A senior security expert has spoken out following the high-profile resignation of a government minister and the defenestration of others from Sweden’s Green Party, expressing his concern that it may have been successfully infiltrated by Islamist entryists.
Speaking to Swedish media, the chief of the Centre for Asymmetric Threat Studies at the Swedish National Defence College Lars Nicandersaid “it is clear they are trying to access positions of trust”.
Far from this being a new development, the veteran security expert said he feared the party had already been infiltrated by Islamists. He said the entryism was the same as the method used by the Soviet Union during the Cold War, which spent decades infiltrating political parties and other organisations, reports Aftonbladet.
Mr. Nicander said of this move: “we can see a very similar effect today where people close to the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist party, apparently gaining large footholds in the Green Party”.
Explaining why it was particularly the Green Party which had been targeted for infiltration, Mr. Nicander pointed to the particular philosophy espoused by proponents of Green politics — humanism. Because Greenism is a “peace movement”, he said they “have not learned that one should examine people’s values. They are naive”.
These views made the Green movement fundamentally afraid to criticise people’s views if they were within the Green Party too, and members were scared of getting “the Islamophobic card put in their face”. It was the fact that the Green party was a relatively young party with a focus on “inclusivity” and being well intentioned left them vulnerable.
A Green Party spokesman responded to the comments and said they were taking the allegations “very seriously. Extremism has no place in the Green Party”, reports Expressen.
Despite that, the events of the past week have shown extremism has carved a place for itself in the Green movement. Breitbart London reported this week on the fall of senior Green Party member and coalition government minister Mehmet Kaplan, who resigned after a series of revelations about his extremist views.
The minister had long fended off accusations that he was an Islamist, even by left-wing politicians in Sweden, dismissing them as “smears”. But after pictures of him eating dinner with members of a hard-left, “neo-Nazi”, “Turkish nationalist” group and a video of him comparing Israel to Nazi Germany emerged his position become untenable.
As the spotlight turned to the Greens in the wake of the resignation, other radicals within the organisation became visible. A prospective member of parliament “retired” from politics after he was caught on camera refusing to shake hands with a female journalist, preferring instead to place his hands over his heart in a traditional Muslim greeting.
The party admitted they knew about his fundamentalist beliefs when they selected him to stand for the party, but said in retrospect allowing him to do so was a “mistake”.
The two resignations generated a significant amount of negative publicity for the party. Another member, a press officer, had to be suspended after it was revealed he had attempted to pressure a Swedish television station into dropping news items about the party from their coverage.
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