If I’d read about this story three years ago I wouldn’t have believed it was possible, but these days it’s not even that surprising to me. A member of Sweden’s Left Party, Vänsterpartiet or V for short, sent a letter of support to a terrorist in an Israeli jail. The letter praised the terrorist’s courage but failed to mention the body count associated with his work.
In an open letter on social media from last year, Ilona Szatmári Waldau addresses Ahmad al-Moghrabi, who is serving 18 life sentences in an Israeli prison, and she does not skimp on the praise :
“Your courage and perseverance in the fight for freedom and dignity touch and inspire far beyond Palestine.” She assures him that he is not forgotten, that the Left Party will continue to “carry your voice forward in our political work,” and concludes: “Your fight is also our fight. With respect and solidarity.”
Anyone who reads only her letters gets the picture of a political prisoner. A man whose struggle deserves admiration. Ilona Szatmári Waldau does not tell what he was convicted of. And that is hardly a coincidence. Because if the reader had first learned what Ahmad al-Moghrabi was guilty of, the words of praise would have clashed with torn children’s bodies.
When Ahmad al-Moghrabi was arrested in 2002, he was a local leader of the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, Fatah’s terrorist-labeled armed wing. He was sentenced to 18 life sentences for organizing attacks in some of the bloodiest terrorist acts of the second intifada.
In one of them, he had sent a suicide bomber to a bar mitzvah celebration in Jerusalem in the spring of 2002. That it was a confirmation party that had been targeted was evident from the death list, because among the eleven murdered were two infants, two teenagers and three other children.
That was just the worst of several bomb plots al-Moghrabi was connected to. MP Ilona Szatmári Waldau is now apologizing and putting the letter down to a mistake with fact-checking. This is a Google translation but in English it sounds a lot like mistakes were made.
“In December I wrote a letter to a Palestinian prisoner as part of a campaign where several MPs wrote letters of support to Palestinian prisoners,” Ilona Szatmári Waldau wrote on Facebook.
“None of the prisoners were supposed to have carried out violence against civilians or have human lives on their conscience. In this case, the fact-checking was flawed, which is not acceptable. I have taken down the post. Terrorism and violence against civilians is not something I support or encourage.”
The current government is criticizing the Left Party for offering lame excuses.
“A party whose members send letters of commendation to convicted terrorists shows that they lack the responsibility required to sit in a government,” writes the Center Party’s party secretary Hannes Hervieu.
– I am deeply provoked by the Left Party’s excuses. For everyone else, it is quite obvious that these are no longer isolated incidents but a pattern, where terrorist praise and anti-Semitism keep recurring, says Foreign Minister Maria Malmer Stenergard, who also demands answers from Magdalena Andersson.
If this really was one incident it might be possible to write it off as a mistake, but the same news outlet that revealed this has previously uncovered similar support for terrorism and Holocaust denial among the Left Party. In fact it found 25 members of the party who’d crossed the line in various ways, 22 of whom were subsequently dropped.
Left leader Nooshi Dadgostar claims that the party does not have a problem with terrorist sympathies or anti-Semitism.
– It’s a handful of people, she said, hard pressed by a media gathering in the Riksdag building yesterday…
Al-Qaeda, Hamas, the Houthi rebels, Hezbollah, the PFLP. These are just some of the terrorist groups that Islam Qatesh , 53, has openly praised.
Despite that, he was given a place on the Left Party’s electoral lists. Now he is being kicked out…
Ahmed El Kilani , 40, is running in the municipal elections in Landskrona. On his social media, he praises several leaders of terrorist organizations. “ The nation has lost its greatest resistance fighters ,” he says in a post about Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah…
Ruqayyah Alkhatib , 36, is on the municipal, regional and parliamentary list for the Left Party in Örebro. On her social media, she shares several posts questioning the Holocaust.
– Jews were not a popular people in Europe, unfortunately. They have a lot of money, they were great with trade and such. Some have written that they destroy a lot too. But I don’t know if that’s true or not, she says.
I could keep going but you get the idea. There were literally dozens of these candidates running as part of the Left Party. Suddenly, Abdul El-Sayed doesn’t seem so strange. If you want to know where the left is headed in the U.S. just look to Sweden for answers.
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