About a year ago at a campaign-style rally in Melbourne, Fla., President Donald J. Trump made a reference to growing social and criminal problems in Sweden caused by a massive influx of refugees from the war-torn Middle East.
“You look at what’s happening. We’ve got to keep our country safe. You look at what’s happening in Germany, you look at what’s happening last night in Sweden. Sweden, who would believe this?”
“Not the Swedes,” The New York Times chortled in a piece that essentially mocked the president (no surprise there).
The Times quoted several tweets from ‘confused’ Swedes as well as Swedish media, all of whom were feigning ignorance at Trump’s comments. Many likened them to Trump claiming that a terrorist attack had occurred in the country “last night” but that’s not what he was talking about.
“Sweden? Terror attack? What has he been smoking? Questions abound,” tweeted Carl Bildt, a former prime minister and foreign minister of the Scandinavian country.
“Sweden,” Trump said. “They took in large numbers. They’re having problems like they never thought possible,” he said.
White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders clarified: Her boss was talking about the mass importation of displaced Muslim migrants.
Turns out that Trump, not his usual detractors (including, in this case, Swedes themselves), was right (as usual).
The Times has finally gotten around to reporting on the dramatic increase in the number of criminal immigrant gangs in Sweden. Headlined, “Hand Grenade and Gang Violence Rattle Sweden’s Middle Class,” the article discusses how clan-like violence and weapons of war have come with the influx of militant migrants from the restive Middle East. (Related: After latest terrorist attack in Germany, will the European Union finally understand it has a Muslim problem?)
The paper notes:
Weapons from a faraway, long-ago war are flowing into immigrant neighborhoods here, puncturing Swedes’ sense of confidence and security. The country’s murder rate remains low, by American standards, and violent crime is stable or dropping in many places. But gang-related assaults and shootings are becoming more frequent, and the number of neighborhoods categorized by the police as “marred by crime, social unrest and insecurity” is rising. Crime and immigration are certain to be key issues in September’s general election, alongside the traditional debates over education and health care.
The story centers on a Swedish man recently killed by a grenade lying on the side of the road as he attempted to pick it up. The incident was one of more than 100 similar ones involving military-style explosives in the Stockholm metropolitan area that police have said are part of an “arms race” among immigrant gangs.
But you wouldn’t know they are immigrant gangs made up of refugees from Muslim countries because nowhere in the Times story are the words “refugee” or “Muslim,” The Daily Caller noted. Also, there is only one mention of the word “asylum” — to characterize a witness to the explosion, “one of many Varby Gard residents who arrived there thanks to Sweden’s famously open asylum policies,” the news site reported further.
Nice, huh?
Sexual violence has also become a major issue, and that’s according to the Swedish government’s own statistics. The number of women who say they were sexually assaulted or were victims of other sex-related crimes grew from 1.4 percent to 4.1 percent in 2016. Also, a 2014 study regarding the geography of outdoor rape in Stockholm found that two-thirds of suspects were non-swedes citizens.
Sweden’s massive influx of Muslim migrants began in 2014.
“The NYT could be taking its cues on reporting on immigrant gang violence from prevailing attitudes in Sweden, where it is taboo to link immigrants and crime,” The Daily Caller reported.
Which, of course, is always better than admitting you have a problem or having a U.S. president named Trump point out the obvious.
J.D. Heyes is also editor-in-chief of The National Sentinel.
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