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SWEDE OF THE WEEK

COMEDY

Comedian Soran Ismail: ‘Someone’s gotta laugh’

In the first of a new series profiling Swedish newsmakers, The Local gets the lowdown on Kurdish-Swedish comedian Soran Ismail, who has been in the news recently for his starring role in the Sweden Democrat racist video scandal.

Comedian Soran Ismail: 'Someone's gotta laugh'

A shaky video has rattled the anti-immigrant Sweden Democrats in recent days, prompting the party to strip several young political hotshots of their jobs.

At the centre of the drunken tirade, filmed two years ago, is Kurdish-Swedish comedian Soran Ismail, 24, whose calm during the incident belies a dogged determination to put the party to task for its opinions.

“But my passport says I’m Swedish,” says Ismail.

“Doesn’t matter.”

It is a rapid-fire exchange in which Ismail defends himself against the drunken rhetorical onslaught of Sweden Democrat MP Eric Almqvist.

In the sequences of the now-infamous video, Almqvist points his finger over and over again at Ismail, just centimetres from his face.

As the debate spills out into the street from the crowded entrance to McDonald’s on central Stockholm’s Kungsgatan, Ismail remains calm as Almqvist towers over him.

“I love Sweden more than most people do,” Ismail says.

On that night more than two years ago, Ismail had no idea he was talking to top-level politicians, or that the exchange would propel him into the media spotlight for a performance which was anything but funny.

“I’m used to people feeling some kind of need to subject me to their racist opinions,” Ismail told daily Dagens Nyheter (DN) this week.

“It’s happened in the pub, on the net, in school, when I’m on tour all over Sweden.”

Raised in Knivsta, a tiny satellite town on the Uppsala-Stockholm commuter rail line, Ismail has called Sweden home for as long as he remembers.

He was nine months old when his parents, Kurdish refugees from Iraq, found shelter in Sweden.

Yet, after 15 years living in the same house, he says his parents still have no ethnically Swedish friends in the neighbourhood.

When he was only six years old, he was attacked by another boy whose father egged the fight on, and called Ismail a “black head” (svartskalle).

Since becoming a professional comedian, Ismail has often said that humour is like a protective armour, a way to let self-irony give him a bit of distance from criticism.

His family’s origin is far from off-topic. Jokes range from a ‘Who’s the most Kurdish?’ test with fellow Kurdish-origin comedian Özz Nüjen, to mocking those who claim that immigrants have a “criminal gene”.

From his regular slot on the satirical political show Parlamentet, Ismail has gone as far afield as to take a crack at US foreign policy. In the show just after the 2008 US presidential election, he encourages the then-newly elected Barack Obama to sort out the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan but “not to forget that Iceland needs some serious sorting out too”.

Last year, in the weekly podcasts “Someone’s gotta laugh at some point” (‘Till slut kommer någon att skratta’), Ismail and colleagues dissected any and all topics.

The banter was raw, even offensive at times, but behind the juvenile, laddish veneer there seemed to be a frank attempt to strip some taboos of their mystery… sex, ethnicity, ‘anti-feminist’ blogger Per Ström, a blow-up shark.

Nor did the comedians spare each other from the dissection.

“Soran earns a hellavu lot more cash than the rest of us, so he picks up the drink tabs, he pays for lunch, he bought the equipment we needed to record this podcast, dang he even pays for Petter’s apartment,” says Ismail’s colleague.

“Dude, he pays for my parents’ apartment,” counters the aforementioned Petter.

“But he only does it because he hates feeling indebted to anyone,” jokes a third colleague.

It is, perhaps, all rather too-cool-for-school, but the podcasts do stand testament to Ismail’s cool in the literal sense.

He doesn’t lose his head.

And he kept it on during his encounter with the three drunken Sweden Democrats.

There is one point in the video where Ismail abandons his neutral tone and slips into sarcasm.

Trying to point out that he was allowed to debate his point of view, Ismail has to hear that he “debates like a pussy.”

“Yeah, okay, that’s a really mature, reasonable and intelligent response,” Ismail retorts.

Overall, Ismail thinks Swedish media needs to pay more attention to the Sweden Democrats.

“Why doesn’t anyone make a fuss when the party says you have to get tougher on people who call blonde girls whores? Why isn’t media putting pressure on them to explain this focus on being blonde, this focus on ethnicity,” he told DN.

“Or take them to task when Kent Ekeroth asks whether seeking asylum should really be a human right?” he inquires, referring to the Sweden Democrat MP who filmed the video.

“Well, you know what, Kent Ekeroth, it became a human right when the fucking UN decided to make it a human right.”

Take a look at our past Swedes of the Week.

Ann Törnkvist

Follow Ann on Twitter here

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POLITICS

Sweden Democrat leader calls for ‘reevaluation’ of Swedish EU membership

The leader of the Sweden Democrats reawakened the spectre of Swexit – Sweden leaving the European Union – on Tuesday penning a debate article which called for a reevaluation of membership.

Sweden Democrat leader calls for 'reevaluation' of Swedish EU membership

“With ever increasing instances of far-reaching gesture politics, EU membership is starting to become dangerous like a straitjacket which we have no choice but to simply accept and adapt to,” Åkesson wrote in an opinion piece in the Aftonbladet newspaper

“This means that German, Polish or French politicians can in practice decide over which car you are going to be allowed to buy, how expensive your petrol should be, or which tree you should be allowed to cut down on your own land.” 

As a result, he said there are “good reasons to properly reevaluate our membership of the union”.  

In the run-up to the UK’s Brexit referendum in 2016, the Sweden Democrats called frequently for Sweden to follow the British example and hold a renegotiation of its relationship with the EU followed by an in-out referendum. 

But in 2019, as the UK struggled to negotiate a satisfactory departure agreement, Åkesson changed his position saying that he now hoped to change the European Union from within

In his article on Tuesday, Åkesson said that power was continually being ceded from Sweden to Brussels. 

“The more that happens, the more the will of the people as reflected in parliamentary results is going to be less and less relevant,” her said. “Our Swedish elections are going to soon become irrelevant to Sweden’s development, and of course, we can’t let that happen.”

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