Sweden is going to the polls in September, which means that all the class clowns are now trying to become popular. There’s nothing they won’t do that can turn their ill-conceived ideas into government policies. Clowns are often fun, but election time reminds us of how scary they can be.

The Swedish party that has gathered many new clowns in recent years is the Left Party (Vänsterpartiet). It used to be the Sweden’s Communist Party, but it rebranded itself after the Soviet Union collapsed and Stalinist dictatorship went out of fashion. The party’s old ideas were now progressive ideas. Or so we were told.

The past two week have seen bad ones for the Left Party. Investigative journalist Inas Hamdan, who is fluent in Arabic, has written a series of articles for the newspaper Expressen in which she revealed how 25 of the party’s candidates have not only praised the Hamas terrorists on 7 October 2023, but on social media denied the Holocaust and shared antisemitic conspiracy theories. The list is too long for this article, but thankfully, some clowns are more progressive than others.

My favourite clown on the list has to be Islam Qatesh, running for the party in Karlskrona. He has been an active member of the party for more than a decade. He was suspended from school in 2006 after he openly praised the top leaders of al-Qaeda. Apparently, that school wasn’t progressive enough for people like him, but he was welcome to run for public office........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)