It is said that Swedish authorities can “‘legally’ kidnap your child” and place him in their foster-care system (which already has a problem with child abuse). A Christian, Russian father learned this the hard way recently, after his three daughters were seized and placed in foster care with a Muslim family. Now the man has fled Sweden with his children and is seeking asylum in Poland.
As Breitbart reports, “Denis Lisov’s daughters. [sic] 12-year-old Sofia, six-year-old Serafina, and four-year-old Alisa, were placed into the Swedish foster care system after his wife’s mental state had greatly deteriorated due to schizophrenia, with a court sending them to live with a Lebanese Muslim family in 2017.”
Swedish social services had decided that Lisov, who was unemployed at the time, couldn’t adequately care for the children. (Pictures of father and daughters below.)
Dzis o godz. 12 w Sądzie Rej. dla https://t.co/jEWexW7egh. Warszawy rozpocznie się posiedzenie, na którym Sąd zdecyduje czy trzy Rosjanki, które uciekły wraz z ojcem przed urzędnikami ze Szwecji będą mogły pozostać w Polsce. Dzieci spędziły noc z ojcem wskutek postawy @OrdoIuris pic.twitter.com/hL7eBD3RC8
— Bartosz Lewandowski (@BartoszLewand20) April 3, 2019
Yet according to Lisov’s “lawyer, the family was given no opportunities to defend their rights and the girls didn’t want to stay in a foster family,” RT informs. “One of the main problems was that the children came from a Christian family and found it difficult to abide by the rules of the Muslim household.”
In fact, Sputnik described the foster home’s environment as “harsh.”
As for Lisov, he not only “took exception to the fact that the girls … were placed in a Muslim home, but also that they were taken 186 miles away from where he lived and he was only allowed to see them six hours a week, Polish broadcaster Polsat reports,” Breitbart also tells us.
This prompted Lisov to take his girls and flee to Russia. “On his way, though, he was stopped in Poland, after Sweden reported his children as missing. In Poland, he sought asylum for himself and his daughters,” informs Sputnik.
The good news is that a “Polish court ruled that Sweden had violated an EU convention that prohibits placing children in culturally alien environments. The Lisovs were also granted the right to stay in Poland until his application has been investigated,” Sputnik continues.
Commenting on the case, Polish judge Janeta Seliga-Kaczmarek said, “The children have a very strong bond with the father, and when I talked to them they told me that they want to stay with their father and love him and do not want to be separated from him,” Sputnik relates.
Moreover, while Swedish authorities had offered to take the children back to Sweden, Judge Seliga-Kaczmarek said that the “court can not issue minor children outside the territory of the Republic of Poland, where they entered under the care of their father,” Breitbart tells us.
Since then, Lisov has been “arrested” in absentia in Sweden “on suspicion of child abduction,” according to Sputnik. (Note: Since “arrested” means “taken into custody,” it seems likely that Sputnik used the wrong terminology here.)
Regardless, Lisov has been granted a reprieve. Yet his is not the only case in which Christians are suffering apparent persecution in Western Europe.
For example, there was “a similar situation in the United Kingdom in which a five-year-old Christian girl was placed into care with an allegedly hardline Muslim family, despite protests from her family,” explains Breitbart. “It was alleged that the girl was forced to remove her crucifix necklace and that Arabic, which she did not understand, was spoken around her frequently.”
There’s also the case related in the following tweet:
Hungary Offers Asylum as Sweden Prepares to Deport Christian Convert Actress to Iranhttps://t.co/U56YHsIMyR
— Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) August 15, 2017
Yet this just echoes a more recent case in which a U.K. official had rejected an Iranian Christian convert’s asylum claim. The official actually mocked the man’s faith, saying it was not a “religion of peace” and that his Christian conversion must be insincere since, the official wrote, you claimed “Jesus is your saviour, but then claimed that He would not be able to save you from the Iranian regime.”
The Christophobic attitude reflected here — where supposedly “compassionate” government officials are willing to send Christians home to their deaths while granting asylum to the type of Muslim migrants who would be their executioners — is typical in today’s Western Europe. It’s also reflected in hate-speech laws, ubiquitous on the continent, which are used to stifle criticism of Islam while anti-Christian agitation is given a pass.
As for Sweden, far from being an exception, it’s actually the world’s least religious Western nation, with 76 percent of the population claiming to be either “not religious” or “atheist” and only five percent being regular churchgoers (mosque attendance is growing, though). Apropos to this, Sweden actually opened an “atheist cemetery” in 2016. (One should wonder why it isn’t a fertilizer factory. Romanticizing death? The departed are just worm food, atheists tell us.)
As elsewhere in the West, this atheism correlates with Christophobia; this manifests itself in many ways in Sweden, one of which was a popular brand of jeans bearing an anti-Christian logo described by its designer as “an active statement against Christianity.”
So we could wonder if placing Lisov’s daughters with a Muslim foster family was as well. It follows that since Sweden is still only 8.1 percent Muslim, there should be no shortage of non-Muslim foster families with which the girls could have stayed. So were anti-Christian Swedish authorities trying to extinguish any incipient faith the children might have? And would they place Muslim kids with a Christian foster family?
Of course, that we even have to ask these questions tells the tale.
Image: JeanRee via iStock / Getty Images Plus
