As Sweden Burns

While the Finnish Prime Minister was embarrassing herself by showing off her dance moves, neighboring Sweden has been preparing for new elections-- in a few weeks. The elections will be something of a referendum on the rule of the Social Democrat Prime Minister, Magdalena Andersson. You know about Andersson: she’s a strong, empowered female political leader who has allowed criminals to have free reign in her country.

Truth be told, things are not going very well in Sweden. Thanks to an open borders immigration policy, the hapless and welcoming leaders of that once-great nation have turned the country into the rape capital of the Western world. The only nations in the world that have higher rape rates are Botswana and South Africa. And, of course, all manner of crime has been exploding over a once-peaceful  nation.

Do Swedish socialists care about women or even men? Not a whit. The result, as of now, is a resurgent right wing political party. It will also benefit more moderate political parties.

Peder Jensen, of the Gatestone Institute, offers an overview of the crime wave that has taken over the nation.

Things are so bad that the voters have noticed:

For the first time, crime tops the list of voters' most important concerns in the run-up to the elections. "It's going to be a very unique type of Swedish election with a very unusual issue at the top of the agenda," Henrik Ekengren Oscarsson, professor of political science at Gothenburg University, told newspaper Dagens Nyheter. Forty-one percent of those surveyed said that law and order are the most important issues in society, as well as the most important political issues.

Democratic socialists have ruled Sweden for eight years now:

The Social Democratic Party has headed the Swedish government since 2014. During these eight years, crime has continued growing to intolerable levels nationwide. Sweden has in recent years suffered attacks involving bombs, hand grenades or other explosive devices on a weekly basis, sometimes several times a week.

In November 2021, Prime Minister Stefan Löfven stepped down as party leader and PM, and Magdalena Andersson became Sweden's first female prime minister. In April 2022, several Swedish cities experienced violent riots and attacks against the police by Muslims when anti-Islamic activist Rasmus Paludan tried to burn copies of the Koran. Andersson then admitted that a lack of integration had contributed to gang violence, saying that there are "strong forces that are ready to go to great lengths to harm our society."

"Segregation has been allowed to go so far that Sweden now has parallel societies," Andersson said according to Aftonbladet. "We live in the same country but in completely different realities... Integration has been too poor while we have had large-scale migration. Society has also been too weak."

Good to see the strong, empowered prime minister offering a solution-- more integration for people who do not want to integrate. The problem was segregation, and perhaps even bigotry and racism. Does that sound like a familiar tune?

As it happens, native born Swedes are not contributing to the crime wave. Migrants are:

Even mainstream media outlets such as the BBC admit that Sweden has one of the highest rates of gun killings in Europe. An official Swedish government report published in 2021 stated that each year, four in every million inhabitants in Sweden die in shootings. The European average is 1.6 people per million inhabitants. Statistics reveal that 85% of suspects involved in fatal shootings in Sweden are either born abroad or come from an immigrant background.

Mass immigration has produced the crime wave. Note well, many of the migrants have the right to vote; thus, they have found a pathway to citizenship:

Sweden has in just two generations gone from being one of the safest countries in the world to being one of the most dangerous countries in Europe. During the same time, mass immigration has dramatically altered Sweden's population. 1.2 million of those eligible to vote in the elections in September 2022 were born outside Sweden -- about 200,000 more foreigners than in the previous election, in 2018. Nearly one in four first-time voters aged 18-21 was either born abroad or has two parents born abroad. In central Malmö, almost every second person eligible to vote for the first time has a foreign background.

Muslim migrants are becoming their own political force. They normally vote for the weak-kneed squishy socialists, but now they want their parties, the better to impose their values on the hapless Swedes:

Muslim immigrants in Sweden, as in other European countries, tend overwhelmingly to vote for the Social Democrats or other socialist or left-wing parties. However, they have now become so numerous and self-confident that they also create their own political parties. Mikail Yüksel, a Turkish-born Muslim, heads Partiet Nyans, which has a following in cities such as Malmö. Yüksel has argued that an artwork by the late Swedish artist Lars Vilks should be burned because it allegedly represents Islamophobia.

Basem Mahmoud is an imam operating in the heavily Muslim-dominated area of Rosengård in Malmö. He has called Jews "the offspring of pigs and apes," said he was "only quoting the Koran," and is looking forward to "the great battle" when all non-Muslims will be forced to submit themselves to Muslims. He has also defended the brutal murder of the French teacher Samuel Paty in 2020, who was beheaded by a Chechen Muslim after teaching students a class on freedom of expression.

In a sermon in February 2022, Mahmoud went on the attack against Swedish schools and social services and stated that Muslims are taking over the country. "Sweden is ours," he said. " It is ours, whether they [Swedes] like it or not. In ten to fifteen years, it is ours."

They are not talking about integrating or even assimilating into the local culture. They are proposing a hostile takeover of Swedish culture and even of the Swedish nation. The word invasion comes to mind. Does anyone recall the history of Islam in Western Europe?

And then there is the problem with criminal gangs. They are flourishing in Sweden:

An official police report from 2019 indicated that Stockholm alone has at least 50 different criminal gangs currently operating in the city. They are also getting more aggressive and violent. Scandinavian countries traditionally did not have strong organized crime groups comparable to the mafia found in southern Italy. Now Sweden has dozens of different groups or clans competing against one another for control over the local market of narcotics, protection money or other illegal activities. Some of them have even managed to create a criminal infrastructure, with ties to lawyers or bureaucrats. Nearly all of them have been imported to the country since the 1970s. Many of these criminals have an ethnic background from far more brutal and cynical societies in the Islamic world or Africa. Soft Scandinavian prisons do not deter them.

Swedes will need to have a severe wake-up call and a strong crack down on the criminals it has allowed to live in their country. Do they not care that their women are more likely to become rape victims?

Dare we say that this situation is a cautionary tale about the downside of open borders. And it is also a cautionary tale about the downside of having weak leadership and soft power.