patrick.net

Has Sweden gone ‘far right’?
The Scandinavian country now has perhaps the most successful anti-immigration, anti-establishment party on the continent...

But their agenda now cannot be described as right-wing extremism. And they had one great advantage: for many years they were the only party to criticize Sweden’s immigration policy. It’s not racist, they insisted, to discuss what’s going wrong, and this is a view that was increasingly widely shared. ...

The Social Democrats spent much of the campaign asking Swedes to imagine the horror of a right-wing government backed by the SD, but much of the electorate didn’t find this horrific. First-time voters will have grown up seeing the party as part of the political furniture. As the daily newspaper Expressen put it, the Swedish left wanted to make this election into a referendum on the Sweden Democrats — “and the Sweden Democrats won.”

So Sweden, which had the highest levels of immigration in Europe, now has perhaps the most successful anti-immigration, anti-establishment party on the continent. This should be a lesson to European progressives and conservatives alike.

Since 2018, there have been almost 500 bombings—yes, bombings—in what is known as one of the most stable societies in the world.

There’s not just a bombing problem. There are shootings, too.

Sweden, which has a population of around 10 million, has the highest per-capita number of deadly shootings of 22 European countries. Forty-seven people have been shot dead so far this year, which, while far from American levels of gun homicide, is extreme for Europe. Other European countries have come to look at Sweden with horror.

It may be shocking for Americans to learn that in Sweden—the land of IKEA, Spotify and Greta Thunberg—all of this is going on. Perhaps the reason you don’t know about it is because of the uncomfortable reality of how we got here.

Among shooting suspects, 85 percent are first- or second-generation immigrants, according to the newspaper Dagens Nyheter, as immigrant neighborhoods have become hotbeds for gang crime.

Nobody on this side of the argument is trying to say that Islam is bad,
that all Muslims are bad. We’re not saying that. But what we are
saying is that if you allow a very large number of young males to
come to European countries, and if they come from a culture where
women are at best second-class citizens, don’t be surprised to see
abominations such as we saw outside Cologne train station on New
Year’s Eve. And don’t be surprised that the formerly rather sleepy
Swedish city of Malmö has now become the rape capital of Europe.
But that is nothing compared to what the boss of Europol said three
weeks ago. He said there are now 5,000 jihadi fighters, every one of
them potentially a terrorist, who have got back into Europe through
the Greek Islands posing as migrants. When ISIS say they will use the
migrant routes to destroy the civilization of Europe, I suggest we start
to take them seriously. And the difference between what is going on
now and any other either migratory wave or refugee wave in the
history of mankind that I can see is that never before have we had a
fifth column — albeit a small one, thank God — but a fifth column
living within our communities that hates us, wants to kill us and wants
to overturn our complete way of life. ...

Nigel Farage: Thank you. What Mark has just said is difficult to listen to and we’d
all rather pretend it isn’t happening, but sadly it is happening. Simon,
you’re in denial. I’ll tell you what’s sad. What’s sad, and you’d know
as a historian, is that a hundred years ago the women went into the
factories, earned their first decent pay packets, went to the pub, got the
vote. We’ve lived through a hundred years of female liberation and
emancipation, and now we have the mayors of towns in Germany and
in Sweden and in other parts of northern Europe telling women not to
walk out after dark on their own. And in the wake of the Cologne sex
attacks the mayor of Cologne said to those women they really ought to
dress differently and behave differently in public. That, Simon, is what
is sad — and actually, I find, the sheer hypocrisy of those of you that
have stood up and said you’re going to defend female rights when
actually you think migrant rights are more important than female
rights in our own community. Frankly, shame on you!
And, Louise, you’re trying to redefine the 1951 convention on refugee
status, but can I just challenge you to something? You know, maybe,
just maybe, you would agree with me that the Australians, when they
faced a similar problem of people coming in boats in large numbers,
of sinkings and drownings, that the Australians got it right when they
said nobody will qualify as a refugee if they come through this route,
but we will process people offshore genuinely and sincerely; and if
they are people who because of their race, religion, or political beliefs
qualify as refugees, we in Australia will have them. Wouldn’t it make
more sense, Louise, rather than having an open door to the Greek
Islands, to process people in North Africa and the Middle East?