COLLECTIVE MADNESS


“Soft despotism is a term coined by Alexis de Tocqueville describing the state into which a country overrun by "a network of small complicated rules" might degrade. Soft despotism is different from despotism (also called 'hard despotism') in the sense that it is not obvious to the people."

Monday, May 29, 2017

When European Men Were Men and Not Feminized Fops







What’s Up with Rape in Sweden?

President Donald Trump was more right than wrong about Sweden. Fox News was slightly misleading.

As you’ve heard, Trump referred to “[what happened] last night in Sweden.” On Twitter, smug critics circulated lists of anodyne events like concerts and road accidents and accused the president of inventing a terror attack. He didn’t cite a terror attack, though his words were characteristically imprecise. Two days later, as if to underscore that Trump had a point, riots erupted in a suburb of Stockholm.

As Andrew Brown of the Guardian put it, Sweden looms large in the “fantasies of the outside world.” It is, by turns, a socialist utopia, a sexually liberated Busch Gardens, or a Mad Max hell-scape, depending on your agenda.

Fox News and, more particularly, certain right-wing websites have been conjuring the “Idyllic Sweden destroyed by Muslim refugees” line, complete with “no go” zones, sharia law, and terror attacks. That’s an exaggeration, but so is the Washington Post’s take: “In 2015, when the influx of refugees and migrants to Europe from Africa, the Middle East and Asia was at its peak, Sweden took in the greatest number per capita. By and large, integration has been a success story there, save for incidents such as the one on Monday night.”

In fact, Sweden has been taking large numbers of refugees and immigrants for decades. They’ve accepted Balkans, Iraqis, Somalis, and many others. The Washington Post notwithstanding, there is a connection between immigration and criminality and other problems. As the Swedish economist Tino Sanandaji has noted, the employment rate for native Swedes is about 82 percent, but it’s only 58 percent for immigrants, and lower still for non-Western immigrants. Among native Swedes, the crime rate is equivalent to Iceland’s. But in immigrant-heavy neighborhoods, lawbreaking is comparable to the much higher overall rate in the U.S. (though not to the high-crime areas of U.S. cities).

Immigrants have found integration into Sweden’s homogeneous culture very difficult, partially because low-skill jobs have been disappearing as Sweden — like other countries in the developed world — de-industrializes. Though many immigrants, like Sanandaji himself, have managed the challenge, others rely on welfare-state subsidies. Joblessness and alienation have sparked riots and other antisocial behavior. At outdoor festivals such as “We Are Stockholm,” women have been groped. Public swimming pools have become venues for gangs of young immigrant men to harass women. Malmö has been losing its small Jewish population, and the Simon Wiesenthal Center issued a travel warning due to threats and attacks on Jews from Muslim immigrants.

The image of hordes of immigrants raping Swedish women, however, is, to say the least, overheated. Getting accurate statistics on rape in Sweden is difficult. On one hand, the government, in obedience to feminist diktats, has broadened the definition of rape very considerably to include many things that most Americans would not consider rape. For example, Julian Assange, for whom I have no sympathy in general, apparently ripped a condom during a consensual encounter and now hides in the Ecuadorian embassy to evade rape charges.
The number of Swedish women who say they have been the victims of sexual assault of some kind ‘in the past year’ has been rising.
On the other hand, the number of Swedish women who say they have been the victims of sexual assault of some kind “in the past year” has been rising, along with the number of women who say they have changed their habits in some way (avoiding certain areas after dark and so forth). The absolute numbers are much lower than those in the U.S., but the trend is up. Also, for those who picture blond Swedish women being preyed upon by dark-skinned foreigners, it’s important to stress that most of the women who have been victims of sexual assaults are themselves immigrants or the children of immigrants.

Tino Sanandaji cautions against the broad-brush depiction of Sweden’s immigration indigestion as a matter of Muslim influence. Some 17 percent of Swedes are foreign-born, but only 3 to 5 percent identify as Muslim. Many of the immigrants who sought refuge in Sweden from the Middle East were Maronite and Assyrian Christians. Others are atheists who were fleeing Islam. They are influenced, Sanandaji argues, more by American gangster rap and The Sopranos than by the Koran. Sweden has had only one terror attack by a Muslim extremist (who killed only himself), though that, of course, could change at any time.
Both major political parties in Sweden have minimized (even whitewashed) the burdens of being the world’s “humanitarian superpower.” The result has been the rise of the Sweden Democrats, a party whose bland name conceals a Nazi past. The party earned only 3 percent support in 2010. Today it is polling at around 18 percent.

Sweden offers many lessons, but the most critical is: Seek the truth, not a narrative.

— Mona Charen is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Copyright © 2017 Creators.com

12 comments:

  1. SAME OLD SAME OLD


    Thousands of people took to social media to defend Britain’s Muslim community, after anti-Muslim comments began pouring in online that blame the terror attack at Manchester Arena on Islam.

    Incendiary comments also came in from right-wing pundits like Tommy Robinson, Katie Hopkins, and Piers Morgan.

    People were quick to respond to the seemingly Islamophobic opinions of some of Britain’s most famous social commentators.



    Hopkins found herself in hot water on Tuesday morning after tweeting that the country needed a “final solution” – a term originally used by the Nazis for the Holocaust.

    The LBC radio host was quick to delete the tweet after being told off by fellow social media users, but it is understood that complaints were also made about her to her employers at the station and Mail Online. She was reported to the Metropolitan Police for using hate speech as well.

    Morgan also came off as tactless in commenting on the event when he told Muslim comedian Abdullah Afzal that more needs to be done “before another radicalized lunatic commits mass murder.”



    “These extremists had nothing to do with Islam and Muslims.Terrorism has no religion, pass it on,” wrote a Twitter user named Ali.

    “We must hunt down and deliver the crucible of justice to those responsible for #Manchester attack, not blame 1.59 billion moderate Muslims,” added Christopher Zullo.

    The calls for people to stop blaming Muslims came just before leaders of Britain’s Muslim community confirmed that an Oldham mosque had been set alight on Monday evening, just hours after the attack. Another mosque in Glasgow was vandalized with a graffiti reading “ISIS.”

    More reprisals are feared over the coming days.

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  2. TRUMP WAS BEASTLY TO THE GERMANS

    LONDON — German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Sunday declared a new chapter in U.S.-European relations after contentious meetings with President Trump last week, saying that Europe “really must take our fate into our own hands.”

    It was the toughest review yet of Trump’s trip to Europe, which inflamed tensions rather than healed them after the U.S. president sparred with the leaders of Washington’s closest and oldest allies on trade, defense and climate change.

    Merkel, Europe’s de facto leader, told a packed beer hall rally in Munich that the days when her continent could rely on others was “over to a certain extent. This is what I have experienced in the last few days.”



    THE REAL STORY

    At the height of the European migrant crisis in early 2016, when masses of migrants were pouring into Europe, the German Green Party Chairwoman Katrin Göring-Eckardt could not control her joy. "We have just received an unexpected gift in the form of people," she told her fellow Germans, reminding them to be grateful. This gift, she said, was going to make the country "more religious, more colourful, more diverse and younger." It was gift, it turns out, that keeps on giving.

    According to the country's annual crime report, compiled by the Federal Crime Bureau (BKA), there has been a more than 50% rise in migrant crime in the country compared to the year before.

    The German newspaper Die Welt, which received an advance copy of the annual crime report, wrote:

    "The number of immigrants suspected of criminal acts in 2016 has risen by 52.7 percent, to the figure of 174,438, compared to the previous year. To ensure a fair comparison with the rest of the population, crimes that only immigrants can commit, such as illegal entry to the country, have been taken out from the statistics. The annual police report (PKS) shows that there were total of 616,230 crime suspects of foreign origin last year. The migrant share [of total crime figures] was disproportionately large, namely 174,438 -- more than a quarter."

    These staggering crime statistics are even more alarming if one looks through the narrow definition German government uses to denote a "criminal migrant". As Die Welt explains, these crime figures do not take into account "foreigners who have been living and working in Germany for some time, but only a specific group of protection-seekers [refugees]."

    In a sane world, the government would take steps to protect its own citizens from such "protection-seekers". Not in Merkel's Germany.

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  3. The big take away story MSM is that Trump nudged out the president of Macedonia.

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  4. WHAT'S THE PROBLEM?

    23% of British Muslims want Sharia law to supersede the judicial process in the UK.

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  5. WHAT COULD GO WRONG?

    Mass immigration from the dysfunctional Muslim world will enrich our cultures. You can count on it.

    Happy Ramadan!

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  6. Merkel wrecked her own country and half of Europe, but the thing that really gets up her nose is Trump and the beastly Brits.

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  7. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  8. Angela

    “Of course we need to have friendly relations with the U.S. and with the U.K. and with other neighbors, including Russia,” she said. Even so, “we have to fight for our own future ourselves.”

    https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2017-05-28/merkel-signals-new-era-for-europe-as-trump-smashes-consensus

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  9. Vladimir Putin a bigger threat than Islamic State, John McCain says

    Russian President Vladimir Putin is a bigger threat to world security than the Islamic State group, US senator John McCain has told the ABC.

    The Republican also admitted in an exclusive interview with 7.30 that President Donald Trump sometimes made him "nervous".

    During a visit to Canberra, Senator McCain said Mr Putin was the "premier and most important threat, more so than ISIS".

    "I think ISIS can do terrible things. But it's the Russians who tried to destroy the fundamental of democracy and that is to change the outcome of an American election," he said.
    "I've seen no evidence they succeeded, but they tried and they are still trying to change elections.

    "They just tried to affect the outcome of the French election. So I view Vladimir Putin — who has dismembered Ukraine, a sovereign nation, who is putting pressure on the Baltics — I view the Russians as the far greatest challenge that we have."

    He said the US needed to respond to Russia with sanctions.

    http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-05-29/putin-a-bigger-threat-than-islamic-state-mccain-says/8570158

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  10. TAKE NO PRISONERS

    Secretary of Defense James Mattis said on Sunday the US had “accelerated” its tactics against the Islamic State, moving from a policy of “attrition” to one of “annihilation”.



    The retired Marine Corps general also said “civilian casualties are a fact of life in this sort of situation”, adding: “We’re not the perfect guys, but we are the good guys. And so we’re doing what we can.”

    His remarks came a day after he cited the suicide bombing in Manchester, which has been claimed by Isis, in a speech to graduating cadets at the United States Military Academy at West Point.

    “Manchester’s tragic loss underscores the purpose of your years of study and training at this elite school,” Mattis said on Saturday. “We must never permit murderers to define our time or warp our sense of normal. This is not normal.”
    The bombing outside an Ariana Grande concert at Manchester Arena killed 22 people, the youngest an eight-year-old girl, and injured dozens more. Fourteen people have been arrested, with two subsequently released. The bomber, Salman Abedi, had been to Libya and may have traveled to Syria.

    Speaking on CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday, Mattis said: “Our strategy right now is to accelerate the campaign against Isis. It is a threat to all civilized nations. And the bottom line is we are going to move in an accelerated and reinforced manner, throw them on their back foot.

    “We have already shifted from attrition tactics, where we shove them from one position to another in Iraq and Syria, to annihilation tactics where we surround them. Our intention is that the foreign fighters do not survive the fight to return home to North Africa, to Europe, to America, to Asia, to Africa. We’re not going to allow them to do so. We’re going to stop them there and take apart the caliphate.”

    THE US MEDIA ARE TRAUMATIZED AND MOMENTARILY STUNNED ON HOW TO REACT TO THIS

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  11. Angelangst Merkel will have a double twist in her size 16 knickers over this.

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