The Demise and Rise of Estonia

Roosie's letter to her mother

This letter is a part of the exhibition in the newly opened National Museum of Estonia, situated in Tartu.

I do not understand Estonian very well, but I can guess the page starts with - "It is now 1 of March, it is beautiful but cold. Minus 30 degrees"

The letter was written by Rosalie Ruben who was deported from Estonia to Siberia with her two children in 1941. The first years they suffered a lack of everything and Rosalie's lettern to her mother in 1945 describes their difficult situation. While the children were able to return to Estonia in 1947, their mother died a year later in Siberia.

Rosalie and her children where a few of over 30.000 estonians deported in 1941 and 1944. Some managed to escape to Sweden (around 26.000) and other countries, but many perished.

Uppsala, the twin city of Tartu, only 470 km away have lived in peace for 498 years, and Sweden as a nation has been spared from the agony of war and unrest for more than 200 years. This in contrast with Tartu, a city first invaded by the germans in the beginning of the 13:th century. Under Swedish rule the University was founded 1632, but already in 1704 / 1706 the city was sacked again by the Russians. The 19:th century however was a golden age with a thriving University and growth, and after the first world war Estonia became an indipendent country.

Tartu University

However, Estonia was invaded again in 1940 (by the Russians), in 1941 (by the Germans) and in 1944 again by the Russians. The fights along the Emajogi, the river in the center of Tartu, were fierce, and many houses were destroyed. Under Soviet rule Tartu became a city closed for foreigners because of the great airbase for deployment of nuclear bombers.

1988 a delegation from Uppsala was sent here, and a twin city agreement was formed the same autumn. We as a city have been able to send helt to Tartu, and support the transformation from a city oppressed by the Soviet system to a thriving and developing centre for industry, science and trade. For us in Uppsala Tartu is a reminder not to take democracy, freedom and independence for granted, and has given us a thankfulness and appreciation of the opportunity to live in a city with the cathedral still standing, not as in Tartu in ruins because of wars and unrest.

The democratic system is worth fighting for, and I am hoping that Sweden soon will join NATO, aswell as Estonia so that we together can secure the peaceful future of our part of the world.

We ❤️ Israel

Last Sunday I participated in a rally by the Zionist Federation at Raoul Wallenberg's square in Stockholm. Main speaker was Yair Lapid, party leader for Yesh Atid ("There is a future") in Israel, one of the leading opposition parties. Concerning the name of the location Mr Lapid told us that his own father was one of the Jewish children saved by Raoul Wallenberg in Budapest. It wasn't very nice to listen to the counterdemonstrators shouting "boycot Israel" and "Israel, murderers". The message of Mr Lapid was also exactly what the sign above says: "We love Israel". Not AGAINST something, but IN FAVOUR of the Jews having their own country in the State of Israel. Israel is the only true democracy in the Middle East and a country which at the same time having a lot of other traditions and influences still stands as a good representative of our western values such as Democracy, Human value and Freedom of Religion and of Speech.

 

What is striking when I recently wrote about Violent extremism is that of the three groups in Sweden identified by the Government accepting violence as a mean of activism, all three groups are in some way or another against the State of Israel. Sometimes it is a matter of antizionism but often simply antisemitism, that brings left wing extremists, right wing extremists and islamists.

 

Some say that they clearly defy antisemtism ("I have nothing against Jews"), but believe it as totally just being an antizionist. But what does that actally mean? Zionism is a movement for the establishment of a Jewish homeland (in Israel / Palestine), and after this homeland was established a support for this state, and a continuous work to support and help Jews who want to make "aliyah" / immigrate to Israel. 

 

If you are antizionist - does that mean that you do not beleive the State of Israel has the right to exist? In that case antizionism is almost as severe as antisemitism.

 

If the definition of antizionism on the other hand is criticism against the Government of Israel, their doings and policies, then you are partly on the same side as the opposition in Israel, for example the above mentioned Yair Lapid. But then this definition is wrong, which is illustrated by the name of the new big leftwing party in Israel - the Zionist Union which is a union (2014) between the former Labor-party, the Greens and Hatnuah with partyleader Tsipi Livni. "Zionism" is thus a broad ideology that most parties in Israel identify with.

The leader of my party, The Christian Democrats, Ebba Busch Thor also made a speech at the rally. (in an article in the paper Expressen she clarifies her participation - also see the interview). We all have to counter Antisemitism and antizionism in Sweden - if we do not manage to keep Clean in this area it is yet another example of the Value Crisis we currently see in Sweden, and the western World.
 

Ebba wrote an article in Dagens Nyheter this week and it is very important for us to start debate which values should govern Sweden - much of the confusion today is due to a lack of fundament on what is Right and what is Wrong.


During the Writing of this article I came across MP Haneen Zoabi - of "Balad". She is a good example of Israel being a very tolerant state with a well functioning democracy and full Human Rights for the Citizens. 

Being elected to the Knesset in 2009 she refused to participate in the singing of the national anthem Hatikvah at the opening ceremony, she is favoring the onestate-solution  (which oddly enough also the President of Israel, Reuven Rivlin advocates!), and she also participated in the Ship-to-Gaza convoy.

I have recently for two days been following a unique trial in the Swedish Supreme Court (partly present myself). It concerns a case with a father of twins who has been prosecuted because he is said to have abused his small 11-week old son. The twins had been sick with a serious virus desease, and the parents had taken turns beeing awake and taking care of the boys.

It is unbeleivable how society have treated this family, only because of a highly questioned diagnosis. The attorney told in court about how the family right after the event was put into 24-hours surveillance for two months, by the social authorities. They were found to be a good family with no problems and were released.

One year later the mother was on her way to pick up her daughter at the kindergarden when 6 persons approached her (four social workers and two civil police officers) and declared they were to take her twins into custody. There and then. She explained that it was not possible since she was going to pick her daughter up, but got the answer that she did not have to care about here since she had already been taken by the authorities. After that followed a long time struggle to get the children back. The girl was released after only a week, but the twin boys remained in foster care for three long years. Only last summer (2013) were they allowed to return home to their parents.

What is it that makes society react in such a way? When I heard this story during the court hearing I was startled, and when I told my wife about it she was totally upset. Upset that a father trying to awaken his conciousless child who was hardly breathing (we listenede to the phonecall to 112 in court) by shaking it, is accused of abuse! Frightening with all the judicial terms where the prosecutor talks about 'likgiltighetsuppsat' which means the fathter should have been ignorant of the risk of hurting his baby. For the first time in the process, the prosecutor also changed the charges from merely shaking the child to inflicting damage to the head. And this was in the Supreme Court, in the lowest court and court of appeal nothing of this was said to have happened! And now evidence was presented to prove it! The reason was as I understand it that the diagnosis has changed from Skaken Baby Syndrome, to Abusive Head Trauma, which indicates that there might also have been violance against the head. In fact here and in all similar cases there are usually no other proves other than the medical diagnosis. On the contrary all other facts speak AGAINST that abusing might have occured in the way described by the prosecutors.

What happened in this case was that the father went in to the bathroom with the boy because he was screaming. He interpreted this as the boy having difficulties pooping, something which was a usual procedure at this time. Putting the boy on the nursing table taking of the diper usually solved the problem, but not this time. Instead the boy was more and more upset, and abviously something hurt, until he finally fell unconsious. The mother called 112 and was devestated because the eyes were rolling and the boy seemed lifeless. It was at this moment the father told that he had been shaking the baby to, if possible, rewake it.

The shaken baby hypothesis says that if you shake a baby it will have head injuries. Something that can be found out by an Xray, and examination or retinal hemorrages and subdural hemorrages, something you could detect in the case of this boy (it has later been pointed out that the twin brother could very much have the same symptoms as well, but that was never checked out in this case). Theese injuries (or symptoms) are said to possibly lead to permanent injuries or conditions, but that has not been the case here.

The unique with this trial is that it is the first time the Supreme Court of Sweden is concidering a Shaken Baby case as far as I know. The court has (as I previously wrote about here) redirected two former cases to the appeal court, where they will be dealt with this winter.

The reason for the Supreme Court to concider this case was to try the question of intent. In the Tingsrätt (lowest criminal court) the man was sentenced only to pay a fine, since they considered the setting for what happened, but in the Hovrätt (court of appeals), he was sentenced to 1 1/2 years in prison. And the question was whether he should be sentenced to have harmed the child, when he was acting in a state of emergency, in order to revive the baby.

But, the other unique with this is that the question of Shaken Baby Syndrome indirectly also came up to be tried by the Supreme Court. In that way an ongoing scientific debate is now highly judicial relevant. The second day of the trial, the representative of the official Swedish medical advisory board ("Rättsliga rådet") of the Health authority ("Socialstyrelsen") professor Anders Eriksson from Umeå, explained that he can no longer stand for what he had written in his statement one year ago. He is now in a board of SBU, the Swedish Authority for Medical Evaluation who are set to investigate the Shaken Baby diagnosis, and he has realized that there is a real controversy conserning this diagnosis. He therefore explained, that he can not for sure say that the shaking of the baby was the reason for the symptoms detected. The expert called by the defence, professor in radiology at Karolinska Institutet, and former chairman of the Swedish Doctor Society (Svenska Läkarsällskapet) Peter Aspelin, who also Anders Eriksson referred to, in the same way explained that we can not now anything for sure why the injuries, or symptoms found, have occurred.

With those two more or less coherent expert witnesses it would of course be strange should the Supreme Court decide to declare the father guilty, but after all the strange things in the Swedish Judicial system I will be suprised of nothing. Especially after having read the book "Mannen som slutade ljuga" (the Man who stopped lying, by Dan Josefsson), about Sture Bergwall (aka Thomas Quick), who in the nineties was convicted with eight murders and 10 years later freed of all charges. But in those cases all the trials were conducted in the lowest criminal courts, so I do hope that the Swedish Supreme Court will be more thorough, and free the father of three from all the charges. It will be significant not only for that man, but for many parents in Sweden (and perhaps even abroad) who have wrongfully been convicted with abusing their children. 

Please see this trailer of an american documentary about Shaken Baby Syndrome which is soon on show!

Child abuse, or not?

Problems concerning Child Abuse

I have not been writing on this English version of my swedish blog for quit some time... But several of my articles on the swedish blog are referring to a growing debate in Sweden about child abuse. I personally have come accross several cases of families who have been accused of abusing their newly born babies

Recently the Swedish Supreme Court in a second similar verdict stated that a condemned father who earlier had been imprisoned should have his case gone through a second time. The problem of maldiagnosed child abuse have now been discovered by media. Above you can se the front page of Dagens Nyheter, the biggest Morning Paper in January and recently also the journalistic Magazine "Filter" wrote about this in a long article "Without my daughter" that describes a case (the one where permission by the Supreme Court to take up the case was granted which also the "pippigroup" And in the radioprogram "Kropp och Själ" gave a good description the status of the problem. The three doctors Ingemar Thiblin, Lina Davisson and Gabriel Otterman, whom I all have met where discussing the clinical and pharmaceutical implications.

Video | News | Weather | Sports

Above there is a cut from Texas, USA describing one of the cases. According to "Kropp och Själ" (swedish radio program) there are more than 1000 people in the USA are put to jarl due to these accusations. There the situation is however a lot more polarized, doctors fighting each others in the courts.

We have started the organisation  RFFR, Riksförbundet för familjers rättigheter ("national organization for the rights of families"), where we already are  150 medlemmar. We hope that more people will join, more information on our website and facebook!

Se also Dagens juridik, Expressen, Forskning och Framsteg,

DN on the Mio-group