Anti-semitism returns to Sweden
by Garvan Walshe, Conservative Home:
In Gothenburg, on Saturday, the mob gathered outside a synagogue and pelted it with molotov cocktails. Children were ushered into the basement for their own protection. Police were on the back foot: their intelligence should have detected the plans. As swift as the police were slow, the far right chose to blame it on Sweden’s social model. The conflict between its social model and Muslim immigration has become a theme of theirs. Nigel Farage recently misinterpreted statistics to describe Sweden as “the rape capital of the world” (it in fact has a broader definition of rape, and makes it easier for women to report the crime). Should he be in any doubt, he could always pop down to the Ecuadorian embassy and ask his mate there, who denies allegations that he added to the statistics.
The claim here is that Sweden’s immigration policy somehow makes it a soft touch for Islamist movements. So best to close the borders. Discount for a moment that closing the borders is the far right’s solution to every problem.
What is going on in Sweden is another phase of the long-running conflict between political Islam, western liberalism and its domestic enemies. It happened here as early as 1988, when Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses was publicly burned. In the Netherlands, where Theo Van Gogh was murdered. In Denmark, over the cartoons of Mohammed. And in countless places because of terrorist attacks, demands for censorship and other legal exceptions made by groups claiming to represent Muslim communities in the West.
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