STOCKHOLM – An official from the Sweden Democrats was suspended by the far-right party for making derogatory comments about the Jewish teenage diarist Anne Frank.
In an Instagram post that has now been deleted, Rebecka Fallenkvist called Anne, among other things, “immoral”, according to Swedish media.
Anne, who wrote a diary while hiding in Amsterdam before her capture, died aged 15 in Nazi Germany’s Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in February 1945.
The post by Fallenkvist, a 26-year-old director of TV programs for the Sweden Democrats, drew strong reactions from Jewish groups and Israel’s ambassador Ziv Nevo Kulman, who said in a tweet: “I strongly condemn this abhorrent insult, disrespectful to the memory of Anne Frank. ” His post contained what appeared to be a screenshot of Fallenkvist’s Instagram post.
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The Sweden Democrats’ media chief, Oskar Cavalli-Bjorkman, told Swedish news agency TT late Saturday that the party would take Fallenkvist’s “insensitive and inappropriate” comments seriously and launch an internal investigation into the matter.
Although it remained unclear what Fallenkvist wanted to do with her comments about Anne’s diary, she later sent a text message to Dagens Nyheter saying she had been misinterpreted.
“The book is a poignant depiction of human good and evil,” Fallenkvist said in his message to the newspaper. “The good Anne, who in the first chapters is like any other young girl who lives her life in peace and finds an interest in boys (which I highlighted), is contrasted with the evil of Nazism. My story was focused on the good and human in Anne without downplaying the evil to which she was subjected.”
The Sweden Democrats were founded in the 1980s by people who had been active in far-right groups, including neo-Nazis. The party emerged as Sweden’s second largest party in the election on September 11 under the leadership of Jimmie Åkesson.
On Friday, three Swedish centrist parties agreed to form a coalition government with the support of the Sweden Democrats, who have moved against mainstream politics but stick to a hard line against immigration.
Source: sn.dk