| Besoeker provided this post to us yesterday with our usual sharp commentary from our readers, but I wanted to pay some attention to it since it's blindingly obvious (to us) what is going on, and yet equally obvious that the authorities are blind. Europe is reaping what it has sowed in more than one way. I've cut down to the more essential bits of the shocked, shocked interviewees who are beginning to see what the problem is but don't quite get the why... |
Youth gang riots in the Swedish capital Stockholm have entered fifth straight night. Hundreds of mostly immigrant teenagers tore through the suburbs, smashing windows and burning cars in the country's worst outbreak of violence in years. At least six vehicles were torched throughout the city late on Thursday while the police called for reinforcements from other Swedish cities bracing for further unrest.
The night before, the fire brigades were called to some 90 different blazes. On the fourth night of violence, youths torched over 30 cars in 15 neighborhoods along with a restaurant in Skogas, south of Stockholm. Three law enforcement officers were injured, police spokesperson Kjell Lindgren reported.
Leaders of immigrant communities were out on the streets in a bid to stop young people from rioting. Despite their efforts, as soon as the night fell, groups of arsonists took to the streets to set cars on fire. RT's Peter Oliver witnessed rioters throwing stones at police and journalists alike.
Civil disorder in Stockholm started on Sunday, when police shot and killed a 69-old-man in his apartment after he confronted officers with a machete; the unrest has since continued throughout week.
| This machete thing seems to be going around... |
Community leaders insist that a main reason for the violence is the high rate of unemployment in immigrant communities, particularly in the suburb of Husby near central Stockholm, one of the worst affected by the nighttime violence, Peter Oliver reported.
| But, but, but, the unemployed get benefits! How can they be unhappy? |
Although Sweden's unemployment rate is below the EU average, joblessness among those under 25 has reached nearly 25 percent. The RT crew in Stockholm noted that a majority of those taking part in the violence are young.
| A majority of those taking part in any riot are young unless the riot is at a nursing home, and even then... |
"In Sweden you've got welfare, access to the educational system -- up to university level, you got access to public transport, libraries, healthcare -- to everything. And still they feel that they [immigrants] need to riot through stones and Molotov cocktails. It's ridiculous and a bad excuse," Swedish Democrats MP Kent Ekeroth told RT.
| Why is that? Why are they rioting? Perhaps it's because they have no meaning in their lives, having had everything given to them, and so they filter over to the local holy place where shrewd men fill their heads with poisonous crap, and then set them loose on the surrounding community... |
"Police can put down these riots in five minutes -- if the politicians were to allow them," Ekeroth added.
Parents of the rampaging teenagers and community religious leaders are now spending sleepless nights on the street in an effort to prevent their children from wreaking havoc.
Meanwhile, the Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt blamed the violence on "hooligans" and said they did not represent the majority in the rioting neighborhoods.
| They don't need to be a majority, they just need to cow and badger the majority... |
"I think it's dangerous to draw a picture of Sweden with a capital separated from its suburbs. I don't think that's true. I think the dividing line runs straight through Husby, with a majority population and then a small group of youts troublemakers," Reinfeldt said.
But the Husby youth taking part in riots told Reuters they are indeed divided from the rest of Stockholm, struggling to find a full-time job with their Husby address. Most of the interviewed rioters were reportedly unemployed.
| So they sit around receiving benefits. They can't work, they can't drink sez their religion, they can't integrate because the blonder parts of the population deep down don't think they're Swedish enough, and they're too headstrong to listen to mom and pop. But the local holy man, him they listen to... |
The claims of social exclusion in immigrant-dominated suburbs have been partly conceded by Sweden's Integration Minister Erik Ullenhag, who said the ministry is aware of "discrimination in these areas." But the riots "don't improve the image of these areas, where there is a lot of positive stuff going on," he added.
| First problem is that they have an 'Integration Minister'... |
For years, Sweden -- one of Europe's most tranquil countries, famous for its attractive immigration policies and generous welfare system -- has been accepting an influx of immigrants, which now make up about 15 per cent of its population. These migrants have failed to integrate into Swedish society, and are only in the country to take advantage of enjoy the country's social benefits system, Swedish journalist Ingrid Carlqvist told RT.
"The problem is not from the Swedish government or from the Swedish people," the editor in chief of Dispatch International said. "The last 20 years or so, we have seen so many immigrants coming to Sweden that really don't like Sweden. They do not want to integrate, they do not want to live in [Swedish] society: Working, paying taxes and so on."
| They're not exactly encouraged to do so by the blonde ones, but that's no excuse. Plenty of ethnics came to America and forced the locals to acknowledge them as equals, mostly by working their tails off. Irish, Italians, Jews, Russians, Chinese, and so on have made it. It isn't perfect as we all know, but these groups came to America to be Americans. It seems that the biggest problem is that the immigrants came to Sweden to take advantage of the system and not to become Swedes... |
"The people come here now because they know that Sweden will give them money for nothing. They don't have to work, they don't have to pay taxes -- they can just stay here and get a lot of money. That is really a problem," Carlqvist added.
| Ms. Carlqvist: they don't want to be Swedes. That is the problem you can't seem to face directly, because doing so would require you to consider the solution that the best thing to do would be to give the immigrants a rather stark choice: either become Swedes (and get off the dole) or go back to the mother country. How 'progressive' would that be? |
"The police could do so much, [instead] they have told the public that they mean to do as little as possible. But they could go there and use water cannons, they could not let people out onto the streets at night. There are so many things they could do within the law -- but they don't do it," she said.
Young Muslims who enjoy tolerance, social institutions and welfare while living in Sweden nevertheless refuse to integrate into the West, Gerolf Annemans told RT. Annemans is the parliamentary leader of Vlaams Belang ('Flemish Interest'), a Belgian far-right nationalist political party.
"They [Muslim youths] have always sought excuse to show that they are not agreeing with the basic values of Western society," Annemans said, pointing to the recent cases of the Boston Marathon bombing in the US and yesterday's beheading of a British soldier in the UK.
"It's always the same problem. There is a massive refusal by Muslim youngsters of the basics of Western society... and they take any excuse whatsoever to show that with violence -- that is where the problem is," he said.
| Again, it's a bit two-way: Europeans felt they had to take in the immigrants but don't really let them become Swedes, or Belgians, or French. Turks came to West Germany in the early 1960s to do jobs the Germans, still recovering from the war, wouldn't do, and fifty years later their grandchildren aren't accepted as German. So it becomes no surprise that they're 'alienated'. |
As rioting continues to rip through Stockholm, some claim the violence has clearly been orchestrated for ulterior motives, Lars Hedegaard, Editor-in-Chief of Swedish newspaper Dispatch International said to RT.
"Some people would like to gain recognition as stakeholder in society. In other words, there are people who would like to be in a negotiating position... that they can make things happen and go away. That they have power in local communities and should be reckoned with," he explained.
| Like the imams down at the local holy shoppes, for example... |
"These riots in the country that are spreading and continuing for a long time that the [multiculturalism] success was a fiction, they never succeeded," Hedegaard said. |
