RUTHFULLY YOURS

Will last Friday’s terror attack in Stockholm change Swedish attitudes toward Islam? Not likely. Pretty much all of Europe has spent the last few decades undergoing (steady) Islamization, but the invasion has progressed so much further in Sweden than in almost every other country on the continent – and has occasioned so much less frank reportage, commentary, and criticism, that brave souls in Sweden’s Scandinavian neighbors, Denmark and Norway – routinely make disparaging reference to “Swedish conditions.” What this term refers to is not only the drastic social and economic changes currently underway in the country that once proudly called itself Folkhemmet, “the people’s home,” but the mentality – a mentality not unique to Sweden, but certainly more fully developed there, in the government, media, academy, police, and the public at large, than anywhere else in Europe – that has made this dread transformation possible.

A few recent news items provide illustrative examples of what it means to be living under “Swedish conditions”:

On March 10, it was reported that despite longtime plans, there would not be a new police station in Rinkeby, a notoriously unsafe immigrant neighborhood in Stockholm. Not a single construction firm had put in a bid for the project. Why? Because, as several police officers told SVT News, “it’s much too dangerous to build a police station in the area.”
On March 12, Sweden’s Minister for Culture and Democracy, Alice Bah Kuhnke, said in a TV interview that the 150-odd jihadists who have returned to Sweden after fighting for ISIS should not be investigated, let alone prosecuted, but should instead be welcomed back and encouraged to integrate – by which she seemed to mean offering various welfare incentives and assorted freebies. (Such enticements, incidentally, would be perfectly in line with Swedish practice.)
On April 5, after Sweden’s TV4 reported that a Muslim school in Vällingby was forcing girls to sit in the back of the school bus, Victoria Kawesa, head of a party called Feminist Initiative, blamed it not on Islam but on the “global patriarchy.”

But no recent event or telecast provided a more illuminating picture of “Swedish conditions” than the April 3 episode of Horisont, a 60 Minutes-type series on Danish TV. (The fact that Danish TV airs such programs while Swedish TV does not is itself, of course, a telling reflection of “Swedish conditions.”)

The central figure on the Horisont episode was Eva Ek Törnberg, an ethnic Swede who not only lives in Seved, an immigrant-heavy district of Malmö, but is known as the “Queen of Seved” because of her decades-long efforts to cozy up to her Muslim neighbors and help them become full members of Swedish society.

On Horisont, however, she admits that her attitudes have changed over time. She used to call herself a “citizen of the world” and to champion open borders – now she looks around and finds herself thinking: “What has happened to my little Sweden?” She once thought it was “nonsense” to expect newcomers to learn Swedish – now she feels otherwise. Yes, she still believes in letting these people in by the truckload – but she no longer warms as she once did to the idea of a “multicultural society.” She perseveres in her attempt to bring Muslims into the Swedish fold – but she’s increasingly frustrated and confused by her lack of success. As she puts it, she’s curious about these people’s lives – why are they so indifferent to hers?

None of Wilders’s speeches incites violence against anyone; the violence that surrounds him is directed only at him.

The only person talking about these problems is Geert Wilders. Dutch political leaders and most journalists seemingly prefer to claim that Geert Wilders is the problem; that if he were not there, these problems would not exist.

What adherents of this view, that the West is guilty, “forget” is that Islam long oppressed the West: Muslim armies conquered Persia, the Christian Byzantine Empire, all of North Africa and the Middle East, Spain, Greece, Hungary, Serbia and the Balkans, virtually all of Eastern Europe, Greece and southern Spain. The Muslim armies were a constant threat until the marauding Ottoman troops were finally turned away at the Gates of Vienna in 1683.

Even if the Dutch politcian Geert Wilders had won and if the Party for Freedom (PVV) he established eleven years ago had become the first party in the country, he would not have been able to become the head of the government. The heads of all the other political parties said they would reject any alliance with him ; they maintain this position to this day.

For years, the Dutch mainstream media have spread hatred and defamation against Wilders for trying to warn the Dutch people – and Europe – about what their future will be if they continue their current immigration policies; in exchange, last December, a panel of three judges found him guilty of “inciting discrimination”. Newspapers and politicians all over Europe unceasingly describe him as a dangerous man and a rightist firebrand. Sometimes they call him a “fascist”.

What did Geert Wilders ever do to deserve that? None of his remarks ever incriminated any person or group because of their race or ethnicity. To charge him, the Dutch justice system had excessively and abusively to interpret words he used during a rally in which he asked if the Dutch wanted “fewer Moroccans.” None of Wilders’s speeches incites violence against anyone; the violence that surrounds him is directed only at him. He defends human rights and democratic principles and he is a resolute enemy of all forms of anti-Semitism.

His only « crime » is to denounce the danger represented by the Islamization of the Netherlands and the rest of Europe and to claim that Islam represents a mortal threat to freedom. Unfortunately, he has good empirical reasons to say that. Also unfortunately, the Netherlands is a country where criticism of Islam is particularly dangerous: Theo van Gogh made an “Islamically incorrect” film in 2004 and was savagely murdered by an Islamist who said he would kill again if he could. Two years earlier, Pim Fortuyn, who had hoped to stand for election, defined Islam as a “hostile religion” ; he was killed by a leftist Islamophile animal-rights activist. Geert Wilders is alive only because he is under around-the-clock police protection graciously provided by the Dutch government.

This is the first time that Erdogan is openly challenging a concerted European stand.

Turkey’s foreign policy and the rhetoric that presumably went to support it, has, during the past several years, aimed less at achieving foreign policy goals and more at consolidating voters’ support for the Ankara government.

Self-aggrandizing behavior has predominantly shaped policy and functioned to please the Turks’ passion for a return to their glorious Ottoman past.

Assertive and confrontational diplomatic language and playing the tough guy of the neighborhood may have helped garner popular support for President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP), but after years of “loud barking and no biting”, Turkey has effectively become the victim of its own narrative.

In 2010, Turkey froze diplomatic relations with Israel and promised “internationally to isolate the Jewish state”, and never to restore ties unless, along with two other conditions, Jerusalem removed its naval blockade of Gaza to prevent weapons from being brought in that would be used to attack Israel. Turkey’s prime minister at the time, Ahmet Davutoglu, said Israel would “kneel down to us”.

In 2016, after rounds of diplomatic contacts, Turkey and Israel agreed to normalize their relations. The blockade of Gaza, to prevent shipments of weaponry to be used by Gazans in terror attacks remains in effect.

In 2012, Davutoglu claimed that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s days in power were numbered, “not by years but by weeks or months”. In 2016, Davutoglu had to step down as prime minister, but Erdogan’s and his worst regional nemesis, Assad, is in power to this day, enjoying increased Russian and Iranian backing. In 2012, Erdogan said that “we will soon go to Damascus to pray at the Umayyad mosque” — a political symbol of Assad’s downfall and his replacement by pro-Turkey Sunni groups. That prayer remains to be performed.

In November 2015, shortly after Turkey shot down a Russian Su-24 military jet and cited violation of its airspace, Erdogan warned Russia “not to play with fire.” As for the Russian demands for an apology, Erdogan said it was Turkey that deserved an apology because its airspace had been violated, and that Turkey would not apologize to Russia.

In June 2016, just half a year after Russia imposed a slew of economic sanctions on Turkey, Erdogan apologized to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Remember Daniel Ortega? The communist thug dictator of Nicaragua who disgusted the great Ronald Reagan with his mirrored sunglasses and his Fifth Avenue shopping sprees, and then later got into the news with child molestation charges brought on by his stepdaughter? He’s also famous for his many fraudulent “re-elections” and dismantling his country’s democracy.

Now that Hugo Chávez is gone, he’s back on the radar again, arm in arm with a new sugar daddy he’s sold his hapless country out to: Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

In an alarming story, the Washington Post reports that the Russians have set up a base camp full of Russian-speaking Russians of indeterminate purpose, in some compound at the base of a volcano, which is supposedly a GPS satellite-tracking station. U.S. officials think it might be more of an electronic surveillance station aimed at the U.S. and note that it’s aimed right at the U.S. Embassy in Managua. They say they aren’t alarmed for now, but it could have a dual-purpose spying function. Besides that, a gleaming new Russian edifice devoted to “counter-narcotics” operations has gone up, baffling many as to what interest Russia could have in the issue. Does Putin really want to keep meth out of the hands of the U.S. Rust Belt’s unemployed?

In exchange for these rather impressive concessions, the Nicaraguans get shipments of blocky, Soviet-style buses to ride around in on public transport – hot, sweaty, and always breaking down.

That sounds like the sort of deal Ortega would do.

It goes to show that Latin America’s leftist dictators’ club really is still entrenched and ruthless, and now that the oil money from Caracas has dried up, its members now put their countries up for sale to America’s opponents. Nicaragua has gotten such a good deal that El Salvador, now led by a group of aging communist guerrillas from Ortega’s 1980s heyday, want a Russian deal of their own. It’s not enough for them to ship one tenth of their population to Los Angeles and elsewhere in the U.S. as illegal immigrants in order to feed off their remittances while Americans pay for their housing, health care, jail costs, education, and welfare. No, a sellout to the Russians needs to be added to the mix to get gringo good. Because let’s face it: communist systems are unsustainable, and they can exist nowadays only if there’s a sugar daddy willing to pay. Putin knows this well and has kept his country rather uncommunist back home, the better to sell the romance to these boobs.

The U.S. left, of course, is silent. Leftists north of the Mexican border are still saying President Trump is in bed with the Russians. They’ve forgotten about their little buddy Ortega.