Sweden's Hypocritical Pursuit of Assange Is a Joke

Naomi Wolf: The nation is lax on sex crimes, until now
By John Johnson,  Newser Staff
Suggested by kokuaguy
Posted Dec 15, 2010 7:43 PM CST
Sweden's Hypocritical Pursuit of Assange Is a Joke
A supporter of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange protests in London on Dec. 13.   (AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis)

Naomi Wolf finds it a wee bit fishy that Sweden does a lousy job at pursuing rape cases—unless your name happens to be Julian Assange. She dispels the "bizarre fantasy" that Sweden is a "progressively post-feminist paradise" quick to go after men who cross the line. Far from it. Sweden has a higher rate of rapes than the US and a lower rate of prosecution, she writes at the Huffington Post.

Which makes the treatment of Assange—"a global manhunt, solitary confinement in the Victorian cell that drove Oscar Wilde to suicidal despair within a matter of days, and now a bracelet tracking his movements"—all the more ludicrous and, in fact, an insult to feminism. "Shame on Sweden; shame on Interpol; shame on Britain," she writes. "And lasting shame, given this farcical hijacking of a sex crime law that is scarcely ever enforced in Sweden in far less ambiguous contexts, on the United States of America." Read her full column here.
(More Julian Assange stories.)

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