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Swedes are Fleeing


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40 minutes ago, Bill said:

Some reply! ?

Now now, Bill.   It was a fitting reply in relation to your earlier non-reply

 

If you'd care to respond to my initial response to your post, or even my request for a more balanced source, then we can get back on track.

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Another view... but as the article says, the Liberal left have called anyone highlighting the issues Sweden now faces with the charge of being ‘safety deniers’ !!

 

It's a bit like the UK where the Liberal Left call anyone who challenges immigration or even support Brexit as being a Fascist or Racist - For source see any of David Lammy's output over the last 3 years. 

 

Bomb attacks are now a normal part of Swedish life. Gang violence is now at a level where it threatens to undermine the Swedish state - Paulina Neuding - The Spectator.

 

One night last week, explosions took place in three different locations in and around Stockholm. There were no injuries this time, just the usual shattered windows, scattered debris and shocked people woken by the blast.

The police bomb squad was already on its way to the first explosion in the district of Vaxholm when it had to turn around and prioritise the detonation at a residential building in the more densely populated city centre. Residents whose doors had been deformed by the shock wave had to be rescued. The third target (seemingly unrelated) was a facility belonging to a Syriac Orthodox church, which had already been bombed twice in the past year.

‘Normalisation’ is a term that we have come to associate with domestic violence: the victim begins to think of abuse as a part of everyday life. Explosions have become so normalised in Sweden that SVT, Sweden’s equivalent of the BBC, did not even mention the three explosions in the country’s capital on its national news programme that evening. Instead, the main domestic story was the purported censorship of ‘big female bodies’ on Instagram. Apparently, we mustn’t be referred to as ‘women’ any more, but ‘female bodies’, lest anyone’s gender be assumed. The explosions were left to the local news.

To understand how Sweden arrived at this degree of normalisation, consider the statistics: between January and June this year, more than 100 explosions were reported in the country, up from about 70 in the same period last year. A total of more than 160 suspected attacks with explosives were reported last year. There are no comparable figures available for earlier years because it’s such a recent phenomenon. Until recently no one would have thought of adding a column on bombings to the national Swedish crime statistics.

 

Wilhelm Agrell, professor of intelligence analysis at Lund University, has warned that the situation has become so dire that the integrity of the Swedish state is in jeopardy. ‘The state’s monopoly on violence, the actual token of a sovereign government, has been hollowed out bit by bit and no longer exists,’ he wrote a few weeks ago. ‘The armed criminal violence is having effects that are increasingly similar to those of terrorism.’

 

A new report from the Swedish Defence University warns that clan structures in some immigrant areas are putting the Swedish justice system under ‘severe stress’. In these parallel societies, the Swedish state is weak, witness intimidation is systematic and ordinary citizens are pressured to submit to clan rule.

Sweden’s gangs, which mainly operate out of the country’s socioeconomically weak immigrant neighbourhoods, do not only use explosives to assert their dominance. Sweden had 45 fatal shootings in so-called criminal environments last year — a tenfold increase in one generation.

 

By contrast, Norway has fewer than three such shootings a year. According to the newspaper Dagens Nyheter, nine out of ten perpetrators of Sweden’s gang shootings are either first- or second-generation immigrants. The country has gone from having among the lowest rates of violent crime in western Europe to one of the highest. When it comes to bombings, no other developed country in the world which is not at war has experienced anything like Sweden’s epidemic.

At first, it was argued that these are just wars between gangs: awful, but avoidable if you just steer clear. But the bombings have now increased to such an extent that it’s impossible to ignore the collateral damage. The biggest blast so far, which took place in the university town of Linköping in June, demolished two residential buildings and damaged more than 250 apartments. A police spokesman called it a ‘miracle’ that no one was severely injured.

 

A bombing in the university town of Lund in September left a female student with severe facial injuries. She was passing by a shop on her way home after a night out when an explosive device detonated. Witnesses saw people jumping out of windows. Just weeks before, a young woman was murdered in an affluent neighbourhood in Malmö, in an attack which police believe was aimed at her boyfriend. Karolin Hakim, a doctor, was carrying her young child when she was gunned down. As she was lying on the ground, the shooter put a bullet in her head. Her baby is now in a government protection programme.

As inured as Sweden has become to gang violence, the country was shaken by this cold-blooded murder of a mother with a baby in her arms. Justice Minister Morgan Johansson declared on Twitter that the state would chase Ms Hakim’s killer ‘to the ends of the earth’. But gang violence has severely strained police resources. A month after the murder, more than a hundred witnesses are yet to be heard. So much for chasing anyone to the ends of the earth: there weren’t even enough police to knock on doors around Malmö.

 

Only days after the murder of Karolin Hakim, another young woman fell victim to the gang wars. Eighteen-year-old Ndella Jack was killed as someone fired an automatic weapon into her flat in western Stockholm, probably aiming for her husband, a well-known figure in Stockholm’s gang scene. Less than a week after the murder, associates of Ms Jack’s husband were lured to a middle-class suburb of Stockholm, where they had been promised information about her killer. Shots were fired, missing the targets and hitting instead a taxi driver and a resident in a nearby building. One victim, also a university student, lost his sight in an eye after it was hit by a bullet.

When to draw a line? The Swedish government — a coalition between Social Democrats and Greens with the support of the Left, Liberal and Centre parties — presented a long list of new policies this summer intended to curb gang violence. Its focus has clearly shifted to repressive measures, such as more effective laws to permit wire tappings, search warrants and CCTV surveillance. No one wants to be reminded of Sweden’s failed attempt at an ‘amnesty for explosives’ which was introduced at the end of last year, and which meant that those in possession of explosives could hand them in without facing prosecution. (Sweden’s police stations were plastered with posters warning citizens not to bring their explosives into just any police stations, only the designated ones.)

 

Three years ago, when the migration crisis was at its peak, Sweden started identity checks on the Oresund bridge with Denmark in the hope of stemming the influx of migrants. Now the Danes are starting to worry too. After two recent bombings in Copenhagen, both linked to gangs in the south of Sweden, the Danish government has declared that it will introduce checks at the border next month. Two Swedish nationals are being held in relation to a bombing outside the Danish tax agency.

It’s tough for everyone to come to terms with the new reality. Gang violence is intimately tied to the issue of immigration and failed integration, so those who highlight the problem have often been smeared as bigots. Only a few years ago Sweden’s leading daily, liberal Dagens Nyheter, came up with the phrase ‘safety deniers’, which it compared to looney climate deniers. The government has invested in a PR campaign for the ‘image of Sweden’ — but every grenade attack makes it trickier.

After a bombing in Malmö this summer which forced families with children to flee through their balconies, an eight-year-old girl was approached by the newspaper Sydsvenskan. ‘I don’t want it to be like this, I want it to be calm. I don’t want any bombs here,’ she said.

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1 hour ago, compo said:

I see the anti immigrant Democrats have moved ahead of the social Democrats in the latest polls taken in the country .

It’s changing slowly but the pressures to toe the line are huge. Thousands have lost their livelihoods or faced arrest, condemned as racists because they dared to complain or question govt policy. It’s Orwellian, everything you would least expect to find in Sweden. The Swedish Democrats have come a long way but still have a long haul in front of them. 

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Sweden is reaping what its woke arrogance sowed ... but the denials go on and on. But I'm sure you've seen all of this reported by the BBC and the UK press, no?

 

Abandoning Malmo to its Criminals

“I think they just shot someone right across from my balcony,” my friend told me. 

The gunshot rang out even as we were texting about another recent act of violence here in the Swedish city of Malmö—a car bomb that went off in a residential area close to my home.

Acts of violence occur so frequently in Malmö that news of one blurs into the next. This year, there already have been 29 explosions in a city of just 320,000. Sweden as a whole is on pace for about 150—or about three per week (as Quillette has reported previously). These are attacks by criminal gangs that usually target other criminals. But the victims are sometimes innocent bystanders. In one recent case, for instance, a female student was severely injured in the face when she happened to pass by a shop that exploded in Lund, a ten-minute car ride from Malmö. The more spectacular attacks have left whole cities such as Malmö fearful and traumatized, as a grandmother explained in a recent Facebook post about a bombing that blew out the windows of a residential building where her grandchildren were sleeping—”… two very frightened Swedish children, whose safe existence just fell apart.”

Writing for the newspaper Expressen that same day, Malmö-based journalist Fredrico Moreno likened his city’s bombing epidemic to a terror spree: “The bombs that wake us at night, that explode so that glass windows fly into bedrooms, have taken thousands of Malmö residents hostage…Friends tell me in passing how they have refurbished or switched rooms at home so that the children are not hurt when there are explosions nearby.” 

As Sweden’s national police chief put it last week, there is “no equivalent” to this bombing campaign in any other Western country. And the violence extends beyond bombings. On Saturday, gunmen killed a 15-year-old boy and critically wounded another at a pizzeria, minutes after yet another explosion in Malmö. Witnesses reported the sound of “an entire clip being emptied.” In August, the city was shaken to its core when Karolin Hakim, a young doctor whose boyfriend is a well-known figure from the city’s criminal underworld, was shot and killed in an affluent Malmö neighborhood. She was carrying her infant baby in her arms. The killer placed a bullet in her head when she was already lying on the street.

As with many Malmö residents, there is a personal dimension for me. In August, 2017, I was awakened at 2:30am by burglars attempting to enter my home. I was alone with my then 5-year old twin daughters when four men smashed the glass panes of the antique door on the ground floor. I carried my sleeping daughters upstairs, called the police and desperately looked around for a makeshift means of self-defense. The best I could manage was a hammer. Over the phone, a police officer urged me not to make my presence known to the intruders, whose silhouettes I could see on the frosted window as they poked around the area where I kept my daughters’ bicycles. Thankfully, my neighbor happened to come home late that night, inadvertently scaring off the burglars when he turned on the stairwell lights in our shared entryway. From my bedroom window, I got a good view of the four men as they ran down the street and disappeared.

Half an hour later, I gave a young and resigned-seeming police officer my account of the incident. When I asked him how best to protect my family in the future, he told me the best solution was “not living in Malmö: Things have escalated to a point where we can’t manage the situation.”

His answer shocked me, and I subsequently wrote an opinion piece for a Swedish national newspaper about it. The article was widely circulated and provoked much discussion. My local Malmö newspaper, by contrast, criticized the decision to publish my piece at all, questioned the validity of my account, and fretted that it might hurt the city’s image.

This ad for Staffanstorp, a municipality 20 minutes from Malmö, sparked intense debate in Sweden this week. It shows a family that moves from Malmö after being harassed by a street gang.

Though many of the bombings and homicides go unsolved, they are known to be the work of warring criminal gangs that are predominantly based in the country’s immigrant neighborhoods. In recent years, the attacks have shifted from underprivileged areas and into the more prosperous city center, where professionals inhabit 19th-century houses on picturesque cobblestone roads. Recently, someone detonated a bomb at a fancy sushi restaurant just a few blocks from my house. A few weeks before that, the patisserie and café across the road was blown up. Before that, it was the nightclub down the road. It’s a small city, and there are few residents who haven’t been affected by the violence in some way.

We’ve been woken by bombings four times this year. When the sushi restaurant exploded, the blast was so powerful it made the windows in our bedroom rattle and a number of car alarms go off in the distance as the shockwave hit them. The explosion happened three blocks away, but the sound had become so familiar that I went back to sleep without even getting out of bed to check on my twins.

For years, the Swedish media and political establishment have done their best to play down the trend, dismissing concerns such as my own as alarmist overreactions. Malmö has been hailed as a multicultural success, despite growing evidence to the contrary. “This is a serious situation, but most people shouldn’t be worried, because they are not going to be affected,” the head of intelligence at Sweden’s National Operations Department assured everyone earlier this week. We are also made to understand that the perpetrators are, as one police official put it, “from socio-economically weak groups, socio-economically weak areas, and many are perhaps second- or third-generation immigrants.” A Social Democratic MP from Malmö, Hillevi Larsson, infamously claimed during a parliamentary debatein 2017 that she goes on her bike everywhere in Malmö, and that there is thus no reason to be afraid. Shootings are mainly about ”gangsters shooting at each other,” she argued.

But if a government doesn’t protect its population, then ordinary people will find a way to address the problem themselves—sometimes by simply leaving. Indeed, underpopulated Swedish municipalities with low crime rates now are actively recruiting well-off families from Malmö and other dangerous areas. The idea of “gated communities” is still a taboo in this country. But there is always the option of simply leaving a city like Malmö for a place with less crime.   

That police officer who came to my home in 2017 was all too correct—which is why my wife and I recently made our own plans to leave the city with our family. Maybe one day we’ll return, but not until Swedish politicians show more concern for fighting crime than fending off criticism.

https://quillette.com/2019/11/15/abandoning-malmo-to-its-criminals/

Edited by Bill
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51 minutes ago, ChelseaBoy said:

This is why the Swedish Democrats are making such big gains - this was a liberal social experiment that has gone badly wrong. 

It's far worse on the ground than even these articles reveal. Sweden is lost. This is where it gets you when you allow the state to decide what's good for you.

Edited by Bill
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