Stockholm High School Vandalized With Swastikas, Anti-Jewish Slurs (PHOTOS)
by Joshua Levitt
Anti-Semitic graffiti painted outside a Stockholm school. Photo: Calle Nathanson via Twitter.
A Stockholm, Sweden, high school was plastered overnight with anti-Semitic graffiti, Nazi Swastikas and anti-Jewish slurs, Swedish English-language newspaper The Local reported on Monday.
Concerned parent Calle Nathanson told The Local: “My 13-year-old daughter was on the way to school and she saw that one of the entrances was totally bombed by graffiti.”
Written in Swedish, the graffiti included the words “Jewish swine” and “disgusting Jews,” swastikas, and the number 1488, which is a symbol for white power and the Nazi greeting Heil Hitler.
Over Twitter, Nathanson broadcast photographs of the graffiti, writing that it was “completely incomprehensible and unacceptable,” that “I am crying” and “That’s enough now!”
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“The central Stockholm high school has more than 800 pupils from grades five to nine, when the children are between 11 and 15. At high-school level, there are three classes with Jewish children who study the Swedish curriculum but also study Hebrew and Jewish studies, according to the Vasa Real website,” The Local reported.
Anti-Semitic graffiti painted outside a Stockholm school. Photo: Calle Nathanson via Twitter.
Nathanson said his daughter “was curious… she said to me that she thought it was just drunk and stupid boys in the night,” according to The Local. “It’s hard to understand. But me, I know that there’s a wave of Nazism spreading through Europe right now. Greece, Hungary, Ukraine… this is populist parties emanating from fascism. And it’s happening here. Especially in Stockholm,” Nathanson said.
“The fact that they targeted a school with Jewish kids is a sign for me that they’re really organized,” he told The Local. “They know exactly what they’re doing,” he said. “It’s incredible that (Swedish security police) Säpo doesn’t work efficiently with this issue… they must start taking it seriously.”
The school said in a statement that the graffiti was reported to the police, and the school was closed in the morning for a teacher’s meeting about the implications of the vandalism, while cleaners worked to remove the graffiti.
Lena Posner-Körösi, head of the Jewish Community Association of Stockholm, told the TT news agency, as reported by The Local: “This is the first time there has been anti-Semitic graffiti aimed at Vasa Real and its Jewish students, but if you piece together everything else that’s happening, you’ll see that it’s more than just individual coincidences.”
“We have an extremely worrying development both in Sweden and Europe where right-wing groups are winning power,” she added. “This is a very uncomfortable situation we are facing, 70 years after the Holocaust.”
