Tobias Hübinette, a Swedish academic and one of the founders of Sweden’s far-left “anti-hate” magazine Expo, claims to have suffered constant racial harassment from “young grown men with an overseas background”.
Hübinette, who was born in South Korea and was allegedly active as a member of Anti-Fascist Action (AFA/Antifa) in the past, was one of the founding members of the Expo magazine, published by the Expo Foundation, a far-left group in Sweden.
Now a faculty member at Karlstad University, where his research interests include “critical race and whiteness studies”, Hübinette wrote on Facebook that he has been subject to constant racist verbal attacks from young men of migrant backgrounds, Document.no reports.
Hübinette said the racial-based verbal abuse happened while he was in low-income housing neighbourhoods, known in Sweden as “Million Programme” areas.
In his Facebook post, the academic claims that youths would yell phrases like “ni hao” at him, the Chinese word for “hello”, as well as making other noises and laughing at him, theorising that his harassers felt “superior to my masculinity”.
He added that many migrant-background young men in low-income areas consider men from the north and south-east Asia “feminine and ‘gay'” and blamed North American stereotype of Asians, saying that in the USA, “it is too socially accepted to look down on and mock northeast/southeast Asians in the non-white ‘ghettos'”.
Hübinette served as the research director at Expo magazine from 1995 until 1997, prior to his academic career. The Expo Foundation, which publishes the magazine, continues to operate and has received funding from Hungarian-American billionaire George Soros’s Open Society Foundations in recent years.
The foundation has not been without its own controversies in recent years either. In 2018, the group was included in a Swedish Defence Research Agency (FOI) report on far-left extremism, along with the UK-based anti-hate group Hope Not Hate.
The FOI report noted that both groups provide information on various topics, including right-wing opponents, that are used by far-left extremists.
Following the publication of the FOI report, the Expo Foundation objected to being included alongside far-left extremists, with the current publisher of Expo magazine Daniel Poohl calling the report “sloppy”.
“What I reacted to is the fact that the Expo Foundation is mentioned in a way that it appears that we are part of this environment that, of course, based on the assignment FOI has received, is about some kind of left-wing violent extremism. And that’s a grossly erroneous picture of our business,” Poohl said.