The Swedes and the Clash of Civilizations

The indispensable Gatestone Institute reports on some very disturbing news out of Sweden.

In 1975, the Swedish parliament unanimously decided to change the former homogeneous Sweden into a multicultural country. Forty years later the dramatic consequences of this experiment emerge: violent crime has increased by 300%.

If one looks at the number of rapes, however, the increase is even worse. In 1975, 421 rapes were reported to the police; in 2014, it was 6,620. That is an increase of 1,472%.

That makes Sweden the rape capital of the West, second globally to only Lesotho in Southern Africa in the number of rapes it suffers. Politically correct academics in the U.S. are sounding the alarm bells about a “rape culture” on U.S. campuses. In fact, the groves of academe across the fruited plain are among the safest, most coddled environments in the world. If the “mattress girl” at Columbia wants to find a hostile environment for women, she need look no further than Sweden.

What happened?  Samuel Huntington, whose book The Clash of Civilizations (1996) looks ever more prescient, warned that Islam and the West were on a collision course. What we have come to call “multiculturalism” was a recipe not for comity  and progressive enlightenment but for increasing conflict. That the huge influx of Somalis, Iraqis, and Syrians into Sweden has led to this expanding rape culture would not have surprised him.

For their part, Swedish bureaucrats prefer to explain the expanding rape culture by denying it. The Gatestone Institute cites some of their excuses (none rises to the level of an explanation):

▪   Swedes have become more prone to report crime.

▪   The law has been changed so that more sexual offenses are now classified as rape.

▪   Swedish men cannot handle increased equality between the sexes and react with violence against women (perhaps the most fanciful excuse).

Note that conspicuous by its absence is any mention of who it is who is committing the rapes.  Gatestone quotes Michael Hess, a local politician from the Sweden Democrat Party: “When will you journalists realize that it is deeply rooted in Islam’s culture to rape and brutalize women who refuse to comply with Islamic teachings. There is a strong connection between rapes in Sweden and the number of immigrants from MENA-countries [Middle East and North Africa].”

For that bit of plain speaking, Hess was handed a fine and a suspended jail sentence by a Swedish court.  Was what he said untrue?  Truth was not something the court cared about: “The Court [Tingsrätten] notes that the question of whether or not Michael Hess’s pronouncement is true, or appeared to be true to Michael Hess, has no bearing on the case. Michael Hess’s statement must be judged based on its timing and context.”

For those whose chief concern is not towing the politically correct line but in the truth, the evidence Hess has assembled tells a disturbing and unequivocal story: “Twenty-one research reports,” Gatestone reports, “from the 1960s until today are unanimous in their conclusions:

Whether or not they measured by the number of convicted rapists or men suspected of rape, men of foreign extraction were represented far more than Swedes. And this greater representation of persons with a foreign background keeps increasing:

▪ 1960-1970s – 1.2 to 2.6 times as often as Swedes

▪ 1980s – 2.1 to 4.7 times as often as Swedes

▪ 1990s – 2.1 to 8.1 times as often as Swedes

▪ 2000s – 2.1 to 19.5 times as often as Swedes

Even when adjusted for variables such as age, sex, class and place of residence, the huge discrepancy between immigrants and Swedes remains.

Just how huge is suggested by these statistics:

It emerged that in 2002, 85% of those sentenced to at least two years in prison for rape in Svea Hovrätt, a court of appeals, were foreign born or second-generation immigrants.

A 1996 report by the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention reached the conclusion that immigrants from North Africa (Algeria, Libya, Morocco and Tunisia) were 23 times as likely to commit rape as Swedish men. The figures for men from Iraq, Bulgaria and Romania were, respectively, 20, 18 and 18.

Et cetera.

It gets worse.  For not only is rape epidemic in Sweden, also very much on the upswing is gang rape, which has increased “spectacularly” between 1995 and 2006. Courts have tended to be lenient with the perpetrators, handing out light sentences or acquitting them outright.

You know how the Western media prays, just prays, that when a violent crime is committed in the U.S.  the perpetrator be a white Christian male?  The Swedes suffer from a kindred disease.  Earlier this month, all the Swedish media reported on a brutal gang rape that took place on a ferry running between Stockholm and Åbo in Finland. At last, they seemed to have their Swedish rapist:

▪       “Several Swedish Men Suspected of Rape on the Finland Ferry” (Dagens Nyheter).

▪       “Six Swedish Men Raped Woman in Cabin” (Aftonbladet).

▪       “Six Swedes Arrested for Rape on Ferry” (Expressen).

▪       “Eight Swedes Suspected of Rape on Ferry” (TT – the Swedish News Agency).

But as Gatestone reports, a look behind the headlines reveals a very different reality. “It turned out that seven of the eight suspects were Somalis and one was Iraqi. None of them had Swedish citizenship.” Oops.

George Orwell once observed that the only way to challenge totalitarianism was by having the courage to call things by their real names.  Political correctness is so dangerous because it is based on a lie and it promulgates itself by enforcing a lie on the rest of us.  The reality of Islamic influence in Sweden is brutal and dehumanizing.  It won’t get better by pretending that Sweden is a multicultural paradise. Sweden is lucky to have truth-tellers like Michael Hess. We are lucky to have outlets like the Gatestone Institute.  Will we listen?