By Sue Reid Tolerance that created a feeding ground for terror
WheN anti-terror police searched Stockholm for clues about terror suspect Rakhmat Akilov, they were pelted with stones by hostile gangs of youths.
Officers had entered the suburb of Tensta, home to thousands of migrants from Islamic countries and increasingly under the stranglehold of strict fundamentalism. It is where Swedish women say they feel unsafe and, as in other migrant-filled suburbs, street posters showing female images are often torn down by patrolling groups of male Muslims who scrawl the word ‘whore’ over them.
This is the melting pot where Akilov is thought to have once lived and still had contacts, but the deep anger at the police’s arrival there will not have surprised officers. Tragically, a liberal country renowned for its generosity for more than half a century to those seeking refuge from war, poverty or oppression is now paying the price for its tolerance. For many migrants, such as Akilov, are not assimilating. Instead, they are forming a parallel society where the hatred of the police, the subjugation of women and the norms of a strict Islamic life are commonplace.
In Sweden, large numbers of asylum seekers are automatically given housing and benefits, yet many cannot work because they speak Swedish poorly and have only had rudimentary schooling. With little to do, they have become easy targets for extremists who recruit for Islamic State.
The fact is that, for years, the Swedish government has opened its borders to almost any foreigner who wanted to join the 9.5 million population.
At the peak of the 2015 migration crisis, 163,000 migrants arrived claiming asylum from chaotic war-ridden countries, such as Akilov’s Uzbekistan, with zealously-held religious values and cultural traditions radically different to those in free-thinking Sweden.
It is telling that if you type the word ‘asylum’ in Arabic into an internet search engine, ‘Sweden’ comes out as the top result. The effect of such uncontrolled mass migration is that the population is the fastest growing in the eU.
It has accepted one in seven migrants (the vast majority asylum seekers) entering the eU in recent years, more per capita than any other member state.
One small Swedish municipality near Stockholm, Sodertalje, took in more Iraqis seeking refuge around the time of the Iraq war than America and Britain combined.
But Swedish officials did not make certain they knew where the arrivals were really from, or the true reason they wanted to settle. Of the asylum seekers admitted in 2015, 80 per cent did not have any identification papers so it was almost impossible to find out who they were or whether they had terror links. Another 40,000 were let in who did not ask for asylum. They simply disappeared and have not been traced by the authorities.
The result is a dramatic demographic change and clash of cultures. Once quiet inner-city suburbs such as Tensta are turbulent with night-time riots commonplace, a distaste of police widespread, and order dangerously near breakdown.
Shockingly, only 494 of the 163,000 who arrived as asylum seekers here at the height of the migration crisis in 2015 had, by last summer, found jobs or contributed to the economy.
Into this dangerous vacuum has come hardline Islam, propagating discontent, particularly among young unaccompanied men.
The Muslim Brotherhood, which promotes a conservative brand of Islam, has got a deep foothold in Sweden and more people are turning to it. Controversially, native Swedes are told to accept this without question.
A TV advert made by a government-backed charity recently urged people to realise that ‘Sweden will never be what it once was’ and to ‘find a way to live side by side’ with the newcomers.
Called ‘The New Country’, the ad showed smiling faces of different races and ethnicity. And it proclaimed: ‘New Swedes will claim their space and bring their culture, language and customs – and it is time to see it as a positive force – there is no way back.’
however, the respected economist Tino Sanandaji, who has an Iranian-Kurdish background, recently described what’s happening in Sweden as being ‘quite disastrous’. he said: ‘This is an irreversible social experiment that no wealthy state has ever attempted. There are almost no ideas or visions over how this can be solved. You can’t combine open borders with a welfare state. If you offer generous benefits, and anyone can come and use these benefits, a very large number of people will try to do that. It’s just mathematically impossible for a small country like Sweden to fund that.’
Yes, Swedish society is changing fast. It has been described as the rape capital of europe. Sex assault figures, although not broken down by ethnicity because doing so is against the law, are rising.
Last year, reports of such incidents went up by 13 per cent, yet fewer than one in five cases were solved. This depressing outcome is believed to be because of a reluctance in migrant communities to co-operate with police – said to be a legacy of bad experiences with officialdom in their birth countries.
One recent crime involved a 30year-old woman sexually assaulted by two Afghan migrants who then posted video footage of the twohour attack on Facebook and sent it to their friends.
Snippets of an official police report published last summer said revealingly: ‘In cases where the crimes were carried out by offenders in a larger group in public places (pop festivals, for instance) and in swimming pools, the perpetrators have been mainly youngsters who have applied or recently received asylum’.
As a result, state schools – once the envy of the free world – have been forced to advise girl pupils not to wear short skirts or walk home alone because of the danger they will be sexually attacked for perceived immoral behaviour.
Bizarrely, bowing to the new values, the head of a secondary where a girl was raped by two migrant classmates sent her to a new school – and welcomed the perpetrators back, saying they were the real ‘victims’.
Only last week, in a sharp illustration of beleaguered Sweden, a private Islamic school was criticised as ‘disgusting’ by the Swedish prime minister for segregating boys and girls as young as six in a country where mixed-gender classes are the norm.
According to demographers, in 15 years’ time, the population explosion fuelled by uncontrolled migration will mean that indigenous Swedes will be in a minority. This is because the birth rate among migrants is faster than indigenous Swedes and, until recently, they could bring their families in to join them.
In an effort to pull up the drawbridge, successful asylum cases are now subject to review after a few years and family reunification is more difficult, making Sweden less accessible and less attractive to migrants.
The country tightened its borders following the Stockholm attack. Too little, too late?
earlier this year, there was an episode which showed how the country’s authorities have buried their heads in the sand over the effects of their immigration policies. A senior police officer called Peter Springare posted his thoughts online.
Describing his week, he said: ‘This is what I’ve handled from Monday-Friday: rape, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, rape-assault and rape, extortion, blackmail, assault, violence against police, threats to police, drug crime, drugs, crime, felony, attempted murder, rape again, extortion again and ill-treatment.
‘Suspected perpetrators; Ali Mohammed, Mahmod, Mohammed, Mohammed Ali, again, again, again Christopher… what is it true? Yes a Swedish name crept in on the edges of a drug crime.
‘Mohammed, Mahmod Ali, again and again. Countries representing all the crimes this week: Iraq, Iraq, Turkey, Syria, Afghanistan, Somalia, Somalia, Syria again, Somalia, unknown, unknown country, Sweden. half of the suspects, we can’t be sure because they don’t have any valid papers. Which in itself usually means that they’re lying about their nationality and identity.’
He added: ‘Now, we’re talking just my municipality. And these crimes take up all our investigations’ capacity.’ Inevitably, he was immediately investigated for possible hate crimes but no action was taken.
Recently, I was standing in the early morning on the streets of Gothenburg where in 2013 Sweden allowed the first amplified Muslim call to prayer at a mosque. It was not difficult to see how the cracks in society are appearing.
This is the second biggest city where the Swedish authorities admit Islamic State is actively recruiting among thousands of newly arrived young men. I saw well-wrapped up Swedes running to get on buses and trams in the snow to go to work.
They were watched by scores of north African and Middle eastern youths sheltering from the weather in the local mall and smoking relentlessly at the entrance, throwing their butts into already overfilled bins. They had little to do with their day and that can lead to social problems.
As Syrian asylum seeker Maher, 30, who arrived in 2015 and lives in a migrants’ hostel nearby, told me: ‘Sweden has welcomed us. But it is not enough to give us pocket money and somewhere to sleep. everyone needs more than that to be content.’
For example, in the big port of Malmo, when the authorities bought 268 apartments with taxpayers’ money to allocate to newlyarrived migrants, locals said it was unfair as they have to wait three years for similar accommodation. Yet nothing changed as the townsfolk were ignored.
Whether the Swedish government (which has so fervently encouraged mass migration for decades) will now, after the Stockholm attack, accept the mistakes it has made, is another question.