Swedish Journalist who wrote pitying article for antisemitic terrorist who murdered Jewish children wins prestigious award

A Swedish newspaper has handed an award to a celebrated journalist despite him having written a pitying article for a terrorist who murdered Jewish children in Toulouse in 2012.

Veteran journalist Göran Greider, who has been Editor-in-Chief of the newspaper Dala-Demokraten since 1999, has been given the prestigious Lagercrantzen award by Sweden’s biggest newspaper, Dagens Nyheter, to celebrate a career in which he has published approximately 30 books and already won many other prizes. Those who awarded him the prize state that he is a “lovely body of a man in Swedish cultural life.”

However, in March 2012, Mr Greider penned a piece sympathising with Islamist terrorist Mohammed Merah, who shot three Jewish children in the Toulouse school massacre, and blamed the state of Israel for their murder.

Mr Merah, 23, born and raised in Toulouse, went on a killing spree beginning on 11th March, shooting an off-duty French Army paratrooper. Four days later, he killed two off-duty French soldiers and wounded another. On 19th March, he burst into the Ozar Hatorah Jewish day school in Toulouse, opening fire and killing rabbi Jonathan Sandler, 30, and his two sons Arié, five, and Gabriel, four, and Myriam Monsonego, seven, who Mr Merah shot at point-blank range after his first gun jammed. Mr Merah also wounded Bryan Bijaoui, seventeen.

In his article for Dala-Demokraten, published five days after the murders, Mr Greider described Mr Merah as “a tragic example of how an unstable man is torn apart by his time: he hated the military for the war against the Taliban and he hated Israeli for what the Israeli military exposed the Palestinians to,” citing Mr Mehra as a victim of French class injustice and xenophobia, and suggesting that he would become a political pawn in that year’s French Presidential election.

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