Sweden has put itself in a situation that requires action far beyond pithy exhortations and serious frowns. Now action is needed, and real action.

The Minister for Civil Defence, Carl-Oskar Bohlin (M), selfie film of his attempt to get from his workplace in the Parliament building to his home quickly went viral.

The minister was followed by a horde of so-called “pro-Palestinian demonstrators”, which is a euphemism for aggressive, Jew-hating, democracy-denying, loud and violence-prone Hamas sympathisers. These individuals, who since 7 October have become part of the Swedish street scene, filmed and photographed the minister while shouting “shame on you” and ranting about genocide, blood on the minister’s hands and Swedish arms exports. The persecution did not stop until the minister managed to make it back to the safety of the parliament building.

This evening I attended a meeting of the Moderate parliamentary group in the Riksdag. When I stepped out on Mynttorget and was going to walk home, it looked like this. A group of people with antisocial dominance behaviour started following me, which resulted in me simply not being able to take the pic.twitter.com/NL8NkwpHmI

– Carl-Oskar Bohlin (@CarlOskar) 8 September 2025

How was this even possible? Where were the police? Why didn’t the Minister have bodyguard protection? So many questions, so few answers.

The persecution of the Minister for Civil Affairs was not an odd accident at work – it was a clear and symptomatic sign of the state of Sweden today. Last October, Foreign Minister Maria Malmer Stenergard (M) was attacked during a debate on Gaza in the Riksdag plenary hall, and it is less than three months since MP Jessica Stegrud (SD) was attacked by a violent pro-Palestinian outside her workplace. In connection with that incident, I asked whether 2025 will be the year when we see another political murder in Sweden.

On Monday night, it could have happened. Now, the minister and Sweden were lucky, but what would have happened if someone in the mob had a knife? Or if the mob had become sufficiently agitated for someone to pick up a pebble or an empty bottle? The mob’s attitude was clear beyond any doubt: in their eyes, the minister was personally responsible for the suffering in Gaza and had Palestinian blood on his hands.

Carl-Oskar Bohlin, in his social media posts, calls the mob “the autonomous Palestinian movement” and says they exhibit “anti-social dominance behaviour”. I think the minister is being extremely diplomatic when he says that, but what we are seeing is violent and anti-democratic domination behaviour that has no place in Sweden. At all.

Maybe the minister was “red-pilled” only on Monday evening, but the fact is that the majority of Swedes have long since realised that we have nothing to oppose in the meeting with these groups. Many warned of the consequences even before the Minister for Civil Affairs’ party colleague, then Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt, instructed Swedes to “open their hearts”, after which the Moderates opened Sweden’s borders wide. The Social Democrats continued in the same vein, with Stefan Löfven declaring that his Europe “does not build walls”.

It was business as usual, when “the humanitarian superpower” Sweden would be the best in class.

A decade after Reinfeldt’s open hearts, this is where we have ended up: Swedish streets and squares have become places where every Saturday there are calls for the genocide of Jews, while the police protect (and hug) the demonstrators. Swedish Jews emigrate because of the threat. Members of Parliament are attacked at (or in) their place of work and a minister is made to run a gauntlet over the same cobblestones where blood flowed during the politically motivated bloodbath almost 505 years ago.

The Prime Minister’s reaction? A call on X: ”[S]ustain immediately from threatening Swedish politicians.”

But then again. The Prime Minister has tweeted a message, problem solved. In the unlikely event that any convinced Hamas or ISIS supporter still believes that all Jews, homosexuals, Christians and [fill in the blank] should be threatened and murdered according to what their perverted ideology prescribes, perhaps they can get a serious talk with Jan Jönsson (L)?

No. The problem is not solved. Instead, Sweden is in a situation where it is reasonable to quote Winston Churchill after the Battle of el-Alamein: ”Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning).

At best, we are entering a phase of recovery from a period of severe national psychosis in which megalomaniacal delusions of undemanding goodness, boundless hospitality and infinite resources have transformed Sweden from a peaceful model nation into a mecca of violence (no pun intended) and an international cautionary tale.

But before we can sense the beginning of the end, we need to realise that Sweden has put itself in a situation that requires action far beyond pithy exhortations and serious frowns. Action is needed now, and real action. If you want to look on the bright side of Carl-Oskar Bohlin’s evening last night, it is that even deeply asleep prime ministers can start to wake up when their own party colleagues risk being lynched on their way home from the Riksdag office.

Some measures may be, from a Swedish perspective, draconian: closed borders, patrolled military, water cannons, rubber bullets, mass arrests, identity checks, detentions, cancelled citizenship, changed rules for citizenship and voting rights, restricted freedoms and rights for non-citizens, deportations of individuals and entire families.

As of today, I hope that Säpo prioritises identifying every single person who appears on Bohlin’s selfie film, to arrest and deport those who are not Swedish citizens and to arrest and prosecute those who cannot be deported (yet).

Does that scenario seem repugnant? Not compared to the alternative. Unpalatable though it is, we must now ask ourselves the same question that the Civil Affairs Minister posed in Tuesday’s interview on Nyhetsmorgon: What is the next frontier that will be crossed by these people?

I think we know the answer.