Swedish Politicians Call To End All Religious Schools
(JTA) — Citing Muslim extremism, two Cabinet ministers in Sweden called for closing all faith schools in the country.
At a news conference Tuesday, Secondary Education Minister Anna Ekström and Public Administration Minister Ardalan Shekarabi said they supported banning faith schools.
“The important thing for us is that in school there are no confessional elements,” said Ekström, a member of the ruling Swedish Social Democratic Party.
Shekarabi wrote in an op-ed for Aftonbladet that he supports banning faith schools, citing his experiences with gender segregation in his native Iran. Referencing phenomenons connected to the arrival in Sweden of hundreds of thousands of Muslims since the 1970s, he wrote “I see religious oppression again — in Swedish schools.”
With the exception of Bulgaria, the Swedish population of 9 million has the highest proportion of Muslims, at 8.1 percent, according to a 2017 Pew study.
Ilya Meyer, a Swedish Jew and former deputy chair of a branch of the Sweden-Israel Friendship Association, called the targeting of all faith schools to end extremist indoctrination in Muslim ones “a bizarre move by the increasingly repressive Swedish government.”
“Because the Swedish government cannot ever be seen to be saying or doing anything against Muslim intransigence because it is Muslim intransigence, its solution is to tar all religious schools with the same brush and ban them all,” he wrote on Facebook.
Administrators from Hillel, Stockholm’s main Jewish school, were not immediately available for comment when approached by JTA.
Ritual slaughter of animals is illegal in Sweden, Finland, Norway and Iceland. In 2013, the ombudsmen of all Nordic countries said they consider non-medical circumcision of boys a violation of children’s rights.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO