The synagogue in Malmo, Sweden. Photo: WikiCommons.

Jewish human rights group the Simon Wiesenthal Center has urged Jan Björkland, Swedish Minister for Education and Deputy Prime Minister, to take a firm stand against allowing a re-named racist party to participate in a school civics program.

In a letter to the minister, Dr. Shimon Samuels, SWC’s Director for International Relations, said, “stand by your own motto: ‘To set school standards is to care,’ by taking every available measure to prevent the Nazification of Sweden’s school system.”

The group in question is now called the Svenskarnas Parti, or the Party of the Swedes, but was formerly the National Socialist Party.

Samuels said, “Party of the Swedes (formerly National Socialist Party) rhetoric in schools will endanger immigrant, Muslim, Roma, homosexual and Jewish students.” He said the group “continues to maintain a racist platform and discourse” and plans to “exploit a law permitting party access to schools as part of a civic education curriculum which, ironically, was established to produce a new generation predicated upon tolerance and human rights.”

The party is reportedly planning to begin its school campaign in Malmo, Sweden, “a city under a Wiesenthal Center travel advisory due to the inflammatory rhetoric of its former Mayor, Ilmar Reepalu, that provoked anti-Semitic violence against the Jewish community,” Samuels said

“Adding neo-Nazi invective to this toxic brew will now endanger immigrant, Muslim, Roma, homosexual and Jewish students,” he said.