BIO LASSE WILHELMSON

Lasse Wilhelmson was born in 1941 in Sweden. Recently he signed an international petition of Jews who waived what they regard as the colonial right of return to Israel. Wilhelmson's ancestors fled to Sweden from the Tsar's pogroms during the 1880s. Wilhelmson lived in Israel for several years during the early 1960s. He is currently employed as a woodworking instructor in an immigrant neighbourhood on the outskirts of Stockholm. He has long been active in the labour movement, as well as the antiwar movement during the Vietnam era. Wilhelmson has been a member of his local city council for 23 years, including four years on the Board. He belongs to the Jews for an Israeli-Palestinian Peace in Sweden. Wilhelmson also published the article "Israel Must Choose the Path of Democracy" in The Palestine Chronicle the 16th of September 2003. A somewhat modified version of that article was published the 3rd of June 2003 in one of the two biggest daily morning newspapers in Sweden - Svenska Dagbladet (independent conservative).

Joh cut his political teeth during the upheaval of 1970‘s South African revolution. He was the inaugural President of the Black Students Society at the University of the Witwatersrand, in 1974 and held that post until 1977. During this period he also served as editor in chief of the societies magazine “By Ministerial Consent” (a reference to the Government permission required for a Black Person to attend a White University in Apartheid South Africa.). He was a member of both the South African Students Organisation and the Black Peoples Convention. His studies were cut short in 1977 after his consent to attend university and his Scholarship were withdrawn. In 1980 he married his childhood sweetheart and in 1985 they left South Africa after being granted permission to migrate to Australia. Joh is a Building Contractor in Brisbane, Australia. He still believes that the “Black Consciousness” Soweto Uprising of 1976 was the defining moment in the demi se of the Apartheid System, paving the way for the broader based African National Congress, which had been rendered moribund by ideological battles, to re-energize itself and exert its more experienced political leadership. There is little doubt in his mind that political change begins at the grassroots level.