Israellycool

Is that an Allah in your rotten mango or are you just happy to see me completely off your rocker?

Rubina Sheikh from Helsingborg in southern Sweden believes she’s received a message from God – in a rotten mango.

As the two halves of Sheikh’s freshly sliced mango fell away from her knife last Saturday, she discovered what she says is a sign from God.

“When I sliced the mango in two, ‘Allah’ was written in one half and ‘Muhammad’ in the other. It’s a miracle, a sign from Allah,” said Sheikh to the Metro newspaper.

The practicing Muslim is convinced that the black lines emanating through the fruit form characters in Arabic which spell the holy words.

And local Muslims have been streaming in to see the miracle for themselves.

“I’d heard of the phenomenon earlier, but never before seen it with my own eyes,” Ghulam Mughal told Metro.

But an emeritus professor in Islam from nearby Lund University is less convinced the rotting fruit is a sign from Allah.

“There are 14 recognized ways to create the word ‘Allah’. When you think about how many mangoes there are out there, it’s not strange that one of them has a pattern which can be interpreted to be the right combination of characters,” said Jan Hjärpe to Metro.

Incidentally, this is not the first time something has been sliced in two for the name of Allah.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in Italy, the Swedes are acting positively French.

The Swedish government has pulled out of an international military exercise in Italy at short notice, after discovering that the Israeli air force was due to take part, local media reported on Wednesday.

The F17 Blekinge Wing, which was to have taken part in the exercise, was informed of the decision on Tuesday, two weeks before the event. The exercise has been planned for more than eight months, reported Swedish Radio.

The objective of the exercise was to train for any future international peacekeeping operations. But details of Israeli involvement changed the conditions of Sweden’s participation, said the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

“Our analysis of the current situation is that Israel’s participation in this kind of peacekeeping effort does not seem likely given the political situation in the Middle East,” said the ministry’s press officer, Christian Karlsson, to SR.

Swedish home furnishings giant IKEA is promising to depict more women in its instruction manuals after Norway’s prime minister accused it of showing only men assembling furniture.

 

“IKEA will now review its instructions leaflets to get a more even balance between men and women,” IKEA said in a statement on Thursday. The privately owned group has 208 stores in 32 countries.

 

IKEA said it already used pictures of women in its leaflets alongside men and cartoon figures whose sex is left unclear.

Norwegian Prime Minister Kjell Magne Bondevik earlier criticised IKEA for failing to depict women and linked it to an apparent fear of upsetting some Muslims.

 

“This isn’t good enough,” he was quoted as telling the Norwegian daily Verdens Gang. “It’s important to promote attitudes for sexual equality, not least in Muslim nations.”

A Swedish woman said on Sunday that she had found a penis in a bottle of ketchup.

Viktoria Ed said she was lucky enough to discover the organ before putting the sauce on her bread rolls, unlike her husband Stefan and their children, Madeleine and Simon.

 

“It looked like a penis, of an adult if it’s human, and medium sized,” she said.

“It’s disgusting. The top of the bottle was intact, as if it had just left the factory. We would like to know how this thing ended up in a ketchup bottle.”

The Godegaarden brand ketchup was made in Turkey and distributed in Sweden by the company Axfood.

The welfare - perhaps even the lives - of five Swedish children is being sacrificed on the altar of political expediency.

 

Swedish mother Elizabeth Krantz’s five children were kidnapped from Sweden back in June 2004 by her estranged Palestinian husband Ismail Nowajah. The children - Adam, Amina, Zakarias, Miriam and Sara - range in age from six to sixteen. They were taken to the Gaza Strip against their will and in contravention of Swedish law, and have since been incarcerated in separate locations. Their mother, from a small town outside Gothenburg on Sweden’s west coast, has official custody of the children, with visitation rights granted to her estranged husband.

 

Ismail Nowajah says he disapproves of the upbringing the children were getting in Sweden, where they were born, and that he wishes to bring them up according to a stricter Islamic code, which he says cannot be done in Sweden but is possible in Gaza.

—-

The children are Swedes. They are unfamiliar with Arab culture and have no knowledge of the Arabic language. They are thus unable to communicate with the surroundings into which they have been forcibly thrust. They are being denied schooling, and 15-year-old Miriam suffers from an unusual form of diabetes - type 1 - that requires special medication, treatment that has thus far been denied her by her father.

However, he has signaled that he is willing to release the children back into the custody of their mother against a payment of five million Swedish kronor (about 720,000 US dollars).

Commenting on the case, the Swedish Foreign Office noted that the situation is highly sensitive since the children have dual nationality - Swedish and Palestinian - and that according to Palestinian law, the children are the wards of their father.

 

This is a remarkable point of view on several accounts. Firstly, because Swedish law applies to Swedish citizens, the more so since they were kidnapped from Sweden. No other legislation is relevant until the children have been returned home. The father is in breach of Swedish law, for a crime committed in Sweden.

 

The second consideration is the illogic of the Foreign Office’s standpoint: the children do not - and in point of law can not - have dual nationality. There is no country called Palestine. While the emergence of such a country may well be a highly desirable goal for reasons of geopolitical interest, Palestine does not today exist. The children therefore do not have dual nationality, and Sweden accordingly need take no such consideration into account.

—-

What is even more remarkable about Sweden’s claim that the children are citizens of a country called Palestine, is that Sweden at the same time provides asylum to countless Palestinians as “stateless refugees”. They are apparently both stateless and nationals - depending on the political niceties at stake.

In the most recent twist to the plight of the five kidnapped children, they have now been enrolled by UNWRA as refugees. Sweden is one of the largest per capita contributors to United Nations aid in the Gaza Strip, and is now in the remarkable position of witnessing the kidnapping of its own citizens from the country of their birth, seeing them incarcerated against their will in a foreign country - which according to the political needs of the day either exists as a legal entity or does not - and then paying from its own coffers to maintain them as refugees in their place of imprisonment.

The situation is a logic-defying absurdity that has been further exacerbated by the impenetrable wall of obstruction thrown in the face of the children’s mother by the Swedish Foreign Office. It was not until she packed her bags and flew to Israel on her own cognizance that Elisabeth Krantz was finally able to meet her children, albeit for only a few short hours before she was forced to leave them again. Their desperate plea: “When are we coming home?”

 

Mr Jan Norlander of the Swedish Foreign Office repeated most recently in a radio interview on Monday the 15th of November that his staff have to tread most carefully in this highly volatile area, as they do not want to expose either themselves or Elisabeth Krantz to danger. That is not an argument that is calculated to put Elisabeth’s mind at ease. She took the risk that the Swedish consular staff are paid to take on her behalf and visited her children. At no time have the Swedish consular staff attempted to visit the children themselves to monitor their condition, or offered their mother the opportunity to do so.

—-

Swedish Foreign Minister Ms. Laila Freivalds visited Ramallah back in September 2004 and maintains that she received assurances from Yasser Arafat that he had dealt with the issue, and that the children would soon be on their way home. That was then, Mr. Arafat is no more, and the children are still imprisoned without access to either medical care or schooling.

 

Elisabeth Krantz contacted Swedish Member of Parliament Yvonne Ruwaida - herself a Palestinian - in the hope that Ms. Ruwaida might feel a strong inclination to have the matter cleared up smoothly and swiftly. MP Ruwaida did not even acknowledge receipt of the letter.

 

There was some hope that Swedish Prime Minister Gצran Persson’s attendance at Yasser Arafat’s funeral might assist in opening doors to the Palestinian hierarchy - after all, Prime Minister Persson was accompanied by Arafat’s lifelong friend, former Swedish Foreign Minister Sten Andersson. However, they landed in Cairo and like most of the non-Arab participants, witnessed the proceedings from afar, returning to Sweden within two hours of touching down.