A Swedish Muslim takes on anti-Semitism | Religion News Service

From one minority community to another:

When Derakhti speaks, the criticism — and unnerving threats — come from many quarters.

The most potent anti-Semitism in Sweden and Europe today comes from Muslim immigrant communities, where some have called Derakhti a traitor and told him he should fear for his life. Some ultra right-wing Swedes nurse their own brand of prejudice, rooted in historic European anti-Semitism. And on the left, many are staunchly anti-Israel and extend their disdain to Swedish Jews. Some Swedes say the liberals among them have failed to denounce anti-Semitism on the part of the country’s Muslim minority for fear of appearing Islamophobic.

This apathy and vitriol seems only to deepen Derakhti’s empathy. “I feel like I am a Jew,” he said.

But he comes off as a cool young Muslim.

Derakhti is a hip dresser, accessorized with earbuds, an earring and tattoos — including a prominent one in Arabic. He talks cool — in both English and Swedish — and quickly admits that, to his parents’ chagrin, he was no student. He and David fought off anti-Semites, but Derakhti also casually mentions how, in their teenage years, they had fun smoking pot, and generally driving the adults around them crazy.

Derakhti’s image can only help him convince more young people to summon the courage to confront bigotry, said Silberstein, a well-educated, middle-aged Jewish man who has been working on the issue far longer than Derakhti.

“I’m pretty used to speaking in public,” Silberstein said. “But when I went into a school with Siavosh, when I spoke they hardly listened. When he got up and spoke, that’s when they really started listening.”

Derakhti has lost count of the number of times he has taken a busload of Swedish teenagers to Auschwitz and other concentration camps. He thinks it’s close to 20. He has also toured them through Srebrenica, the site of the worst massacre in Europe since the Holocaust, where Bosnian Serbs in 1995 slaughtered more than 8,000 Muslim men and boys during the Bosnian War.

His Jewish friend David was not the only one to inspire the trips he now leads to concentration camps and killing fields. His parents — persecuted in their native Iran as members of the Azerbaijani minority — moved the family to Sweden, where Derakhti was born. His father took him to Bergen-Belsen when he was 13, and Auschwitz when he was 15, to show him where hatred can lead.

“My father told me that if you’re in a minority, you always have to stand up for a friend,” Derakhti said.

Growing up in Malmo, a city with a reputation for intolerance in a country known for just the opposite, Derakhti saw its tiny Jewish minority — including its Chabad rabbi — attacked by members of the city’s much larger Muslim community. Many Malmo Jews fear wearing a yarmulke or other symbol of Jewishness. In the capital, Stockholm, Jews feel safer, but still wonder about their future in Sweden, particularly when Israel is at war, as it was during the summer of 2014 against Hamas in Gaza.

Source: A Swedish Muslim takes on anti-Semitism | Religion News Service