Sweden facing a crisis of gang violence

Swedish PM Magdalena Andersson recently blamed Sweden’s soft approach to Islamic extremism and mass migration as a primary cause for violent social upheaval.

By Ian Miles Cheong
|
May 05, 2022

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Sweden is facing a crisis of gang violence due to its failure to integrate massive numbers of migrant refugees into the country, leading to the creation of a parallel society isolated from broader Swedish culture.

Speaking in the aftermath of nationwide riots caused by migrant gangs on Easter weekend, which left over a hundred police officers wounded, newly elected Swedish Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson, who belongs to the country’s left-wing Swedish Social Democratic Party, said that the nation’s approach to immigration has failed.

Andersson blamed Sweden’s soft approach to Islamic extremism and mass migration as a primary cause for violent social upheaval, as reported by Rebel News last week.

“Segregation has gone so far that we have parallel societies in Sweden. We live in the same country, but different realities,” said Andersson, Remix News reported. “Integration was poor, and alongside, we have experienced intense immigration. Our society was too weak, while money for the police and social services too little.”

The violence sparked after far-right politician Rasmus Paludan torched a Koran at a political rally, and also threatened to hold similar events in migrant-dominant neighborhoods.

As reported by Spiked’s Brendan O’Neill, “Something is rotten in the state of Sweden. Grenade attacks have soared in recent years.”

“Sweden is now the only country other than Mexico in which police record the number of grenade attacks. Explosions in general are on the rise. ‘Sweden’s 100 explosions this year: What’s going on?’, a bamboozled BBC asked in 2019. In 2020 there were more than 200 explosions and 360 shootings, continued O’Neill, citing numerous statistics exposing the rise in criminality and violence across the Scandinavian country.

“The murder rate for 2020 was Sweden’s highest in 18 years: 124 people were killed and 39 per cent of the killings involved guns. Sweden is the only country in Europe in which fatal shootings have surged since the year 2000. Even the once Sweden-adoring Guardian has had to admit, with not a little perplexion, that Sweden has gone from having ‘one of the lowest rates of gun violence on the continent to one of the highest in less than a decade,” he wrote.

“People born abroad are 2.5 times as likely to be registered as a crime suspect as people born in Sweden to two native-born parents,” reported Sweden’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 2021.

Spiked reported:

Swedish police say that much of the bomb and gun violence of recent years has been the work of criminal gangs made up of foreign-born youths – ‘criminal clans that have a completely different culture’. Or consider Sweden’s sexual-offence stats. Four esteemed social scientists in Sweden studied the rape trends of the past two decades. They found that of those convicted of rape, 40.8 per cent were Swedish-born with Swedish-born parents, while 47.7 per cent were born outside of Sweden. Of the foreign-born men convicted of rape, 34.5 per cent were from the Middle East and North Africa, and 19.1 per cent were from other parts of Africa. This is unquestionably striking.

One problem, of course, is that facts like these are too often easily and lazily folded into pre-existing narratives, usually about the folly of any form of immigration or the evil of Muslim men. Yet as Ayaan Hirsi Ali rightly says, ‘the overwhelming majority of foreign-born men living in Sweden are not guilty of crimes’ and no social or ethnic group should be ‘condemned for the actions of a very small percentage’. Then there is the other response to Sweden’s undoubted crisis of integration, which, if anything, is even worse. That is, to pretend it isn’t happening, to look the other way, to stay silent. Hirsi Ali rebukes the way that problems of immigrant crime are either exploited by the ‘populist right’ to demonise foreigners or subjected to a liberal-elite attitude of ‘See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil’. This is why Andersson’s intervention is important – she is not seeking to denigrate entire communities, yet nor is she willing to ignore the social conflict that can spring from mass immigration that is not accompanied by clear strategies of integration.

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