Police and politicians fudge the issue for fear of not being politically correct. But until they accept violent crime is being carried out by Somali and Arab gangs, they won’t be able to tackle it. It’s a lesson for the UK too.
Sweden is under assault, with its residents enduring frequent bombings, hand grenade attacks, murders, and shootings. Last year, there were 257 bomb attacks, following 162 the year before. With a population of just 10 million, that would be the equivalent of more than 1,600 bomb attacks being carried out annually here in Britain. Almost none of these incidents was motivated by terrorism.
So, how has one of the previously most peaceful and liberal countries in the world been turned into such a den of criminal depravity? And why have the authorities allowed this descent into anarchy?
The truth is that, all too often, the Swedish police and politicians refuse to deal with the real reasons these crimes go on, because the perpetrators are not indigenous Swedes. The attacks are almost always part of ongoing feuds between criminal gangs that are fighting over drugs and territory. These gangs are principally made up of Somali immigrants, with others from the Middle East. They all bring a culture of extreme violence and misogyny from their war-torn homelands.
They’ve turned parts of the country into no-go zones for the police and places of fear for those of Swedish heritage and other law-abiding immigrants.
There are poorer areas of the cities of Stockholm and Malmo where bombings and other examples of extreme violence are now accepted as part of everyday life. Masked and armed men recently set up roadblocks to control cars entering certain neighbourhoods in Gothenburg. In one horrific incident last month, in Botkyrka, south of Stockholm, a 12-year-old girl walking her dog was shot dead, having been caught in the crossfire during a battle between rival gangs. Her friends later explained that shootings were an everyday experience for them, with one saying she heard gunfire from her bedroom window almost every night.
Rapes and attacks on women, particularly on indigenous females, continue to grow. Almost every day, people simply going about their business are surrounded by gangs of young male immigrants and attacked for what appears to be little more than being in the wrong place at the wrong time. But no one says anything about who’s carrying out the crimes. Even the police won’t speak openly, and many politicians are in denial.
Such incidents are changing the face of Stockholm and once-peaceful Malmo. I’ve been to Malmo – it’s a lovely old traditional European city with some beautiful buildings that remain unscarred because Sweden avoided being drawn into the two world wars. However, given what I see going on there now, I don’t think I’ll be going back there as a tourist any time soon.
So, how has something as awful as this been allowed to happen? The answer is simple: whilst it’s a fine thing to be liberal, that’s only true if you don’t allow your values to be clouded by naivety and an unwillingness to question your beliefs in the face of overwhelming evidence. Sadly, that is exactly what’s been going on in Sweden for a long time.
In short, because all these dreadful bomb attacks were being carried out by immigrants from war-torn areas whom the benevolent Swedes had welcomed into their country, no one would face the facts: that the very people they’d tried to help had among them many dangerous and violent criminals who present a real threat to residents of whatever hue or creed.
Also on rt.com Sweden’s PM won’t blame immigrants for surge… in immigrant crimeThe police officers who responded to the calls, the investigators, and even the police chiefs dared not tell the truth for fear of being deemed racist or bigoted. Politicians, both at a local and national level, joined the culture of silence, even as the evidence mounted of what was going on. The official line was that even asking questions about the link between crime and immigration was xenophobic. Prime Minister Stefan Löfven likes to talk about crime as a socio-economic problem, saying, “I do not want to link crime to ethnicity.”
That may be changing. Finally disgusted by what he has seen at first hand, Mats Löfving, the deputy national police chief, this month decided to talk openly about the 40-plus family-based criminal networks, or clans, operating in the country. They are made up, he said, of immigrants who came to Sweden “solely for the purpose of organising and systematising crime”, making their money through drug-trafficking and extortion. and possessing “a great capacity for violence”.
It was an outburst that was sorely needed and long overdue.
Euphemisms cannot be used to describe the nature or description of bombers, killers or rapists. If you don’t accept the reality of your own eyes and the evidence before them, how can you start to tackle it?
To address such problems, you need to work with precise information. This is so, whether you’re designing a long-term social policy to address disadvantages in housing, education, jobs, or cultural values, particularly in relation to violence or women. This takes funding, and there will never be enough to take a scattergun approach. Such public monies must be husbanded and used to best effect on those who are disrupting the social order.
The same applies to how the police force carries out criminal investigations and uses its resources to proactively target offenders – that is, it must tell the truth and act on factual information, so the police decision makers and the politicians they report to ensure resources are used appropriately and the media are briefed accurately in order to win public support.
Some readers may think the Swedish approach of being ‘woke’ and turning a blind eye sounds uncannily familiar, given what has been happening here in the UK. And you’d be right. That’s why, in more than 30 cases, predominantly taxi drivers of Pakistani heritage and their associates were able to get away with grooming, drugging and raping hundreds of vulnerable, socially disadvantaged, teenage white girls while local police, politicians and social workers looked the other way.
Even now, the media, politicians and public officials fudge the issue by referring to the criminals as ‘Asian’ gangs. This is inaccurate: they are not of Indian, Sri Lankan or Nepali heritage. Most of the offenders are of Pakistani background and emanate from the Mirpur region of that country. It is possible to be that precise in most cases.
The point is that if you are not accurate in identifying where the problem originates, how can you deal with it effectively by social or police interventions?
It is the same with all the teenage stabbings and murders that go on in cities such as London, Birmingham and Manchester. Too often we hear that both the victim and the attackers are teenagers. This creates a false narrative that there is a major problem with all teenagers. There is not. Most of the victims and offenders are young black males of either Afro-Caribbean or Somali heritage. Again, how can we get upstream of the problem with targeted social interventions or police operations if we do not tell the truth?
How can we expect the police to act in the face of the ‘woke’ counter narrative that the police are all racist and do not allow black officers to progress? Would you address black criminality if you feared for your job and how you would feed your family if you lost it?
It’s the same story with drugged, trafficked and raped East European women. The people who are doing this are now mostly Albanian gangs. But no one dares say it for fear of being called discriminatory.
Also on rt.com Immoral French are blatantly putting migrants’ lives at risk by not doing enough to prevent Channel crossingsIf you’re in the business of catching rogue traders or distraction burglars tricking their way into old ladies’ homes and stealing their life savings or family heirlooms, you know who’s disproportionally the most likely to be doing this. If you dared to say it was mainly Travellers, even if it’s true, you’d end up sacked and would never work for the police or as a council enforcement officer again.
So, where are we now? The criminal gangs get more assertive every day in Sweden, just as they do in the UK. Why? Because being ‘woke’ is firmly entrenched now in the minds of the young people working in the media, the wannabe politicians, the ambitious police chiefs and our privileged children who’ve never faced poverty, violence or hunger in their lives.
If we don’t wake up and face what’s going on across Europe and in our own country, the lives of all our people – of whatever ethnicity – will change irrevocably for the worse as our societies and values become further blighted by gangsters and criminals with the enthusiastic help of the ‘woke’.
An inevitable result will be that racial discrimination will spread, as people tire of this failure to tell the truth and face the issues. Some are likely to tarnish all people of colour with the same brush. The losers will not only be those people of Afro-Caribbean or Somali descent who do their best for their children, their communities and their neighbours, but also the whole of our society, as we fail to harness the real benefits to be gained from fully utilising the talents of all members of our diverse society.
If some particular sections of our communities produce and harbour disproportionate numbers of certain types of criminals and foster the formation of gangs, all of us, including those communities, need to face facts and deal with these issues. And we need to stop listening to the activists who make a living from crying ‘racist bigot’ at anyone who dares to tell the truth.
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The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.