NYT Moves From “Bafflement” About Sweden’s Refugee Crime Problem To the Truth

NYT Moves From “Bafflement” About Sweden’s Refugee Crime Problem To the Truth

The New York Times has experienced an amazing epiphany: Sweden’s open-door policy to refugees from Muslim countries has created a crisis of violence and crime in Sweden.  While they myopically attribute this crisis to “gangs,” they do dabble with the idea that integration of foreign nationals into the existing socio-cultural framework of the host country may be desirable after all.

This is a remarkable shift given the NYT’s attempts to cover up the escalation of violence, rape, and crime perpetrated by refugees in Sweden.  Remember their feigned shock when President Trump last year pointed out, quite rightly, that Sweden was feeling the negative affects of letting hundreds of thousands of refugees flood their country?

Sweden has famously been proud of its open-door refugee policy, yet this same policy led to a number of problems such as the ones we covered here at LI:  Sweden’s Troubles With Refugee Assimilation and Mass migration gives Sweden male gender imbalance worse than China.

Other problems reported included attempts by Swedish feminists to justify refugees raping Swedish women and allegations that Swedish officials attempted to cover up the growing problems within their country:

 Swedish Feminists Thread Needle Between Sexism and Racism in Migrant Controversy

This cover-up of sex assaults in Sweden is a gift for xenophobes

Torn apart by an open door for migrants: Sweden is seen as Europe’s most liberal nation, but violent crime is soaring and the Far Right is on the march.

In February of last year, Tucker Carlson aired a segment about the refugee violence and rape crisis in Sweden, and the next day, President Trump referenced the segment in a comment about how important it is to secure America’s borders.  His point was that a large influx of refugees has created problem in Sweden that we don’t want to see here.

As we noted at the time, the media jumped on this comment, even going so far as to suggest that the president imagined that a terror incident had occurred in Sweden.

The MSM is falsely portraying President Trump as having alleged on Saturday that a “terror” attack had occurred the night before in Sweden. Take, for example, this NBC story headlined “Donald Trump Explains Sweden Terror Comment That Baffled a Nation.” In addition to the misleading headline, the story includes a video clip of President Trump making his remarks. The chyron at the bottom of the screen reads “President Trump appears to refer to a non-existent terror incident in Sweden.”

But if you listen to the president’s remarks, you’ll see that he never mentioned terror. He said: “The bottom line: we’ve got to keep our country safe. You look at what’s happening in Germany. You look at what’s happening last night in Sweden. Sweden! Who would believe this? Sweden! They took in large numbers, they’re having problems like they never thought possible.”

[Here’s the segment in question:]

As President Trump subsequently clarified in a tweet, he was referring to a segment on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show in which filmmaker Ami Horowitz discussed the rape crisis in Sweden.  But leave it to the MSM to cast President Trump’s statements in the most problematic light.

The New York Times quickly published a story about how the president’s comment “baffled a nation.”  Implying that there is no refugee violence or rape crisis Sweden, the NYT sang Sweden’s praises for their open-door policy.

Mr. Horowitz said, “Sweden had its first terrorist Islamic attack not that long ago, so they’re now getting a taste of what we’ve been seeing across Europe already.”

It was not clear what he was referring to. In 2010, a suicide bomber struck central Stockholm, injuring two people. The bomber, Taimour Abdulwahab al-Abdaly, 28, was an Iraqi-born Swede who had developed an affinity for Al Qaeda. But that attack occurred long before the current wave of migrants.

Sweden has a long history of welcoming refugees — Jews, Iranians, Eritreans, Somalis, Kurds and people from the former Yugoslavia, among others — but even some of the most tolerant and idealistic Swedes have raised questions about whether the country can absorb so many newcomers so quickly.

Henrik Selin, a political scientist and deputy director of the Swedish Institute, a state agency dedicated to promoting Sweden globally, said he was puzzled by Mr. Trump’s remarks.

This 2017 NYT article concludes:

In an essay in the newspaper Dagens Nyheter, the journalist Martin Gelin speculated that “Trump might have gotten his news from the countless right-wing media in the United States that have long been reporting that Sweden is heading for total collapse.”

He added, “Among Trump supporters, there are common myths that Sweden is in a state of chaos after taking in refugees from the Middle East.”

These “myths,” however, are now being covered by the NYT as . . . well, there’s no other way to put it, news.

Last year, when Fox News and Trump noted Sweden's immigrant crime problem, NYT pushed back. Now, NYT reports on Sweden's immigrant crime problem. https://t.co/Wo753MCjtd and https://t.co/aPz5IKKMYo pic.twitter.com/H0pHXfNefc

— Byron York (@ByronYork) March 4, 2018

The New York Times is suddenly aware of Sweden’s refugee violence and are reporting it as if it’s manifested out of the clear blue sky.

In the Stockholm suburb of Varby Gard, it was not unusual to see the figure of a 63-year-old man pedaling a bicycle home after the end of his shift as an aide for disabled adults, hunched against the icy wind of a Swedish winter.

Daniel Cuevas Zuniga had just finished a night shift on a Sunday last month, and was cycling home with his wife, when he spotted a spherical object lying on the ground, stopped and reached down to take it in his hand.

It was an M-75 hand grenade. Manufactured in great numbers for the Yugoslav national army, and then seized by paramilitaries during the civil war in the 1990s, the grenades are packed with plastic explosives and 3,000 steel balls, well suited for attacks on enemy trenches and bunkers. When Mr. Zuniga touched it, he set off the detonator.

So surprised is the NYT by this revelation of “gang violence” in Sweden that they struggle to understand why it’s suddenly a problem.

Illegal weapons often enter Sweden over the Oresund Bridge, a 10-mile span that links the southern city of Malmo to Denmark. When it opened, in 2000, the bridge symbolized the unfurling of a vibrant, borderless Europe, but in recent years it has been more closely associated with smuggling, of people, weapons and drugs.

The influx of heavy weapons has caught Sweden’s criminal justice systems unprepared.

The border with Denmark is open, with insufficient personnel to search every vehicle entering the country. Hand grenades were, until last year, classified as “flammable products” rather than weapons, so sentences for detonating them were mild. The police are struggling to gather information in immigrant neighborhoods, and clearance rates for gun homicide cases have fallen steadily since the 1990s.

In a moment of the most intense irony, the NYT references President Trump’s 2017 comments about Sweden’s refugee violence and rape crisis (and no, they don’t acknowledge that they mocked and belittled him at the time).

Sweden’s far right-wing party blames the government’s liberal immigration policy for the rising crime, and will thrust the issue to the fore in the fall campaign.

Last year, Peter Springare, 61, a veteran police officer in Orebro, published a furious Facebook post saying violent crimes he was investigating were committed by immigrants from “Iraq, Iraq, Turkey, Syria, Afghanistan, Somalia, Somalia, Syria again, Somalia, unknown country, unknown country, Sweden.” It was shared more than 20,000 times; Mr. Springare has since been investigated twice by state prosecutors, once for inciting racial hatred, though neither resulted in charges.

Even President Trump weighed in on the issue, saying that after taking in “large numbers” of immigrants, Sweden was “having problems like they never thought possible.”

Police officials are more likely to attribute gang violence to a failure of integration, citing a recent study of a Swedish street gang that found 24 percent of its members were ethnic Swedes, and 42 percent had been born in Sweden.

But they, too, see an urgent problem.

Failure of Muslim refugees to integrate, dare we say “assimilate,” into their adopted society and culture is the problem?  You don’t say.

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