find it unbearable that the Holocaust has the decisive significance for the understanding of the European 20th century and the societies of today that most of us do accept", Weyler wrote.

Arpi in his defence described his tweet as a reference to French writer Michel Houellebecq and a kind of a Rorschach test. He also said he received praise for it from Isaac Bachman, former Israeli ambassador to Sweden.

"Thank you Ivar Arpi for writing of Israel with such a deep understanding and sympathy. And for pointing to Israel as an example in the struggle against international terror", he quoted Bachman as saying.

Ivar Arpi is a columnist and debater working for Svenska Dagbladet. He is known as a supporter of freedom of speech, an opponent of globalism, and a co-author of the book "This is how we all became racists" on the dangers of political correctness.