Björklund!
Shana Tova – a happy new honeyed year to everyone!
This morning it occurred to me that Stockholm Metro and Stockholm City are quite influential morning papers ( if you can call them that) and they’re what the tunnelbana people read – and to some extent, readers are influenced by all that election gossip, and some of the advertisements.
This morning, what caught my eye – after all the lavish praise that has been heaped on Jan Björklund – was an column by one, Nabila Abdul Fattah, entitled “ Burka är inte viktigaste skolfrågan” that the wearing or permissibility of wearing the blessed burqa to school is not the main school policy issue :“ Nabila Abdul Fattah asks the question whether it is really Jan Björklund’s most important task to be chasing young girls in burqas?”
Sister Nabila hits the minister hard with some rhetorical questions that he will probably not ever get round to answering even in his second term as “School minister”.
The state of school affairs has progressed from the days of Dickens “Hard Times” to it’s present state in Sweden, after being subjected to some of the policy suggestions (disciplinary measures and measurements) by the benign ex- major of the Swedish military, now turned minister of education…..
Of course if it were the Sweden Democrats who were saying – or had said the same hard things that General Bjorklind has been saying about the ordained conventional Muslim attire for women, then the Sweden Democrats would have been accused of something else, by all and sundry, including some of the Islamophobes.
The Sweden Democrats have apparently been saying some of what the Britons are saying
One more thing about the Sweden Democrats who have sometimes been allocated a place on “the extreme right” – yesterday afternoon I listened to a Swedish Radio programme in which on a scale of 1 to 10 – from left to right, the Sweden Democrats are placed somewhere in the Middle, at 5.6……
And one last thing about the leader of Sweden’s Liberal Folk party: today’s Dagens Nyheter exonerates him ( but isn’t Dagens Nyheter owned by the Folk Party ? So what else to expect ? – And, not only that, I actually saw and heard the editor of DN Peter Wolodarski attacking Comrade Lars Ohly on “Good Morning Sweden” TV programme this morning , as I was having breakfast. Wolodarsksi called him “a commie” and gave a few warnings about the danger – but DN also has some sound advice to the Minister of Education: that his thinking has to extend beyond his present policy horizons.