Sweden Bears Costs of Denial

By Dan Cadman on April 10, 2017

There is a tendency toward schadenfreude in all of us, and it takes a strong person to swallow those tendencies, particularly when the would-be recipient is a smug, deserving prig.

Back in late February, President Donald Trump made a public comment in reference to the risks inherent in taking on large numbers of unassimilated migrants and would-be refugees by referring to the example of Sweden. ("Look what happened last night in Sweden.")

His comments were typically imprecise in that Trumpian kind of way, and so the media did its usual slice-and-dice job, helped along nicely by the Swedish government, whose senior officials and foreign ministry leaped forward to decry his statement, and deny that there were any problems whatever in their assimilation of newcomers.

They appeared to take great delight in their self-assigned task of showing Trump to be confused, off-base and groundless, and they did this despite the fact that there had in fact been several ugly incidents of terrible crimes in which migrants were perpetrators, and that Sweden really does appear to be confronting a cultural crisis brought about by its absorption of migrants, many of whom not only haven't, but don't want to integrate.

But then Sweden appears to be in denial; a progressive, left-leaning nation whose ideals, ouroboros-like, have swung in a full circle to begin chewing on their own tails: one of those places where hate speech, very broadly construed, is condemned and even prosecuted, unless it comes from migrants whose different cultural norms make it "okay" to spew vitriol against others, such as Jews or homosexuals.

I suppose that Swedish officials, assuming that they had inoculated themselves against terror attacks by being so passive and accepting in the face of extreme Islamic views, were caught completely off-guard, then, by the recent horrific truck attack at a downtown pedestrian mall in the capital city of Stockholm that took several lives and caused many more injuries. It certainly appears to be an attempt to copycat previous infamous truck attacks in Nice, France, Israel, and elsewhere. The thing is, Islamists are not grateful for soft treatment at the hands of western governments; guided by the twin principles of jihad and hijrah (immigration with the intention of converting the population of the new country to Islam), they scorn it and don't hesitate to bite the hand that is feeding them.

To his credit, the president has not engaged in the kind of schadenfreude I mentioned at the beginning of this blog.