Tag Archives: Bruce Bawer

They’ll Take Sweden

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Night after night last week, as the tumult in Stockholm not only continued but kept spreading to more and more neighborhoods and then to other Swedish cities, the media in that country, by and large, kept pretending that it was all about things like unemployment and social marginality, all of which were supposedly aggravated by Swedish racism (and, especially, by the insufficiently respectful attitude of police officers toward immigrant “youths”); meanwhile, the foreign media, which, as the disorder persisted, found it increasingly difficult to pretend that all this wasn’t happening (the New York Times finally ran a four-sentence Reuters item about the bedlam on Thursday), largely echoed the domestic disinformation.

Of all the reports I looked at, the one that most effectively epitomized the asinine, mendacious approach of the Western media to this latest nightmare was a piece from Reuters that had no fewer than eight names attached to it. I would strongly recommend that you read the whole thing; in fact, I would suggest that it be taught in future history courses as a prime example of the high level of duplicity of which the early twenty-first-century Western media were capable when confronted with raw displays of Islamic power on their own turf. Credited to Niklas Pollard and Philip O’Connor, with “additional reporting” by Johan Ahlander, Mia Shanley, Patrick Lannin, and Simon Johnson, writing by Alistair Scrutton, and editing by Janet McBride, the Reuters piece was headlined “Sweden riots expose ugly side of” – no, not of “European immigration policies” or “Islam,” of course, but of the “Nordic model.”

Yes, it’s all the fault of the “Nordic model”: the roots of the Stockholm unrest, Reuters (and virtually every other major Western news organization that deigned to report on the disturbances) would have us believe, lay “in segregation, neglect and poverty,” in years of “fruitless job hunts, police harassment, racial taunts and a feeling of living at the margins.” And so on. Which means, I suppose, that 9/11 revealed the flaws of the American model, and the car-burnings in French suburbs reflect the weaknesses of the Gallic model, and the explosions in Madrid were all about the failings of the Spanish model, and the savage murder of Lee Rigby in London last week…well, you get the idea.

The dispatch from Reuters suggested that Sweden’s “lowered taxes” (which are still absurdly high) and “reduced state benefits” (which are still staggeringly bounteous) are responsible for rising economical inequality and segregation, and thus for the pandemonium in the streets. An Ethiopian-born woman interviewed by Reuters maintained that Swedish kids won’t play with her daughter “because she’s dark.” (There was no mention, needless to say, of the real problem in an increasing number of Scandinavian schools, namely the systematic harassment, and worse, of ethnic Swedish kids by their immigrant-group classmates.) On late-night trains from downtown Stockholm to the suburbs, the Reuters team told us, you’ll see “exhausted-looking Arabic or Spanish speaking immigrants returning home from menial jobs”; an “Asian diplomat” lamented that immigrants in the Swedish capital “are mostly selling hotdogs.”

Read more at Front Page

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The Media’s Character Assassination of Lars Hedegaard

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It’s starting to look like the Book of Job. For years, he’s been demonized in his nation’s media for criticizing Islam. In 2011 and 2012, he was put on trial – not one, twice, but three times – for violating a Danish law that makes it a crime to insult or denigrate a religion. Last month, a guy came to his door dressed as a mailman and tried to kill him; his survival seems nothing short of a miracle.

You might think that in the wake of this assassination attempt, Lars Hedegaard would get some respect – or at least solidarity – from the Danish media. But you could only think that if you were unaware of the aftermath of the murders of Pim Fortuyn and Theo van Gogh, whose bodies weren’t even cold when Dutch journalists set about smearing them even more enthusiastically than they had before, essentially blaming them for their own deaths. Many of Lars’s fellow Danes, to be sure, did rally round him after his close call. But in large part, the Danish media’s reaction was depressingly predictable. As I noted just last week, a couple of morally challenged employees of the newspaper Ekstra Bladet actually tried to follow a moving van to Lars’s new home, apparently so they could print the address; fortunately, the police foiled their effort.

Alas, that wasn’t the end of it. On Sunday, Deadline, a program on the state-owned TV channel DR2, aired a half-hour taped interview with Lars by reporter Martin Krasnik. Krasnik’s introduction, tacked onto the beginning of the show later, was not promising. In a manifest attempt to paint Lars as an extremist, Krasnik mentioned Lars’s hosting of Geert Wilders at the Free Press Society and Anders Behring Breivik’s citation of Lars in his “manifesto.”

Read more at Front Page

See also:

In Defence of Lars Hedegaard (counterjihadreport.com)

The Islamization of Copenhagen

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Bit by bit, it’s getting worse.

 

By Bruce Bawer

Bit by bit, it’s getting worse.

In recent years, life in the city of Copenhagen has hardly been free of, shall we say, problems related to Islam. But for the most part, the worst of it has been confined to Muslim neighborhoods such as Nørrebro. And residents of Copenhagen have at least been able to console themselves that conditions in their city were nowhere near as bad as those right across the Øresund Bridge in the now notorious Swedish burg of Malmö.

Well, as an editorial in Jyllands-Posten acknowledged last week, “conditions such as those in Malmö…are beginning to appear in Copenhagen.”

In a news story that appeared on the same day as the editorial, Jyllands-Posten reported the latest example of these “conditions”: both the Israeli ambassador to Denmark, Arthur Avnon, and the head of Copenhagen’s Jewish community are now advising Jews in that city to stop wearing yarmulkes and Stars of David and speaking Hebrew loudly in public – even in neighborhoods that they think of as “safe.” Asked about this advice, Police Commissioner Lars-Christian Borg told Jyllands-Posten that Jews – and gays, too – should stay away from parts of the city where there is a recognized “risk of clashes and harassment.” (Nice euphemism for “Muslim neighborhoods,” that.)

The Jyllands-Posten editorial bleakly toted up other examples of what they described as the city’s increasing readiness to adapt to the ever-worsening situation in the Danish capital: Copenhagen’s Jewish school “looks like a small fortress,” supplied with an elaborate security system and police protection, a constant reminder to the children that there are people who wish to do them harm; the head of the Danish-Palestinian Friendship Society, who is also a leading figure in Denmark’s ruling Socialist People’s Party, recently opined that Hitler should have killed even more Jews than he did, and went unpunished and all but entirely uncriticized for it; Copenhagen’s mayor called on Jews not to display too many Israeli flags at a recent multicultural festival, an admonition that was generally regarded as sensible: “why pick unnecessary fights?” Why “provoke”? Once again proving itself to be morally head and shoulders above virtually every other major newspaper in Europe, Jyllands-Posten called on Danes to recognize just how dangerous it is to respond in a passive and accommodating way to Muslim hatred, and urged them to  stand up to it before it’s too late.

Read more at Front Page

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Going Undercover in Sweden’s Mosques

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by Bruce Bawer, Front page:

You may recall that back in 2007, the series Dispatches, produced by Britain’s Channel 4, sent reporters into several mosques in that country with hidden cameras and microphones.  The result was a program entitled Undercover Mosque, which – for those who didn’t already suspect that fishy stuff was going on behind those walls – was mind-blowing, confirming pretty much every claim made by the critics of Islam that had been furiously rejected by imams as sheer Islamophobia.  Among other things, Channel 4 caught preachers on videotape rejecting Western law and integration into Western society; asserting the intellectual inferiority of  women and the acceptability of marrying pre-pubescent girls; and calling for the murder of Jews, Hindus, gays, Muslim apostates, and British soldiers.

If you remember that program, you may also remember what happened afterwards.  The British police investigated the mosques, but decided they didn’t have enough evidence to charge them with anything.  At which point the cops did a 180 and reported Channel 4 to Ofcom, the UK’s answer to the FCC, for allegedly editing its footage in such a way as to misrepresent the preachers’ views.  The good news is that Ofcom eventually rejected the charges; the bad news is that, once again, the critics of Islam became the heavies, the Muslims the victims.  And despite Undercover Mosque‘s explosive revelations, nothing much changed as a result of them.

Now, to its credit, and to the astonishment of many, Swedish television has done its own version of Undercover Mosque.  The 60 Minutes-style series Uppdrag: Granskning (Assignment: Investigation) sent two women in burkas into ten Swedish mosques.  One of them carried a hidden camera; the other pretended to be a woman whose abusive husband had taken a second wife and who wanted to know the answers to these questions:

  • Is a man permitted to marry more than one woman?
  • Is a woman permitted to deny her husband sex?
  • Is a man permitted to hit his wife?
  • If so, is she permitted to call the police?

Again, for those who have been following these matters for years in North America and Europe, the results of this investigation will not come as much of a surprise.  But in Sweden, where the media try their best never to approach these matters in a remotely honest way, this episode of Uppdrag: Granskning provided a rare taste of media candor.

One of the ten mosques was the Stockholm Mosque, the most prominent Muslim house of worship in Sweden.  An official at the mosque, Mahmod Adam, told his burka-clad interlocutor that it’s perfectly acceptable under the Koran for a man to take four wives, so long as he can support them and treat them equally.  “Understand?” he asked.  “Yes,” she replied meekly.  In response to which he told her, sharply, “You’re supposed to listen!” – in other words, “Shut up!”

The faux wife went on to tell Adam that her husband hits her if she so much as opens her mouth – and that he cites the Koran in his defense.  Adam replied that her husband is allowed to smack her on the arm – and that under no circumstances, in any case, should she call the police on him.  His final advice: to show her husband more affection.

Elsewhere the advice was similar.  At the Örebro Mosque, Abdur Kadir Salad told the woman not to call the police because she’d end up getting a divorce and breaking up her family – and Muslims don’t want that, for Islam is about building families, not breaking them up.  At the Islamic Center in Malmö, same advice: no police, because “they can take your kids.”  At another Malmö mosque, the message was unambiguous: “Never, never consider calling the police.”  Even if he hits her twenty or thirty times?  Smacking himself on the arm, the imam said forcefully: “This is not hitting!”

On to Uppsala, where Abdul Wadod – who, amusingly, looked not unlike Sasha Baron Cohen with a beard – told the woman that when her husband hits her, she shouldn’t call the cops; she should apologize.  Apologize?  Yes.  He cited what he called “a very fine hadith,” which, according to him, says in effect that a good wife responds to spousal abuse by telling her husband: “I’m sorry, I just can’t sleep until you’re satisfied with me.”

That was the overall pattern.  There were exceptions.  “It doesn’t matter if he ends up in prison,” said the counselor at the Islamic Cultural Center in Rinkeby when asked about how to deal with domestic violence.  “You must report him to the police.”  (Curiously, of all the mosques, this is the one that has the reputation of being the most conservative; I couldn’t help wondering if he’d figured out that his visitor was wearing a wire.)

The final score: at six out of the ten mosques, the woman was told that it was her duty to submit to sex with her husband.  At six, she was told not to report spousal abuse to the police; at two others, the advice she received was vague or contradictory; only at two mosques was she told to go to the police.  And at nine out of ten, she was told that her husband has the right to take four wives.

All of this advice, as Uppdrag: Granskning duly noted – and as the mosque employees certainly understood – is in explicit violation of Swedish law.  And these mosques, as was pointed out on the program more than once, receive generous financial support from the Swedish government.

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Netherlands Sliding into the Abyss

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Posted By Bruce Bawer In Daily Mailer,FrontPage

 

In a new interview in the Dutch magazine Panorama, Geert Wilders talks about a variety of things, including his forthcoming book about Islam, which will be published in the U.S. in April.  In it, he says, he’ll document the fact that “Islam is a dangerous ideology” and that “Muhammed really is one of the big bad guys” of history, whose negative influence continues to be felt today.  Yes, Wilders acknowledges, there are genuinely moderate people who call themselves Muslims, and if they want to call themselves Muslims that’s fine with him – but there is no such thing as a moderate Islam.

What, asks the interviewer, is his great fear?  Answer: that “if we don’t put an end to Islamization, it will slowly but surely insinuate itself into our society, at the cost of our freedom.  And bit by bit things will go the wrong way.  That’s why I’m extending this warning.  Otherwise someday our children and grandchildren won’t have freedom any more.”  To which the interviewer replies: “And if people say: come on, Geert, it’s not really so bad, is it?…What do you say then?”  “I say: it’s worse than you think.”

It’s hard to believe that in the year 2011 there exist Dutchmen – outside of the perennially clueless cultural elite, that is – who are still able to believe that things aren’t “really so bad.”  But, alas, there are.  There are.

To be sure, thanks largely to pressure from Wilders and his Freedom Party, the last few years have seen reforms in Dutch immigration and integration policies.  But has it been too little, too late?   For the unfortunate fact is that one set of indicators after another continues to head south.  Take a new report commissioned by the Dutch Ministry of the Interior and produced by Risbo, a research institute at Erasmus University.  It shows that of males in the Netherlands’ “Moroccan community” between the ages of 12 and 24, no fewer than 38.7 percent have come to the attention of the police at least once during the last five years in connection with some offense – mostly violent crimes and thefts.

The winner in this dubious sweepstakes is the historic city of Den Bosch, about fifty miles south of Amsterdam.  In Den Bosch, just under half of young Moroccan males between 12 and 24 – 47.7 percent, to be exact – have police records.  (That’s up from 45 percent last year.)  In a long list of other cities – Zeist, Gouda, Veenendaal, Amersfoort, Maassluis, Oosterhout, Schiedam, Nijmegen, Utrecht, Ede, Leiden, and The Hague – the figure also topped 40 percent.  In every municipality that was studied, incidentally, the scores for Moroccan youths far outstripped those for ethnic Dutch kids, among whom an average of 13 percent of boys in the same age cohort had come in for similar police attention during the same period.

One person who knows a good deal about the Dutch Moroccan youth milieu is filmmaker Roy Dames, who spent eight years – imagine! – working on Mocros, a documentary about young Moroccans in Rotterdam.  (The film opened on November 10 in Amsterdam and Nijmegen, and will be aired on Dutch TV early next year.)  In an interview with the Dutch edition of Metro, Dames, whose previous work includes documentaries about criminals, prostitutes, alcoholics, and homeless people, says that he “wanted to make a documentary about the Moroccan boys in the street, the street kids that you see everywhere.  In 2002, when I started Mocros, Moroccan boys had a poor image. They still do.  Many Moroccan boys are kicked out of school, cause trouble in the streets, and are in danger of leading a life of crime.”

The ones he’s been following around all these years with his camera now average about twenty-three years old.  They’re on welfare and get “an occasional job.”  One of them has spent some time in prison.  It’s not easy to get them to open up, he says, because they “live in a culture of silence and shame” in which pressure from family, friends, and community “is enormous.”

Spending all these years in the company of these youths hasn’t exactly protected Dames from their not-so-chummy side.  At one point he was filming a (shall we say) uncongenial encounter between thirty of his young subjects and some hapless “youth workers” when suddenly the boys “turned on me” aggressively.  Dames jumped in his car and sped off just in time – and had to put the project on hold for six months.  (Apparently it took that long for the kids to cool down.)

One gathers that while Dames has a certain degree of sympathy for at least some of these kids, he also doesn’t pull any punches, and shows things how they are – which is not pretty.  (A snotty little review in De Telegraaf gripes that the film, intentionally or not, will confirm all the prejudices of ethnic Dutch viewers – and the reviewer ends with that line, as if to make it clear that the last thing he wants to do is to explore the disturbing implications of this observation.)

It seems significant that the profile of Dames appeared in the Dutch edition of Metro, of all places.  Metro is a chain of urban newspapers that can be picked up for free in subway stations and other such places (the Dutch trains are always full of discarded copies), and over the years I’ve noticed that the Dutch and Swedish editions of Metro are – scandalously – often the only places you’ll find news stories that are too politically incorrect for those countries’ “real” media to touch.  Apparently Dames’s documentary falls into that category.  Mocros has received “little attention in the media,” he laments, because “the Dutch press is politically correct” and would prefer not to have a “real debate” about the issues raised by films like his.

Well, we knew that already – heaven knows Geert Wilders does.  But after the murders of Pim Fortuyn and Theo van Gogh, the hounding of Ayaan Hirsi Ali out of the country, and the prosecution of Wilders – all because they dared to express their opinions about Islam – and given the increasingly out-of-this-world statistics such as those included in the Risbo report, one wonders exactly what it would take to persuade the Dutch media that it’s time, at long last, to permit a truly wide-open, no-holds-barred discussion of Islam in the Netherlands.  One fears that by the time some of the media moguls realize it’s time to let ‘er rip, it’ll already be much too late.