Mohamsson, the Swedish and Palestinian minister with the Star of David

Simona Mohamsson is the Swedish Minister for Education and the leader of the Liberals in the Stockholm government. Her father is a Sunni Palestinian born in Haifa who lived in the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp, near Tripoli, in northern Lebanon. Her mother is a Lebanese Shia. Her parents arrived in Sweden via Hamburg, where the future minister was born. The family moved to Sweden when Simona was eight years old, and her father also changed the family surname, Mohammed, to Mohamsson, to sound more Swedish.

At the party leaders’ debate organised by Expressen and throughout the election campaign leading up to the 13 September vote, Mohamsson appeared wearing a Star of David around her neck. She is not Jewish, but comes from a Muslim family (although she now describes herself as an atheist), and is half Palestinian. “I wear the Star of David for those children who do not dare to do so in today’s Sweden,” said Mohamsson. The minister also accused the left of having sent letters of support to Palestinian prisoners convicted of terrorist attacks that killed Israeli civilians.

“I think the left should be held responsible for sending love letters to Hamas,” said Mohamsson. A quick glance at pro-Palestinian groups on social media is enough to make your skin crawl. “I can’t believe she’s half Palestinian.” “Satan incarnate.” “A dog collar, the invisible chain to their master.”

Another example comes from the political scientist, speaker and activist Valley Ghanem, who, amongst other things, has worked on the development of ‘Malmö’s action plan against Islamophobia’. On Instagram, Ghanem writes of the minister: ‘May she be burned’.

Mohamsson grew up and studied in Gothenburg, where synagogues were set on fire and attacked. She knows Malmö well. In the 1970s, Malmö’s Jewish community numbered over two thousand members: today, fewer than five hundred remain. Those who remain conceal their Jewish identity.

The Wiesenthal Centre has issued a warning to all Jews visiting Malmö: “Remove any religious symbols in public and do not speak Hebrew”. No Star of David. Recently, cinemas in Malmö refused to host the Jewish Film Festival. Of the seven cinema chains, not a single cinema in Sweden’s third-largest city had the courage to organise a harmless Jewish film festival.

Petter Ljunggren, a Swedish journalist who wanted to experience what life is like for Jews in Malmö, wore a kippah and a necklace featuring the Star of David. The result is a one-hour television documentary entitled “Odiare gli ebrei a Malmö”. In Rosengård, the neighbourhood seen as a symbol of integration, eggs were thrown at Ljunggren from windows. In the end, the journalist was forced to flee and remove his Jewish head covering.

But Malmö is merely a pioneering laboratory: what is happening there in concentrated form is already taking place, in more diluted but no less dramatic forms, in other European cities. Last week, a French Jewish tourist made the mistake of walking around Rome wearing a kippah. He was kicked in Largo Torre Argentina. In another incident in France, a Jewish couple in a supermarket were approached by an Irish tourist, who told them on camera that he was sorry that “Hitler didn’t finish the job”. The man then threatened them: “Get out of here before I put a bullet in your head, OK?”. No, that’s not OK at all. Simona Mohamsson understands this better than most, and this anti-Semitic disaster has the nerve to wear it in public.