Swedish public broadcaster SVT has been criticised for not challenging a guest on one of its programmes who compared pro-life Christians to Islamic State fighters and Nazi Germany.
The criticism comes after the broadcaster aired its Current News programme which was on the topic of Islamic State radicalism within families and featured Islamologist Mohammad Fazlhashemi, Swedish newspaper Världen Idag reports.
Mr Fazlhashemi commented on a recent video which emerged in Sweden showing Swedish Islamic State supporters interacting with their children urging them to say “Allah hu Akbar” and another describing to his children how he had killed an “unbeliever.”
When asked if he saw any resemblance in the behaviour to other extremist ideologies, Fazlhashemi said, “Yes, violent ideologies. From Nazism to Christians who kill abortionists. They all think the same way.”
Programme host Jon Nilsson was slammed by the newspaper, which has a Christian leaning, for allowing the point to go unchallenged noting that fewer than ten Christians had been convicted for murdering abortion doctors compared with the millions of deaths under Nazism and untold thousands under the oppressive yoke of the Islamic State.
Frida Mörtsell from SVT’s press office claimed the comments were directed at Christians who killed abortion doctors and not Christians in general, while Fazlhashemi himself clarified his words saying, “The difference may lie in the scope, but the mindset is the same: to have the right to violate others because they ‘do not think as we do’.”
While the programme was slammed by the Christian-leaning newspaper, it is unlikely to have caused much in the way of controversy across Sweden, where the exceedingly liberal state church is losing members every year and some are predicting it will lose as many as a million members in the next ten years.
According to a report released earlier this year, the number of baptisms has also fallen sharply, from 73 per cent of Swedish children being baptised into the Church of Sweden in 2000, to only 43 per cent in 2017, largely due to the recent mass influx of migrants.
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