And, it’s all about immigration! See this story (with a pro-socialist spin) from the Guardian and watch for news later today.
The Swedish Social Democrats are no ordinary party. If Mona Sahlin, their leader, loses tomorrow’s election, as seems almost certain, she will become the first leader in the party’s history never to have been prime minister. The party has been in government for 65 of the last 78 years, and in that time no non-socialist government has ever been re-elected. But today a far-right party that blames Muslim immigration for almost all the country’s ills is poised to enter parliament and hold the balance of power. It already has members in local government across more than half the country. The local paper in Malmö, the country’s third-largest city, publishes a Google Map marking all the shootings in the city – there have been 46 this year, though no one has been killed. What on earth is going on in this tranquil, ordered and progressive country?
If you believe the international rightwing press, the answer is simple, and has been since 2004, when Fox News made a special report on the subject: Sweden, and especially Malmö, has become a laboratory for the creeping Islamisation of Europe. The most common child’s name there is now Muhammad; police dare not go into immigrant districts, where only sharia law is respected; and soon all the Jews will be driven from the city. All this, flecked with varying amounts of spittle, is recounted as fact on the net and in US papers.
Paulina Neuding, a neoliberal Swedish commentator, wrote in Rupert Murdoch’s Weekly Standard, “Too many of the country’s Arab immigrants have brought anti-democratic values from their home countries; values that neither ‘dialogue police’ nor the world’s most generous welfare system has been able to cure. And [Sweden] is also becoming a symbol of a western country that is prepared to compromise with those values.”
To get a much better understanding of how Sweden has come to this point. See this important history lesson at Gates of Vienna from earlier this month. Hat tip: Richard Falknor at Blue Ridge Forum.
We have written many posts about the growing tensions in Sweden over Muslim immigration and this post continues to be one of our most read posts at RRW. I think it must be the title that brings readers, “Muslim immigration killing Sweden.” However, I thought this was a much more significant post on Sweden—Jews leaving Sweden—here.
Update September 26th: More biased reporting from the Guardian on the Swedish vote, here.