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Posted on 02/23/2017 12:11:57 PM PST by SeekAndFind
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.
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
He didn’t make any error. The media needed a way to make his speech seem like a failure.
Junk News like junk food will kill you...................eventually................
Dr. Oz: EEG Brain Scans Reveal Fake News Threatens Your Health
Observer ^ | 2/23/17 | Dr. Mehmet Oz
Posted on 2/23/2017, 9:55:44 AM by Mozilla
Our show will spotlight a first-of-its-kind social experiment to identify the dangerous and disruptive effect of fake news on our brains. We had high profile fake news creator Jestin Coler craft two fictional stories: one designed to prey on liberals and another on conservatives.
Women read the articles, not knowing they were fake, as neuropsychiatrist Dr. Daniel Amen gathered quantitative EEG assessments. The findings supported results of a functional MRI study recently published in Nature Scientific Reports, which showed how challenging a person’s political beliefs could activate the parts of the brain associated with emotion and self-identity.
A self-described liberal woman in our social experiment reported feeling sad after reading a fictional article on illegal immigrants, but revealed stronger irritation and anger when processing a fake story about a jailed climate change researcher. Simultaneous changes in her brain activity were also much greater when processing the climate change story and correlated with a strong emotional response of angst and fear.
A conservative woman demonstrated opposite reactions. For her, the article on illegal immigration elicited changes in brain activity changes that you would see during a physical threat.
The women were not told that the articles were fake until they were seated on stage. What happened next was startling. First, the women understandably, but awkwardly, tried to defend why they believed the false stories, rather than expressing frustration that they had been duped. This natural human tendency was highlighted by one woman’s comment that while the news was fake, it reinforced a truth she felt about our country—so the piece was tolerable.
http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3528304/posts
So protect your mental health by never watching ANCNNBCBS and some Faux liberals.
Never read any article by the NY or LA Slimes, Compost, SF Gay Rhonical, WSJ supposedly about President Trump.
Then: Donate Monthly to Free Republic and don’t read posts labeled as Fake News, Junk News or Not Even News. Let Trump drive the liberals and their mediots even more insane and depressed with his real news from Tweets and his controlled Press Conferences!
I see National Review is still trying to ride the fence.
I’m getting a little tired of this parsing of meaning. The fact is, Trump was right-not essentially, not partially, he was right. The immigrant situation in Sweden and Europe in general has been a disaster. Now one rape or murder or other might not make the standard for mass terror, (unless, of course, you’re the victim or know him/her) but in aggregate, the situation can be just as bad as a 9/11 or Paris attack. Just ask the women in Sweden who can barely leave their homes at night.
RE: I see National Review is still trying to ride the fence.
The writer, Mona Charen is also published in Townhall.
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again....
(I’m not surprised given what we saw last year)
If I read the article correctly, it tries to argue that yes, rapes and sexual assaults are trending up in Sweden, but overall, they are not as serious as the ones we see in the crime ridden areas we have in the USA.
Disappointed in Mona Charen.
There is also a media backlash meme that it’s the vast rightwing conspiracy which is spreading the `perception’ that Sweden has been overrun by Muslim rape gangs and that no woman is safe.
Official Swedish rape stats also downplay the Mohammedan rape epidemic. National suicide takes many forms.
Disappointed in Mona Charen.
There is also a media backlash meme that it’s the vast rightwing conspiracy which is spreading the `perception’ that Sweden has been overrun by Muslim rape gangs and that no woman is safe.
Official Swedish rape stats also downplay the Mohammedan rape epidemic. National suicide takes many forms.
That’s what I seemed to be seeing, too. A little backhanded “Oh let’s not blame the muslims” when it’s more than apparent there are all sorts of things wrong with unfettered Middle Eastern muslim invasion taking place in Europe and elsewhere.
Terror attacks in France, Germany, USA. There was the reporter, Lara Logan(?) who was lucky to make it out of Egypt alive a few years ago.
After the terrorist attacks in Germany and France, I daresay those could happen quite easily here in the U.S.A. You can bet your bottom dinar that more than a couple would try it. I hope all truckers are armed, frankly. But they can’t be - not in some states.
He said nothing about terrorism. If you look then if you have a brain then you would see the problem.
But, the Swede PM choose the ignore and hide the problem, as well as the MSM.
It’s a feminist double standard. Rape and other sex crimes have a much broader definition to white males and such crimes are grossly under-reported in regards to immigrants (Muslim colonists). It’s no different here in the USA.
[There is also a media backlash meme that it’s the vast rightwing conspiracy which is spreading the `perception’ that Sweden has been overrun by Muslim rape gangs and that no woman is safe.
Official Swedish rape stats also downplay the Mohammedan rape epidemic. National suicide takes many forms.]
Exactly. When a bio, gas or even possibly a nuclear attack happens, folks will wonder how it could have possibly happened that nobody foresaw the problem coming.
Interstate Jihad could be the next level for terrorists.
These days I mostly practice pistol firing from my vehicle, either while moving or use it stopped as a vehicular shield. This is done on a farm, where I am putting up target stands along a dirt road. With Islamically themed paper targets.
Aloha Snackbar!
One thing for sure, any rape caused by a refugee is one more than would of happened.
One more rape, murder, theft, assault by people that shouldn’t be there are ones that shouldn’t have happened in the first place.
For the USA, we have enough criminals, no need to import more potential criminals.
So I will concede to liberals, yes, he should have been more careful with his words. There. Donald Trump bad for that. Counter that with the total lies of the media, such as the UK press saying the crowds at the stop Trump protest at 300,000 when they were really 2000. The media is one large glass house.
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