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They’ll Take Sweden
FrontPage Magazine
Bruce Bawer
5/27/2013
Excerpt:
Night after night last week, as the tumult in Stockholm not only continued but kept spreading to more and more neighborhoods and then to other Swedish cities, the media in that country, by and large, kept pretending that it was all about things like unemployment and social marginality, all of which were supposedly aggravated by Swedish racism (and, especially, by the insufficiently respectful attitude of police officers toward immigrant “youths”); meanwhile, the foreign media, which, as the disorder persisted, found it increasingly difficult to pretend that all this wasn’t happening (the New York Times finally ran a four-sentence Reuters item about the bedlam on Thursday), largely echoed the domestic disinformation.
Of all the reports I looked at, the one that most effectively epitomized the asinine, mendacious approach of the Western media to this latest nightmare was a piece from Reuters that had no fewer than eight names attached to it. I would strongly recommend that you read the whole thing; in fact, I would suggest that it be taught in future history courses as a prime example of the high level of duplicity of which the early twenty-first-century Western media were capable when confronted with raw displays of Islamic power on their own turf. Credited to Niklas Pollard and Philip O’Connor, with “additional reporting” by Johan Ahlander, Mia Shanley, Patrick Lannin, and Simon Johnson, writing by Alistair Scrutton, and editing by Janet McBride, the Reuters piece was headlined “Sweden riots expose ugly side of” – no, not of “European immigration policies” or “Islam,” of course, but of the “Nordic model.”
Yes, it’s all the fault of the “Nordic model”: the roots of the Stockholm unrest, Reuters (and virtually every other major Western news organization that deigned to report on the disturbances) would have us believe, lay “in segregation, neglect and poverty,” in years of “fruitless job hunts, police harassment, racial taunts and a feeling of living at the margins.” And so on. Which means, I suppose, that 9/11 revealed the flaws of the American model, and the car-burnings in French suburbs reflect the weaknesses of the Gallic model, and the explosions in Madrid were all about the failings of the Spanish model, and the savage murder of Lee Rigby in London last week…well, you get the idea.
The dispatch from Reuters suggested that Sweden’s “lowered taxes” (which are still absurdly high) and “reduced state benefits” (which are still staggeringly bounteous) are responsible for rising economical inequality and segregation, and thus for the pandemonium in the streets. An Ethiopian-born woman interviewed by Reuters maintained that Swedish kids won’t play with her daughter “because she’s dark.” (There was no mention, needless to say, of the real problem in an increasing number of Scandinavian schools, namely the systematic harassment, and worse, of ethnic Swedish kids by their immigrant-group classmates.) On late-night trains from downtown Stockholm to the suburbs, the Reuters team told us, you’ll see “exhausted-looking Arabic or Spanish speaking immigrants returning home from menial jobs”; an “Asian diplomat” lamented that immigrants in the Swedish capital “are mostly selling hotdogs.”
The point of all this being – what, exactly? That it’s the hard-working holders of low-level jobs who are setting fire to cars and buildings? That it’s legitimate for a newcomer to Sweden to go on the rampage because he’s got to work as a hot-dog vendor? Nowhere was there a hint that the extraordinary history of immigrant success in North America, for example, was written by people who worked themselves up from employment of that very sort. Nowhere, moreover, was there a hint that what counts as poverty in Sweden would be considered remarkable affluence in the hellholes most of these punks’ families hail from. Yes, the Reuters gang acknowledged (fleetingly) Sweden’s generosity to its foreign-born inhabitants, but the implication remained that the free housing and endless handouts somehow just aren’t enough – that the state should find a way to shield them from every variety of professional frustration and personal disappointment, from a failure to land the ideal job to the unspeakable fate of being tired at the end of a long workday.
The boys and girls of Reuters, while taking obvious pains not to give a remotely negative impression of the Stockholm hoodlums, cited without comment hoodlums who pretty much blamed the police for everything that’s happened. “In the beginning it was just a bit of fun,” one of the rioters insisted. “But then when I saw the police charging through here with batons, pushing women and children out of the way and swinging their batons, I got so damned angry.” Yes, if the cops had only left them alone to burn a few cars, it would all have been over by now! Plenty of participants in the nocturnal melees – as well as busybody agitators from the mischievous, rabble-rousing group Megafonen – threw around charges that police officers, in addressing the troublemakers, had used insulting language, including racist words.
Those accusations seem dubious, to say the least, given that the Stockholm police, far from treating the city’s delinquents with the aggression they deserved, seemed determined not to hurt or offend them in the slightest. On Wednesday night, according to the BBC, they didn’t make a single arrest – supposedly because their “priority was to disperse mobs and ensure access to fires for the fire brigade,” but really, one strongly suspects, because of Swedish authorities’ manifest terror of doing anything that might open them up to charges of insensitivity, let alone brutality and – heaven forfend – racism. On Saturday night the number of arrests reached 35, but this was still a drop in the bucket (to be followed, one can pretty safely wager, by 35 slaps on the wrist). “Police can put down these riots in five minutes – if the politicians were to allow them,” a Sweden Democrat politician, Kent Ekeroth, said. Journalist Ingrid Carlqvist agreed: “The police could do so much, [but] have told the public that they mean to do as little as possible.” Though police suspect that all the mayhem is being planned via social media, with Megafonen playing a lead role, they haven’t hauled that group’s leaders in for questioning, but have instead, in good Nordic fashion, tried (so far unsuccessfully) to arrange a “dialogue.”
.................................................. .....
View the complete article at:
http://frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-b...l-take-sweden/
FrontPage Magazine
Bruce Bawer
5/27/2013
Excerpt:
Night after night last week, as the tumult in Stockholm not only continued but kept spreading to more and more neighborhoods and then to other Swedish cities, the media in that country, by and large, kept pretending that it was all about things like unemployment and social marginality, all of which were supposedly aggravated by Swedish racism (and, especially, by the insufficiently respectful attitude of police officers toward immigrant “youths”); meanwhile, the foreign media, which, as the disorder persisted, found it increasingly difficult to pretend that all this wasn’t happening (the New York Times finally ran a four-sentence Reuters item about the bedlam on Thursday), largely echoed the domestic disinformation.
Of all the reports I looked at, the one that most effectively epitomized the asinine, mendacious approach of the Western media to this latest nightmare was a piece from Reuters that had no fewer than eight names attached to it. I would strongly recommend that you read the whole thing; in fact, I would suggest that it be taught in future history courses as a prime example of the high level of duplicity of which the early twenty-first-century Western media were capable when confronted with raw displays of Islamic power on their own turf. Credited to Niklas Pollard and Philip O’Connor, with “additional reporting” by Johan Ahlander, Mia Shanley, Patrick Lannin, and Simon Johnson, writing by Alistair Scrutton, and editing by Janet McBride, the Reuters piece was headlined “Sweden riots expose ugly side of” – no, not of “European immigration policies” or “Islam,” of course, but of the “Nordic model.”
Yes, it’s all the fault of the “Nordic model”: the roots of the Stockholm unrest, Reuters (and virtually every other major Western news organization that deigned to report on the disturbances) would have us believe, lay “in segregation, neglect and poverty,” in years of “fruitless job hunts, police harassment, racial taunts and a feeling of living at the margins.” And so on. Which means, I suppose, that 9/11 revealed the flaws of the American model, and the car-burnings in French suburbs reflect the weaknesses of the Gallic model, and the explosions in Madrid were all about the failings of the Spanish model, and the savage murder of Lee Rigby in London last week…well, you get the idea.
The dispatch from Reuters suggested that Sweden’s “lowered taxes” (which are still absurdly high) and “reduced state benefits” (which are still staggeringly bounteous) are responsible for rising economical inequality and segregation, and thus for the pandemonium in the streets. An Ethiopian-born woman interviewed by Reuters maintained that Swedish kids won’t play with her daughter “because she’s dark.” (There was no mention, needless to say, of the real problem in an increasing number of Scandinavian schools, namely the systematic harassment, and worse, of ethnic Swedish kids by their immigrant-group classmates.) On late-night trains from downtown Stockholm to the suburbs, the Reuters team told us, you’ll see “exhausted-looking Arabic or Spanish speaking immigrants returning home from menial jobs”; an “Asian diplomat” lamented that immigrants in the Swedish capital “are mostly selling hotdogs.”
The point of all this being – what, exactly? That it’s the hard-working holders of low-level jobs who are setting fire to cars and buildings? That it’s legitimate for a newcomer to Sweden to go on the rampage because he’s got to work as a hot-dog vendor? Nowhere was there a hint that the extraordinary history of immigrant success in North America, for example, was written by people who worked themselves up from employment of that very sort. Nowhere, moreover, was there a hint that what counts as poverty in Sweden would be considered remarkable affluence in the hellholes most of these punks’ families hail from. Yes, the Reuters gang acknowledged (fleetingly) Sweden’s generosity to its foreign-born inhabitants, but the implication remained that the free housing and endless handouts somehow just aren’t enough – that the state should find a way to shield them from every variety of professional frustration and personal disappointment, from a failure to land the ideal job to the unspeakable fate of being tired at the end of a long workday.
The boys and girls of Reuters, while taking obvious pains not to give a remotely negative impression of the Stockholm hoodlums, cited without comment hoodlums who pretty much blamed the police for everything that’s happened. “In the beginning it was just a bit of fun,” one of the rioters insisted. “But then when I saw the police charging through here with batons, pushing women and children out of the way and swinging their batons, I got so damned angry.” Yes, if the cops had only left them alone to burn a few cars, it would all have been over by now! Plenty of participants in the nocturnal melees – as well as busybody agitators from the mischievous, rabble-rousing group Megafonen – threw around charges that police officers, in addressing the troublemakers, had used insulting language, including racist words.
Those accusations seem dubious, to say the least, given that the Stockholm police, far from treating the city’s delinquents with the aggression they deserved, seemed determined not to hurt or offend them in the slightest. On Wednesday night, according to the BBC, they didn’t make a single arrest – supposedly because their “priority was to disperse mobs and ensure access to fires for the fire brigade,” but really, one strongly suspects, because of Swedish authorities’ manifest terror of doing anything that might open them up to charges of insensitivity, let alone brutality and – heaven forfend – racism. On Saturday night the number of arrests reached 35, but this was still a drop in the bucket (to be followed, one can pretty safely wager, by 35 slaps on the wrist). “Police can put down these riots in five minutes – if the politicians were to allow them,” a Sweden Democrat politician, Kent Ekeroth, said. Journalist Ingrid Carlqvist agreed: “The police could do so much, [but] have told the public that they mean to do as little as possible.” Though police suspect that all the mayhem is being planned via social media, with Megafonen playing a lead role, they haven’t hauled that group’s leaders in for questioning, but have instead, in good Nordic fashion, tried (so far unsuccessfully) to arrange a “dialogue.”
.................................................. .....
View the complete article at:
http://frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-b...l-take-sweden/