Swedish authorities sound the alarm about violent, Islamist organizations spreading false allegations about the country’s child welfare service. The threat picture in Norway is unchanged, says PST.
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– It is about channels with up to 17 million followers.
This is what operations manager Mikael Tofvesson says for the agency Psychological Defense in the Swedish Agency for Civil Protection and Emergency Planning (MSB) in Sweden.
– The spread is potentially greater than the Swedish population, he adds.
According to Swedish SVT launched the threat campaign on Twitter in late December.
Here, incorrect information was spread in Arabic-speaking channels with millions of followers. The authority for civil protection and emergency preparedness states that the campaign tactically uses information as a means of force to mislead.
Tofvesson is clear on what he thinks is the reason for the campaign.
– The purpose is to create a negative image of Sweden.
–Crying children
The campaign has recently become stronger and stronger. according to Swedens radio the distribution of films has risen sharply in just the last week.
Central to the campaign are fake films of children crying while telling that they have been kidnapped from their parents by the Swedish authorities.
Tofvesson says that the filmmakers have used several cases where the Swedish social services have taken over the care of children in accordance with child welfare legislation or cases where the police have been forced to intervene in families.
And then they make their own false analysis of the situation, he says.
SVT asks if the campaign is related care for children of IS women:
– We can not speculate on that. But we can state that there is another factor. There are various actors who joined the campaign when it grew, some of which expressed support for IS and other anti-democratic, Islamist movements, says Tofvesson and adds:
– It is not unreasonable to assume that any of them have considered that question in connection with this.
Magnus Ranstorp is a research leader in terrorism at the Swedish National Defense College.
To VG, he says that the background for the campaign is multifaceted, but that it all started within Sweden.
– For many years there has been rumors about the social services … that one should have nothing to do with them.
According to Ranstorp, what was “just” spreading rumors has developed sharply over the past year – to now include conferences for people with children who have been taken care of by the social services, and legal assistance and strategies for how to stand up against child welfare. .
But it was not until August that it went viral online, after a Facebook group was started where personal stories about “abducted children” were spread.
– Here they have started talking about stopping the kidnapping of our children, the researcher says.
–False claims: “Sweden in the process of becoming a terrorist state”
Both municipalities and social services have been attacked by accounts linked to violent Islamist organizations.
As a result, municipalities and authorities across the country have been informed of the ongoing campaign.
The website Tissue has mapped the campaign. They write that the conspiracy theories are spread in closed groups with tens of thousands of members.
According to the website, there are allegations that Swedish authorities kidnap Muslim children to secularize them as part of the “war against Islam”.
They also write that what they refer to as “well-known names” in the radical, Islamist milieu in Sweden participates and fuels mistrust of society and officials.
Below is an example of a post in these groups:
- «The child welfare service in all Swedish municipalities is criminal. It is guilty of war crimes against humanity, children and immigrants, and especially Muslim families. Sweden is about to become a terrorist state codified of the so-called Act on the Care of Young People, LVU “Child Welfare Act”, and deprives children and their parents of basic human rights. “
Researcher Ranstorp draws, among other things, two extreme imams who have been expelled from Sweden because, according to the Swedish security police, Säpo, they pose a threat to the country’s security. Among other things, the imams are said to have spread the false allegations through Friday sermons.
Other posts claim that Muslim children are placed in non-Muslim homes and forced to eat pork and drink alcohol.
According to Doku, there are also false allegations that girls are raped and have to take off their hijab, in addition to children having to change their name and religion and start cross-dressing.
Psychological defense in MSB says that the threats have become increasingly worse, as the Swedish authorities went out against the campaign in Arabic-speaking media.
Tofvesson believes that there was a coordinated reaction against Sweden.
Then threats of violence and threats of terrorist attacks appeared.
Researcher: – Two threats
Ranstorp at Försvarshögskolan tells VG that the disinformation has been captured and passed on by actors such as al-Jazeera Arabic, which has 17 million followers on Twitter.
He believes that the snowball effect of the spread of rumors is very serious for Sweden.
– Does the campaign constitute a real deterioration of the threat picture?
– There are two threats here. One is the polarization of society – the other is the actual, pure threats, says Ranstorp.
He points out, among other things, that people with links to the terrorist group al-Qaeda, spread false allegations about the Swedish social services:
– When you have high-ranking al-Qaeda personalities, that a lot of false information is spread, or people become desperate in their own situations, yes, then it can increase the level of violence, Ranstorp says and emphasizes:
– It is still difficult to know how this actually increases the threat level. But one is monitoring who is active in this debate.
Unchanged threat picture in Norway
– This has not changed the threat picture in Norway, says senior adviser Martin Bernsen to VG on Monday afternoon.
He further says that PST continuously assesses the threat picture.
– But now this is something that has just become known in Sweden, so it is too early to say whether this is something that hits Norway and whether it will have an impact on the threat picture.
– For the time being, the threat picture is unchanged.
–I The national threat assessment for 2021 PST wrote that “extreme Islamism and right-wing extremism are expected to continue to be the biggest terrorist threats against Norway”.
Among other things, PST wrote that they consider it possible that both extreme Islamists and right-wing extremists would try to carry out terrorist acts in Norway last year.
– The threat from extreme Islamists is considered to have intensified. The reason for this is the increased tension between freedom of expression and what many Muslims experience as violations of Islam.
In a few days, Friday 11 February, adds PST, the Intelligence Service and the National Security Authority each presents its own recent threat and risk assessment for 2022.
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