Swedish court: Hospital unfairly fired doctor who complained about anti-Semitic bullying
JTA – A prestigious hospital near Stockholm unfairly fired a Jewish doctor who had complained about anti-Semitic bullying by his superior, a local court ruled Thursday, bringing what appears to be the end of a wide-ranging affair that has cast a spotlight on anti-Semitism in Sweden.
Karolinska University Hospital has contested the decision from the Labor Court but will not appeal against it.
The affair began in 2018, when a Jewish surgeon, who has asked to remain anonymous in court and media reports for career reasons and the possibility of family harassment, told reporters about the alleged anti-Semitic comments made by a former department head at Karolinska.
The former head of department, named Inti Peredo, is said to have posted anti-Semitic caricatures and texts on Facebook. At about the same time, he demanded that the surgeon, an experienced doctor who was among only a handful of Jewish employees at the hospital and the only Jew working under Peredo, be assigned supervision during the operation.
Peredo also flagged the surgeon to a review board as a risk to patient safety, citing reckless conduct, which the labor court said was a false allegation.
The surgeon contacted the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which protested what they and the surgeon said was anti-Semitic persecution in the workplace. Peredo resigned from that position and was reassigned. At the same time, the surgeon was fired last year. The hospital cited “difficulty in cooperation” on the part of the surgeon.
After the dismissal, the Medical Association, a labor union, sued the hospital for wrongful termination because of the surgeon’s ethnicity. The court accepted its claim that the termination was illegal and discriminatory, Dagens Nyheter reported, and the hospital was ordered to reinstate the surgeon and pay him about $121,000 in damages.
Publicly questioning the ruling, a spokesman said the hospital is not appealing simply because “we know that if we were to challenge it, it would be a lengthy legal process,” which “wouldn’t be healthy for either party.”
On Thursday, if Karolinska would have done anything differently, a spokesperson for the hospital told Dagens Nyheter: “We have done everything we could.”
The affair at Karolinska developed amid efforts to tackle the anti-Semitism problem in Sweden, where 27 percent of all religious hate crimes in 2020 targeted Jews, even though their minority of 20,000 people make up 0.1% of the population. The attacks come from both neo-Nazis and Muslim immigrants.
Last year, Sweden’s then Prime Minister Stefan Lofven hosted media giants and foreign dignitaries in Malmö at a conference on combating anti-Semitism. He called on internet companies such as Twitter and Meta to do more to stop the spread of anti-Semitism online.