Sunday, April 22, 2007

Sweden: Why should Muslims be a terror threat?

Sweden must be the only country to run a terror threat exercise and not come out and say outright who they're trying to protect their citizens from. Not that it helps any.. they're still being accused of harassing Muslims.

Sweden has been directly threatened with a Muslim terror attack, already had a possible attack thwarted and has arrested several terrorists in its territory. Making up stories about the Bogalanders will not reduce that very real threat.

A major crisis management training exercise taking place in Stockholm next week will contribute to further stigmatization of Muslims, according to two leading members of the Green Party.
"The security police constantly engages in harassing Muslims and actively contributes to fuelling Islamophobia," wrote Stockholm's opposition vice mayor Yvonne Ruwaida and member of parliament Mehmet Kaplan on Dagens Nyheter's opinion page. The politicians believe that the crisis exercise which the Swedish Emergency Management Agency (Krisberedskapsmyndigheten) is starting on Wednesday will follow this pattern. Around 4,000 people will participate in the exercise and the scenario which they will attempt to deal with is described as "a terrorist attack with weapons of mass destruction". The terrorists in the exercise have been given the fictional name of 'Bogalanders'. They live in one of the predominantly immigrant ' Million Homes ' areas, their religion is split into two factions and they are protesting against the occupation of holy ground in 'Bogaland'. "The parallels with Muslims and Islam are not exactly hard to find," wrote Kaplan and Ruwaida. They want to know why the security police (Säpo) is "specifically targeting Muslims" and are proposing a parliamentary inquiry into Säpo's future operations. In the article, which was published on Sunday, Ruwaida and Kaplan also called for a retrospective investigation into Säpo's surveillance of Muslims in Sweden.
Source: The Local (English)

See also: Sweden: Jordanian terror suspect extradited to Germany Sweden: Moroccan terror suspect to be extradited to Germany, Scandinavian terror stories, Morocco: Swedish terror suspected interrogated about Swedish contacts, Sweden: possible terror attack thwarted