Critics and observers argue back and forth about to whether Sweden is, in fact, the “rape capital of Europe” due to mass migration into the coutry. While new information released this week seems to put that debate to bed, the government’s spokesmen have resorted to blaming poverty, toxic masculinity, and even homosexuality for the rise in violent rape and assaults.
Sweden has undergone a transformation from socialist “paradise” to multicultural hellhole, though some of us would argue that one was always bound to lead to the other.
This has caused consternation as figures ranging from academics to the President of the United States have used the nation as an example of what not to do with mass migration and cultural relativism.
In my 2017 book, No Go Zones: How Sharia Law is Coming to Neighborhood Near You, I used Sweden as an example, leaning on years of reporting, as well as personal tours of these “no go zones,” which most writers at The New York Times or BBC daren’t undertake themselves.
What I found was patchy information — intentionally so — about the nature of the rise of criminality in the country. Incidents including grenade attacks, shootings, stabbings, mass automobile fires, and yes, rape.
Now Sveriges Television (SVT), the national public broadcaster, has released details of a new study that disproves the allegation from the political left that increases in criminality are not directly linked to mass migration.
In the report by the broadcasters’ investigative team, it was revealed that 58 percent of convicted rape or attempted rape suspects were born abroad. This figure doesn’t include those of foreign origin born in Sweden.
Offenders included Algerians and Syrians, and researchers noted that conversations about the violence in high-migrant-populated neighborhoods often includes the role women play in migrants’ home nations, and the “different view of women’s freedom and sexuality” that are usually held in such places.
While a full 58 percent of those convicted of rape and attempted rape over the past five years were born abroad, the number rises when you only look at “attempted and completed assault violence — where the victim and the perpetrator do not know each other.”
SVT also found that “more than eight out of ten convicted offenders were born in another country,” while 40 per cent of these “have been in Sweden for a year or less.”
Over half of convicted offenders, they note, were born outside of Europe (427 out of 843), while nearly 40 percent “were born in the Middle East or Africa.”
“In the case of assault violence, 97 out of 129 are born outside of Europe,” SVT adds.
Bear in mind, this information arises from a liberal, left-leaning public broadcaster, not a fringe right-wing organization or news site.
This should help correct the biases of the establishment media in the English-speaking world, who have oft-sought to play down the fears that mass migration a la Sweden could be coming to a neighborhood near you.
Perhaps it will do no such thing. Too much of an inconvenient truth.
But for victims of this violent crime surge in Europe, the reality is hard to come to grips with.
Victims talk about their lives being irrevocably altered by rape or sexual assault while the government’s spokesmen are already out there trying to play down the link between migration and the rise in crime.
“The young men who commit rape often come from countries where women’s vision is different from here in Sweden, that’s quite correct. But let me point out that these people who come here, many of them have not lived at all in their countries but left them very early. Many of them have lived on streets in Tehran, Paris, Marseille or Stockholm. They have lived in roughly masculine environments where they have only been intercourse with other men. They have lived under very difficult circumstances and often commit themselves to crime”.
Despite what the benefactors and apologists of mass migration and multiculturalism suggest, however, the truth is beginning to cement itself in the minds of voting Swedes.
With national elections just a few weeks out, the populist-nationalist Sweden Democrats party are set to secure around 20 percent of the vote if the polls are to be believed, likely putting them in second or third place in an election which eight major parties are contesting.
It’s another test for the status quo establishment, after which they will cobble together an unholy coalition government of the socialist left and the center-right — all globalists — and likely declare a victory.
But the last election in 2014 saw the Sweden Democrats take just 12.9 percent of the vote and 20 seats. This time that number will almost double.
Raheem Kassam is a Shillman Fellow at the Middle East Forum, a Senior Distinguished Fellow at the Gatestone Institute, and a Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute. He is the author of two bestselling books: No Go Zones and Enoch Was Right. He serves on the academic advisory board of the Institute of Social Sciences, Economics and Politics in Lyon.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of The Daily Caller.