We even have cases of politicians openly blaming (Ilmar Reepalu mayor of Malmö) the Jews of their own country for the anti-semitism they face because they don't condemn Israel loudly enough.
About Sweden and antisemitism — the real problem is that for decades there's been so little of it publicly expressed, people no longer recognise it. Worse, even those who end up resorting to making antisemitic statements, like Reepalu, literally don't realise what they are saying.
Big problem with Reepalu, and a bunch of other Swedish politicians — had a liberal MP blogging after the convoy-debacle about the perfidity of the Jews as "The Chosen People" behaving badly against non-Jews — is that they revert to tropes of thinking and arguing that are antisemitic without realising.
When called on it, they are absolutely astounded, and most of them are very quick to retract the offending statement. (Reepalu was different in that respect, but he really is an idiot who still doesn't understand the implications of his words.)
Reeplau otoh is a Social Democrat, the party that created an honest to goodness specific government agency, The Forum For Living History, specifically to inform the public about the Holocaust and antisemitism, so if official political action against antisemitism is looked for, there it is.
(That thing is otoh a bad idea for what it says about a political will to proscribe history-writing, even if directed against antisemitism. That such an enetity is politically created can also be seen as an indictment of the state of the public discussion of antisemitism — which I think is the root of the problem, except the problem being less a presence recognisable traditional antisemitism, there is virtually none, but rather a staggering ignorance of it as a result of its seeming public disappearence in post-WWII Sweden..)
Still, a Swedish historian working on the history of Holocaust-revisionism in Sweden a couple of years ago noticed the Swedish Democrats (anti-immigration nationalists, very anti-Islam) also slagging off the "Internationalists" on their webpage. He actually circulated this info to the various established political parties, asking what they thought was meant by "Internationalists". Lots of confused but inventive suggestions were made, but not one instance of spotting that this is a traditional and established antisemitic way of referring to Jews in general.
One of the astonishing revelations of the stink over the article appearing in the Culture section of the Aftonbladet tabloid a year or so ago, seriously insinuating Israel was robbing organs from Palestinians it killed, was that the writer of said article was honestly completely oblivious to the very old antisemitic tradition of blood-libel against Jews. Seriously, he was. To the point of admitting that he would have written it very differently had he know what kind of associations it would dredge up. (I know from experience some Israelis who have a very hard time getting their heads around such massive ignorance of this matter, tending to rather assume it was all in bad faith. Otoh, considering what a disaster the blood-libel connotations was for his general argument, killing its credibility stone-dead, the writer really had nothing to gain. He should of course be tarred and feathered for that kind of culpable ignorance.)
Another Swedish historian, Henrik Bachner, has analysed how radical left-wing movements in the 60's and 70's picked up a lot of the traditional antisemitic arsenal of tropes and expressions in their criticism of Israel.
There is at times a disturbing blurring of the lines between specific criticism of Israel and general antisemitic attitudes coming out of the radical left. The Nazis and right-wing antisemitic nationalist nutters are usually easy to spot. And that's part of the problem. In Sweden no one has for decades been publicly visible slagging off Jews according to the known model of Nazi, just right-wing, or traditonal religious antisemitism. (Well, there is Ahmed Rahmi and his never-say-die seriously conspiracy-theorist website Radio Islam, since it used to be a local radio show in Stockholm in the 80's, but has since been forced off the air, onto the internet.) To the point where literally generations of the public and politicians alike no longer knows what that sounds and looks like, unless they have a specific historic interest.
The disturbing thing is rather the way in which antisemitic tropes and expressions have crept into the radical left. It's much more insidious as it has gone mostly unnoticed. What it otoh doesn't constitute is a an essential part of their ideological outlook, or a consistent view of "race" in any other way. It's more of a bunch of bad, very bad, habits of thought and expression.
Is it a prevailing attitude among Jews that they cannot possibly be at fault?
