The Mega "MIGRANT THREAT TO EUROPE" thread

[CougarKing]

While global attention is focused on Syrian refugees, this article says other refugees such as Afghans are overlooked.

Diplomat

Global Crisis: Afghanistan's Europe-Bound Refugees


When it comes to seeking refuge, Afghans often get the short end of the stick in Europe.


By Benjamin David Baker
November 14, 2015

“War is hell,” goes the well-known axiom attributed to General William Tecumseh Sherman often mentioned in conjunction with his infamous  “March to the Sea” in the twilight year of the American Civil War. Sherman knew what he was talking about: the Georgia Campaign destroyed much of the Confederacy’s infrastructure, but also caused severe hardship for the civilian population.


Although much in warfare was changed since Sherman’s time, war is still hell for civilians caught in it. Millions of refugees are fleeing conflict areas in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan, searching for security and a better life for them and their children. Although most refugees end up sheltering either in or near their country of origin, over 750,000 are in or are believed to be trying to make their way to Europe this year.


(...SNIPPED)

 

[a_majoor]

With the usual caveat that what they are calling "right wing" isn't anything of the sort (the nativists are mostly National Socialist parties, so you would have to be in another universe for them to be "right" of you), European nativists and nationalists are gearing up for more electoral success:

http://www.businessinsider.in/Europes-anti-immigration-and-hard-right-parties-are-on-the-warpath/articleshow/49843744.cms

Europe's anti-immigration and hard-right parties are on the warpath
MIKE BIRD59NOV 19, 2015, 01.58 PM

It seems like everywhere you look in continental Europe, the hard right is gaining ground.
Today, it's the turn of the Sweden Democrats.

In 2014, the hard-right party came in third place on 12.9% of the vote, shocking international commentators. By comparison, the party got just 5.7% of the vote in 2010, and 1.49% in 2006.

They've only been getting more popular since and on Thursday Yougov published a poll that puts the Sweden Democrats ahead on 26.7%, 5 points clear of any other party.

It's one of 7 polls since August that have put the party in the lead in one of the world's most open and liberal states. The Sweden Democrats have built support on the back of opposition to immigration in a country that has taken more refugees relative to the size of its population than any other European nation.

The Sweden Democrats are part of a group of European political figures and parties that don't all want to be associated with each other, but all share at least two common tenets: opposition to immigration and scepticism about the European Union. Some even advocate leaving the single currency.

Just like Sweden Democrats, many of these parties are seeing surging popularity. Germany's rightist and eurosceptic AfD just got their best polling result ever, hitting 10.5%. They're back in 3rd place as the public mood with regards to refugees becomes increasingly fearful.

Dutch polling likewise puts Geert Wilders' Party for Freedom not just in the lead for the next election (which must take place before March 2017), but 19 points clear of the next party.

In the rest of Europe, it's a similar story. Austria's Freedom Party have drawn or lead in every poll conducted for the last six months. Italy's regional hard-right Lega Nord's polling average is sitting at around 15%, after getting just 4.1% in the 2013 election.

In France, there's understandably been no polling since the brutal attacks in Paris on Friday night. But Front National leader Marine Le Pen, who has built up significant support on the same eurosceptic and anti-immigration platform, already led in most polls for the 2017 presidential election.

Le Pen has already demanded an immediate halt of all migrant flows into France since the attacks. Europe's hard-right is already riding high after months of refugee crisis headlines, and the brutal attacks on Paris could propel it even further.

 

[a_majoor]

More on the success of the National Socialists in European elections, in this case, France:

http://www.the-american-interest.com/2015/12/07/le-pen-fn-triumph-in-french-regional-elections/

Le Pen & FN Triumph in French Regional Elections

The populist, anti-immigrant Front National triumphed in the first round of regional elections in France yesterday, coming in first in six out of the country’s 13 regions and winning 28 percent of the vote nationally. The center-Right Républicains came in second with 26.9 percent of the vote, finishing first in only four regions. The Socialists, who had held all but one of the regions, came in first in only three, with 23.3 percent of the vote. Marine Le Pen, the FN’s leader, won a crushing 40 percent of the vote in her race, and her niece Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, captured more than 40 percent in her region.

Marine Le Pen’s race is particularly interesting: In winning Nord-Pas-de-Calais-Picardie, she captured a historic stronghold of the socialist Left, while also putting herself on the path to govern the region with one of France’s most acute migrant problems. At the port of Calais, thousands of refugees and migrants huddle in a makeshift camp called “the Jungle,” trying to sneak into England—even returning after French attempts to relocate them. This situation, unsurprisingly, has led to exacerbated tensions between locals and the migrants.
Le Pen’s victory in the heartland of the Left, however, is less surprising than one might think based on the “far-Right” label usually applied to the party. The FN has always been protectionist and socialist (really, how could one be a French nationalist in this day and age and not be?), and has recently gone out of its way to present itself as the savior of the French economic model. And to say that Le Pen’s victory is “interesting” is not the same as “good.” The FN remains a party with an ugly history of anti-Semitism that espouses anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim views and embraces Putin. Historically, France’s centrist parties have counted on exactly that ugliness to push voters towards them, betting that on the second round of ballots (which in this case come next week) voters would gravitate to whichever of them remained as the only acceptable alternative to the FN.

And indeed, the old impulse is still alive: The Socialists had called for the formation of a united bloc with Les Républicains ahead of the election. While Les Républicains leader Nicolas Sarkozy rejected the proposal, the Socialists announced that they were pulling several of their candidates from the second round of voting in hopes of limiting the FN’s gains, and several Les Républicains leaders endorsed the strategy: “When you are third, you pull out,” as ex-Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin put it.

But it may not work this time. Projections show the FN still winning at least four regions come next week, and that’s not surprising. The FN was already doing well before the Paris attacks, its surge fueled by the centrists’ steadfast refusal to address issues, starting with immigration, that the public cared about. Throw in a massive security failure and a “stay the course” message on immigration post-Paris, and it may well be enough to break through historic firewalls. Whether that will happen remains to be seen next week.

and from the same magazine:

http://www.the-american-interest.com/2015/12/06/jihadists-using-refugee-flows/

Jihadists Using Refugee Flows?

Evidence accumulating that jihadi groups, including the one that planned the Paris attacks, are using the migration of hundreds of thousands of refugees to cover their own movements. The New York Times reports:


The investigation into the Paris terrorist attacks, previously focused on jihadist networks in France and Belgium, has widened to Eastern Europe, with a Belgian federal prosecutor announcing Friday that one of the people suspected of terrorism traveled in September by car to Hungary, where he picked up two men now believed to have links to the carnage of Nov. 13.

The disclosure of a Hungarian connection has not only dramatically expanded the scope of the investigation but has also put a spotlight on the question of whether jihadist militants have concealed themselves in a huge flow of asylum seekers passing through Eastern Europe.

A statement issued by the Belgian federal prosecutor on Friday said that Salah Abdeslam, a former Brussels resident who is the only known survivor from three terrorist squads that killed 130 people in Paris, had made two trips to the Hungarian capital, Budapest, in a rented Mercedes-Benz a few weeks before the Paris attacks.

On a drive back to Western Europe on Sept. 9, he was stopped during a routine check at Hungary’s border with Austria and found to be transporting two men using what have since turned out to be “fake Belgian identity cards.”

Europe, which just a few years ago thought that it inhabited a post-historical universe in which nothing could ever go seriously wrong, is painfully waking up from the dream. It’s now crystal clear that one can’t combine a passive foreign policy with a legalistic adherence to absolutist ideals—that, for example, one can turn a blind eye to a disintegrating Middle East and North Africa while opening the gates to every refugee and migrant that the meltdown creates.

Not far behind this lurks the realization that a cosmopolitan and tolerant society can’t thrive if it admits millions of migrants who hate and despise cosmopolitan values. Still obscure to most European elites (and to their American counterparts) is the understanding that neither the values nor the liberties of liberal civilization can long flourish if the religious and spiritual foundations of that civilization are allowed to decay, and are treated with scorn and neglect by society’s leaders.

Today’s Western elites, in the U.S. as much as in Europe, have never been so self-confident. Products of meritocratic selection who hold key positions in the social machine, the bien-pensant custodians of post-historical ideology—editorial writers at the NY Times, staffers in cultural and educational bureaucracies, Eurocratic functionaries, much of the professoriat, the human rights priesthood and so on—are utterly convinced that they see farther and deeper than the less credentialed, less educated, less tolerant and less sophisticated knuckle-dragging also-rans outside the magic circle of post historical groupthink.

And while the meritocratic priesthood isn’t wrong about everything—and the knuckle-draggers aren’t right about everything—there are a few big issues on which the priests are dead wrong and the knuckle-draggers know it. Worse, as the mass of the people become more aware that the elites are too blind and too wrapped up in the coils of elite ideology to deal effectively with society’s most urgent problems, an age of demagogues is opening up around us. People need leaders; when the meritocratic priesthood seems incapable of providing leadership, people start looking elsewhere.

 

[a_majoor]

Interesting that Merkel, who grew up in former East Germany, seems unaware of Samizdat and word of mouth as means of idea and information propagation:

http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2015/12/15/facebook-twitter-google-collude-with-german-government-to-censor-discussion-on-immigration/

Facebook, Twitter, Google Collude With German Government To Censor Discussion On Immigration
by CHARLIE NASH15 Dec 2015480

The two largest social networks, Facebook and Twitter, and the world’s largest search engine, Google, have teamed up with German law enforcement to delete “hate speech” within 24 hours in what is being seen as a last-ditch effort to silence public dissent about a gigantic wave of Syrian immigration.

The partnership to crack down on what Germany deems illegal speech comes after German law enforcement’s reported concerns about “racist abuse” posted to social media after the country’s huge and extremely controversial import of over a million Syrian refugees.

Justice Minister Heiko Maas is reported to have warned social networks that they must not become “a funfair for the far-right” and that “the benchmark to be applied will be German law and no longer just the terms of use of each network.”

Specialist teams will be used to track down, examine, and remove offending posts, and the process is not to take more than 24 hours.

After World War Two, all Nazi-related imagery and material was made illegal irrespective of context in Germany. All Nazi-related swastikas and salutes were replaced in the Wolfenstein video game remake, owing to this law.

Charlie Nash is a libertarian writer, memeologist, and child prodigy. When he is not writing, he can usually be found chilling at the Korova Milk Bar, mingling with the infamous. You can follow him on Twitter at @MrNashington.
['/quote]

Of course this will simply redirect anger and score points for German nativists and ultra nationalists. Cutting off information rarely works at all, and almost certainly does not work in your favour. To be even minimally effective, you need to impose "Great Firewall of China" sized restrictive infrastructure or assume a level of social control equal to that of the DPRK; hardly outcomes that anyone would think of as desirable.

 

[a_majoor]

The Dutch look like they are trying to recover the badass reputation they earned in the 15 and 1600's. On a more serious note, mass riots against the government (local in this case) almost certainly represents a huge disconnect between the "governors" and the "governed", which can only lead to trouble downrange (including the resurgence of National Socialist political parties and movements, with all that implies):

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3363895/Riot-police-fire-warning-shots-THOUSANDS-protesters-storm-site-planned-asylum-centre-1-500-migrants-Holland.html

Riot police fire warning shots as THOUSANDS of protesters storm the site of a planned asylum centre for 1,500 migrants in Holland

Demonstrators went on the rampage in town of Geldermalsen last night
They smashed through fence surrounding asylum camp, attacked police
The angry crowd yelled 'No n****** here!' and 'foreign scum keep away'
Town hall left looking like a 'battlefield' and councillors were forced to flee
At least 14 people were arrested, several policemen were injured in melee

By ALLAN HALL IN BERLIN FOR MAILONLINE
PUBLISHED: 10:53 GMT, 17 December 2015 | UPDATED: 04:53 GMT, 18 December 2015

Police had to fire warning shots into the air when thousands of Dutch protestors stormed the site of a planned asylum centre, shortly to open for 1,500 refugees.

The demonstrators went on the rampage in the small town of Geldermalsen last night in the worst riot of its kind in the Netherlands since the refugee crisis began.

A planned discussion about the imminent arrival of the migrants, staged by the town council, was abandoned in the chaos as the mob outside tried to storm the building. Councillors were forced to flee out of rear exits into police vans.

Thousands of rioters smashed the fences around a planned asylum centre in the Dutch town Geldermalsen in the worst riot of its kind

The mob, who left the town hall looking like a 'battlefield', yelled 'no n****** here!' and 'foreign scum keep away!'

Fences around the planned asylum camp were smashed down or cut through in the rioting. Police were pelted with bottles and fireworks before they drew their firearms and fired warning shots into the air.
The crowd shouted 'no n****** here!' and 'foreign scum keep away!' and left the town hall looking like a 'battlefield' with broken windows and chipped brickwork.

Running skirmishes between youths and the police went on until the early hours of Thursday morning.

The mayoress, Miranda de Vries, said she was shocked at the violence caused by an estimated 2,500 people in the town of 27,000 that lies near the city of Utrecht.

It was by far the biggest and the most violent outbreak of anti-immigrant sentiment in the country.
Deputy justice minister Klaas Dijkhoff responsible for managing Holland's intake of refugees, called the protestors 'un-Netherlanderish'.
There were 14 arrests and several police officers were slightly hurt in the melees. A Dutch bomb squad had to be called in on Thursday morning to deal with a potentially lethal 'heavy' fireworks lodged in the town hall facade.

Thousands riot over asylum centre plans in the Netherlands

Police were pelted with fireworks and bottles as protesters stormed the planned asylum centre, soon to be home to 1,500 refugees

Running skirmishes between youths (pictured) and the police went on until the early hours of Thursday morning

'It is very serious what happened tonight,' said a police spokesman. 'We going to investigate what exactly occurred.'
Mayor de Vries said: 'Everyone from the council chamber is safe. And they tell people to be afraid of asylum seekers. Am I sad.
'The clearance of a council chamber in Geldermalsen due to disturbances is of coursen unheard of. If you want to express your opinion there is plenty of room for it. You don't express opinions by throwing fireworks.'

The plan for an asylum centre with a capacity for 1500 people for a period of 10 years is highly controversial for locals who fear there may be more trouble to come.


Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3363895/Riot-police-fire-warning-shots-THOUSANDS-protesters-storm-site-planned-asylum-centre-1-500-migrants-Holland.html#ixzz3uiVtSvGT
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook

 

[a_majoor]

Sweden's citizens are now feeling their contract with the governing class is being broken, and the downfall of Sweden as the model "socialist state" will be very troubling for everyone (not the least being the Swedes themselves):

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/6865/sweden-anarchy

Sweden Descends into Anarchy
by Ingrid Carlqvist
November 13, 2015 at 5:00 am

Translation of the original text: Sverige på väg mot anarki
Translated by Maria Celander

"You have to understand that Swedes are really scared when an asylum house opens in their village. They can see what has happened in other places." — Salesman for alarm systems.

Since Parliament decided in 1975 that Sweden should be multicultural and not Swedish, crime has exploded. Violent crime has increased by over 300% and rapes have increased by an unbelievable 1,472%.

Many Swedes see the mass immigration as a forced marriage: Sweden is forced to marry a man she did not choose, yet she is expected to love and honor him, even though he beats her and treats her badly. Her parents (the government) tell her to be warm and show solidarity with him.

"Are the State and I now in agreement that our mutual contract is being renegotiated?" — Alexandra von Schwerin, whose farm who was robbed three times. Police refused to help.

Once upon a time, there was a safe welfare state called Sweden, where people rarely locked their doors.

Now, this country is a night-watchman state -- each man is on his own. When the Minister of Justice, Morgan Johansson, encourages breaking the law, it means opening the gates to anarchy. Mr. and Mrs. Swede have every reason to be worried, with the influx of 190,000 unskilled and unemployed migrants expected this year -- equivalent to 2% of Sweden's current population. The number is as if 6.4 million penniless migrants who did not speak English arrived in U.S. in one year, or 1.3 million in Britain.

And the Swedes are preparing: demand for firearms licenses is increasing; more and more Swedes are joining shooting clubs and starting vigilante groups. After a slight dip in 2014, the number of new gun permits has gone up significantly again this year. According to police statistics, there are 1,901,325 licensed guns, owned by 567,733 people, in Sweden. Add to this an unknown number of illegal weapons. To get a gun permit in Sweden, you need to be at least 18 years old; law-abiding; well-behaved, and have a hunting license or be a member of an approved shooting club. In 2014, 11,000 people got a hunting license: 10% more than the year before. One out of five was a woman.

"There is also a high demand for alarm systems right now," says a salesman at one of the security companies in an interview with Gatestone.

"It is largely due to the turbulence we are seeing around the country at the moment." People have lost confidence in the State, he added. "The police will not come anymore. Truck drivers say that when they see a thief emptying the fuel tank of their trucks, they run out with a baseball bat. It is no use calling the police, but if you hit the thief, you can at least prevent him from stealing more diesel. Many homeowners say the same thing: they sleep with a baseball bat under the bed. But this is risky: the police can then say you have been prepared to use force, and that might backfire on you."

The salesman, who asked to remain anonymous, also spoke of Sweden's many Facebook groups, in which people in different villages openly discuss how they intend to protect themselves: "Sometimes you get totally freaked out when you see what they are writing. But you have to understand that Swedes are really scared when an asylum house opens in their village. They can see what has happened in other places."

One blog, detailing the consequences for the local population when an asylum facility opens, is aptly named Asylkaos ("Asylum Chaos"). There is a list of companies the reader is prompted to boycott; the blog claims these businesses encourage the transformation of Sweden to a multicultural society, and are therefore considered "hostile to Swedes."

At another security company, a salesman said that every time the Immigration Service buys or rents a new housing facility, his firm is swamped with calls. "The next day," he said, "half the village calls and wants to buy alarm systems."

Ronny Fredriksson, spokesman of the security company Securitas, said that the demand for home alarm systems first exploded about six years ago, when many local police stations were shut down and police moved to the main towns. This, he said, could result in response times of several hours. "More and more people now employ the services of our security guards. Shopping malls and stores in the city come together and hire guards. We are kind of like the 'local beat' cops of old."

Even though Securitas makes big money from the increased need for home security alarms and security guards, Fredriksson says they also are worried about the effect on society:

"The problem is that we too need the police. When our guards catch a burglar or a violent person, we call the police but the response times are often very long. Sometimes, the detainees get violent and quite rowdy. On occasion, the police have told us to release the person we have apprehended, if we have his identity, because they do not have a patrol nearby."

Even before the massive influx of migrants in the fall of 2015, Swedes felt a need to protect themselves -- and with good reason. Since the Parliament decided in 1975 that Sweden should be multicultural and not Swedish, crime has exploded. Violent crime has increased by more than 300%, and rapes have increased by an unbelievable 1,472%.

The politicians, however, ignore the people's fear completely. It is never discussed. Instead, the people who express concern about what kind of country Sweden has become are accused of xenophobia and racism. Most likely, that is the reason more and more people are taking matters into their own hands, and protecting themselves and their families to the best of their ability.

All the same, some people do not settle for that. It seems some people are trying to stop mass immigration to Sweden. Almost every day there are reports of fires being set at asylum houses. So far, miraculously, no one has been hurt.

These fires are set not only by Swedes. On October 13, a 36-year-old woman living in Skellefteå was convicted of setting fire to the asylum facility in which she herself resided. The woman claimed she lit a candle and then fell asleep. Yet forensic evidence showed that a combustible fluid had been doused throughout the room, and the court found beyond a reasonable doubt that she herself had ignited the fire.

The number of violent incidents at Sweden's Immigration Service facilities is now sky-high. In 2013, according to Dispatch International, at least one incident happened every day. When Gatestone Institute recently acquired the incident list for January 1, 2014 through October 29, 2015, that number had risen to 2,177 incidents of threats, violence and brawls -- on average, three per day.

The Swedish government, however, would apparently rather not talk about that. Foreign Minister Margot Wallström conceded, in an interview with the daily Dagens Nyheter that garnered international attention, that Sweden is, in fact, heading for a systemic breakdown:

"Most people seem to think we cannot maintain a system where perhaps 190,000 people will arrive every year. In the long run, our system will collapse. This welcome is not going to receive popular support. We want to give people who come here a worthy reception."

Symptomatic of Swedish journalists, this statement was tucked away at the end of the article. The headline was about how the political party that is critical of immigration, the Sweden Democrats Party (Sverigedemokraterna), is responsible for the asylum-housing fires. But foreign media, such as The Daily Mail and Russia Today, picked up Wallström's warning about a systemic collapse and ran it as the urgent news it actually is.

Nevertheless, in official Sweden, the imminent collapse is ignored. Instead, journalists exclusively focus on attacks by supposedly "racist" Swedes on refugee centers. To prevent new fires, the Immigration Service decided on October 28 that from now on, all asylum facilities would have secret addresses. And meager police resources will now be stretched even further -- to protect asylum seekers. Police helicopters will even patrol refugee centers. But considering there are only five helicopters available, and that Sweden's landmass is 407,340 square km (157,274 square miles), this gesture is effectively empty.

At a meeting with the Nordic Council in Reykjavik, Iceland, on October 27, Sweden's Prime Minister, Stefan Löfven, was questioned by his Nordic colleagues about the situation in Sweden. Löfven had recently said that, "We should have the option of relocating people applying for asylum in Sweden to other EU-countries. Our ability, too, has a limit. We are facing a paradigm shift." That comment led a representative of Finland's Finns Party (Sannfinländarna) to wonder, with a hint of irony, how mass immigration to Sweden, which for years Swedish politicians have touted as being so profitable, has now suddenly become a burden.

Another Finns Party representative, Simon Elo, pointed out that the situation in Sweden is out of control. "Sweden has great abilities, but not even the Swedes have abilities that great," Elo said.

When Löfven was asked how he is dealing with the real concerns and demands of the citizenry, his answer was laconic: "Of course I understand there is concern," Löfven said. "It is not easy. But at the same time -- there are 60 million people on the run. This is also about them being our fellow men, and I hope that viewpoint will prevail."

The daily tabloid Expressen asked Löfven about the attacks on asylum facilities. He replied, "Our communities should not be characterized by threats and violence, they should be warm and show solidarity."

As if such behavior can be forced.

Many Swedes see mass immigration as a forced marriage: Sweden is forced to marry a man she did not choose, yet she is expected to love and honor him even though he beats her and treats her badly. And on top of that, her parents (the government) tell her to be warm and show solidarity with him.

More and more Swedish commentators are now drawing the same conclusion: that Sweden is teetering on the brink of collapse. Editorial columnist Ivar Arpi of the daily Svenska Dagbladet, wrote an astonishing article on October 26, about a woman named Alexandra von Schwerin and her husband. The couple lives on the Skarhults Estate farm in Skåne in southern Sweden; they have been robbed three times. Most recently, they were robbed of a quad bike, a van and a car. When the police arrived, von Schwerin asked them what she should do. The police told her that they could not help her. "All our resources are on loan to the asylum reception center in Trelleborg and Malmö," they said. "We are overloaded right now. So I suggest you get in touch with the vigilante group in Eslöv."

What the police had called a "vigilante group" turned out to be a group of private business owners. In 2013, after being robbed more or less every night, they had decided to come together and start patrolling the area themselves. Currently, they pay a security firm to watch their facilities.

"On principal, I am totally against it," von Schwerin said. "What are the people who cannot afford private security to do? They will be unprotected. I'm sure I will join, but very, very reluctantly. For the first time, I feel scared to live here now. Are the State and I now in agreement that our mutual contract is being renegotiated?"

Commenting on the police's encouraging people to join vigilante groups, social commentator and former Refugee Ombudsman Merit Wager wrote:

"So, the Swedes are supposed to arrange and pay for their own and their families' security and keep their farms from being subjected to theft, even though that has up to now been included in the social contract -- for which we pay high taxes, to have police we can count on to protect us and apprehend criminals?! When did the social contract expire? October 2015? Without any notice of termination, since the tax-consuming party is not fulfilling its part of the deal? This should mean that our part of the deal - to pay taxes for public, joint services -- has also become invalid? If the social contract is broken, it is broken. Then it is musical chairs (lawlessness, defenselessness, without protection), and that means that each and every one of us should pay less taxes."

Ilan Sadé, lawyer and social commentator, wrote about the refugee chaos at Malmö Central Train Station on the blog Det Goda Samhället on October 27: "The authorities no longer honor the social contract." He described four large signs on display around the station that read "Refugee? Welcome to Malmö!" in four different languages.

"It is unclear who the sender of the message is, or, for that matter, who is in charge of the reception facility -- a number of barracks by the old post office in the inner harbor. Everything is utterly confusing. It could be Malmö City or the Immigration Service, but it might as well be 'Refugees Welcome,' or possibly a religious community. I think to myself that a government agency could not reasonably write like this, a correct and pertinent sign would say something like: 'Asylum seekers are referred to the barracks for information and further transport.' But I am probably wrong; Malmö City is the chief suspect communicant. ... The signs in and around the Central Station are symptoms of something incredibly serious: Role confusion and the decay of the constitutional state. And thus, that our authorities no longer honor the social contract."

In a post called Anarchy, blogger Johan Westerholm, who is a Social Democratic Party member and a critic of the government, wrote that the Minister for Justice and Migration, Morgan Johansson, is now urging authorities to "be pragmatic" about laws and regulations (concerning asylum housing for so-called unaccompanied refugee children). Westerholm stated that this is tantamount to the government "opening the gates to anarchy":

"Our country is founded on law; Parliament legislates and the courts apply these. Morgan Johansson's statement and his otherwise passive approach are testimony to how this, our kind of democracy, may fade into a memory very shortly. He now laid the first brick in the building of a state that rests on other principles. Anarchism."

If anarchy really does break out, it would be good to remember that there are nearly two million licensed firearms in Sweden. Sweden's shooting clubs have seen a surge in interest; many are welcoming a lot of new members lately.

Ingrid Carlqvist is a journalist and author based in Sweden, and a Distinguished Senior Fellow of Gatestone Institute. Follow Ingrid Carlqvist on Twitter.

Follow Ingrid Carlqvist on Twitter

 

[a_majoor]

Sweden finally ends its generous policy of accommodation, setting the conditions for everyone else in Europe to harden their borders lest the migrants shift direction. This year will see a great deal of turbulence and violence in Europe as the European nations struggle to deal with the importation of an alien culture in their midst. Expect even more gains by nativist political parties as well.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/2016/01/01/overwhelmed-by-migrants-sweden-throws-in-the-towel-as-europe-faces-general-permanent-terror-threat/

Overwhelmed by 'Migrants,' Sweden Throws in the Towel as Europe Faces 'General, Permanent Terror Threat'
BY MICHAEL WALSH JANUARY 1, 2016

German special police stand in front of the Munich, southern Germany, main train station Thursday evening, Dec. 31, 2015 after police warned of 'imminent threat' of terror attack and ordered two train stations to be cleared. (Sven Hoppe/dpa via AP)
It's a Happy New Year in Europe, where the blowback from last summer's "refugee" crisis is already hitting the old continent hard. People have been killed and liberal ideals shattered, all because naifs like Angela Merkel preferred her fantasy version of Islam to the real, murderous, expansionist thing.

When the small, crumpled body of 3-year-old Alan Kurdi washed up on the Aegean coast Sept. 2, Europe’s humanitarian superpower sprang into action. Sweden’s prime minister headlined gala fundraisers, Swedish celebrities starred in telethons, and a country that prides itself on doing the right thing seemed to rally as one to embrace refugees fleeing for their lives.

But after taking in more asylum seekers per capita than any other nation in Europe, Sweden’s welcome mat now lies in tatters. Overwhelmed by the human tide of 2015, the center-left government is deploying extraordinary new border controls and slashing benefits in an unmistakable signal to refugees contemplating the long trek to Sweden in the new year: Stay out.

“We’re willing to do more than anyone else,” said Swedish Migration Minister Morgan Johansson. “But even we have our limits.”

Sweden has been hell-bent on replacing its native population of real Swedes with "Swedes" -- foreigners with Swedish passports from Africa, the Middle East and the Balkans, most often Muslims, in an effort to prove... what, exactly? Now, it seems, those limits have been reached.

The country’s dramatic shift threatens to wreak havoc all the way down Europe’s migrant trail in 2016 by setting off a domino effect in which countries seal their borders for fear that their neighbors will do the same.

Barriers have already risen across the continent, primarily in the transit nations for migrants traveling by land into wealthy Western Europe. Hungary lined its borders with razor wire, forcing this autumn’s unparalleled streams of humanity farther west into Croatia and Slovenia. In November, Macedonia introduced strict controls meant to filter out new arrivals from countries other than Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. The policy has left thousands of people stranded in Greece.

But Sweden’s abrupt reversal is potentially far more consequential. Across Europe this year, two countries have stood out for their uncommonly generous reception policies: Sweden and Germany.

Now, Sweden is actively trying to keep people out, while German Chancellor Angela Merkel is under pressure from critics within her own center-right coalition to do the same after the country welcomed a record 1 million asylum seekers this year. During her Christian Democratic Party conference in December, she bowed to those critics, at least in part, saying that Germany needed to “palpably reduce” its refugee numbers.

Alas, too late!

German police are hunting seven suspected suicide bombers who planned to blow themselves up in Munich train stations during the New Year's Eve celebrations, it has been reported. French and US intelligence agencies are said to have given Germany the names of the seven suspects, thought to be from Iraq and Syria, and Munich police believe they may be linked to ISIS.

Police evacuated two Munich stations at around midnight after they were tipped off about a 'serious, imminent threat'. They both reopened early this morning. German police lifted the alert this morning, saying there was no longer a risk of an immediate attack, but armed police remained at Munich stations.

The BBC has more details, and an ominous warning:

"The situation has eased a bit again," said Bavarian Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann. Munich's main station and Pasing station reopened in the morning. He said the temporary closure had been necessary because the intelligence service had got a "specific" warning. That warning spoke of a threat from Islamic State (IS) suicide bombers.

Police say they are looking for "five to seven" suspects, believed to be Iraqis and Syrians.

But the state of alert now is "as it was before last night", Mr Herrmann told the Bavarian state broadcaster BR. He added that Europe was facing "a general, permanent terror threat."

It's easy to get murdered when you're already trying to commit suicide.

 

[a_majoor]

Massive crowds of "immigrants" flooding the downtown core and committing hundreds of sexual assaults, robberies and thefts isn't going to make the average person any happier about immigration, but what is really astounding is the attitude of the authorities in trying to cover up what is shaping up to be a serious crime problem. This ins't limited to Germany, and it will be illuminating (and horrifying) once the full scale and scope of this finally comes out. Don't forget that British authorities kept quiet to prevent being caused of racism and over a thousand girls were raped in Rotherham over a period of years, and the San Bernadino shootings might have been prevented if the neighbours who saw suspicious activity had called the police rather than worry that they might be accused of "profiling" or "Islamophobia", resulting in 14 dead.

The German people may very well turn more to the nativist and ultra nationalist political movements (wrongly called "right wing" in the article) in order to "do something" about a problem they perceive and the political system clearly wants to bury. Trying to be evasive and shutting down social media discussion will only add fuel to the fire, with potentially dire results.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/germany/12090750/German-law-should-be-toughened-to-ease-deportation-of-migrants-says-Angela-Merkel.html

Germany will deport migrants who break law, warns Angela Merkel as thousands join anti-Islam protest
By Justin Huggler, in Cologne, video source APTN5:39PM GMT 09 Jan 2016

Angela Merkel for the first time signalled a change in her “open-door” refugee policy on Saturday, as police admitted that a "majority" of those suspected of sex attacks in Cologne were asylum-seekers or illegal immigrants.

New figures released disclosed the scale of the violence in the city on New Year's Eve, which showed 30 more sexual assaults than were previously reported.

Cologne Police said that 379 offences were committed on that night, of which 150 were sexual assaults.
"Those in focus of criminal police investigations are mostly people from North African countries," police said in a statement. "The majority of them are asylum-seekers and people who are in Germany illegally."

After a meeting with her party on Saturday, Mrs Merkel promised that her government would amend the law to make it easier to deport asylum-seekers who commit crimes.

“We have to consider when someone forfeits their right to our hospitality,” said Mrs Merkel. “When crimes are committed, and people place themselves outside the law, there must be consequences.”

Under current rules, asylum-seekers can only be expelled if they are sentenced to three years or more in prison.
Privately, Mrs Merkel is said to be deeply disturbed by reports that refugees were among those who sexually assaulted some 150 women in the heart of Cologne, while outnumbered police looked on helplessly.

“I sometimes hear it said I’m happy that so many refugees are coming,” she is reported to have said at a meeting with political allies in Bavaria this week. “I don’t see this as a success of mine.”

The remarks were in stark contrast to her earlier optimism about the influx to Germany, which has taken in far more migrants than any other European country. Her welcoming stance and 'we can do it' slogan irritated many Germans, uneasy about the arrival of some 1.1 million migrants last year.

Both critics and supporters of the chancellor are warning the Cologne attacks show the scale of the challenge Germany faces in integrating the asylum-seekers.

Hundreds of supporters of the anti-immigration Pegida movement marched through the centre of Cologne yesterday. Lutz Bachmann, the group’s leader, is campaigning on the slogan "Rape Refugees not Welcome".

Some of the demonstrators hurled bottles and firecrackers at the police, they accuse of failing to prevent assaults during New Year's festivities in the western city. Officers used water cannons to try to disperse those gathered.

Questions are being asked about why it took more than a week for the authorities to acknowledge that asylum-seekers are among the suspects in the attacks, amid claims of a cover-up.

Bild newspaper has published allegations that police forces around the country are under orders not to report crimes involving refugees to the press.

Wolfgang Albers, the Cologne police chief, was removed from his post this week after he repeatedly insisted there was no evidence asylum-seekers were involved.

But Bild quoted a senior police officer in Frankfurt as saying it was standard policy to keep offences by asylum-seekers from the media.
Das Bild's homepage on Friday night

“There are strict orders from the chiefs not to report offences by refugees,” the unnamed officer said. “We are only allowed to answer if journalists ask specifically about such incidents.”

The Frankfurt authorities said police spokesmen had been told to be careful when speaking about asylum-seekers.
“Press spokesmen were warned the far-Right could exploit cases involving refugees to stoke sentiment against those seeking protection,” Michael Shaykh, a spokesman for the Hesse state interior ministry, said.

The newspaper claimed it had evidence of a similar policy in North Rhine-Westphalia, where Cologne lies, and elsewhere in the country.
Guten Morgen! Auf unserer Titelseite heute: Das geheime Polizei-Protokoll zu #koelnhbf! https://t.co/nROuCSixNV pic.twitter.com/FCsGbVZjq5
— BILD (@BILD) January 7, 2016

Many in Germany are asking how such a serious outbreak of sexual assualts in a major European city went unreported by the national press for five days.

Part of the answer appears to lie in a press release issued by the Cologne police on New Year’s Day.

“Relaxed atmosphere: celebrations largely peaceful,” it read. It is now clear that the events of the previous evening were anything but “relaxed” or “peaceful”.

Police appear to have been aware that trouble was brewing as early as 9pm. Spiegel magazine on Saturday published an interview with a senior officer in the Cologne police who said he was told at a briefing about a crowd of some 400 to 500 “drunk and aggressive” men in the square between the main station and the cathedral.

Only 80 police were on duty in the area, despite more being available, the officer told the magazine. At around 10.50pm he arrived at the scene to find the crowd had grown to 1,000 to 1,500, and many were throwing fireworks at people.

The officer was shocked that the crowds took no notice of police. “We were nothing to them, completely irrelevant,” he said.
He heard over the radio that a plainclothes policewoman operating undercover to catch pickpockets had herself been sexually assaulted. Heavily outnumbered uniformed officers had unable to protect her.

Revellers heading into the city centre to see in the New Year found themslves in the middle of this crowd. “Women were forced to run the gauntlet, like you can’t described,” according an internal police report leaked to newspaper this week. Victims have described being groped, beaten and having their underwear torn from their bodies.

It now appears clear police were aware many of those in the crowd were asylum-seekers. “I am Syrian. You have to treat me kindly. Mrs Merkel invited me,” one of them told officers according to the leaked report. Another tore up his residence permit before officers’ eyes of police, and told them: “You can’t do anything to me, I can get a new one tomorrow”.

Police checked the identity of 71 suspects that night, and the majority were carrying registration documents as asylum-seekers who had recently arrived in Germany, according to a second leaked police report.

At around 11.15pm police decided to clear the area. They encountered heavy resistance and it took 40 minutes. But it appears the worst sexual assaults took place after the clearance, as the crowd moved into the back streets.

At one point during the night, police in the nearby city of Duisburg offered to send reinforcements to help the overwhelmed Cologne force. For reasons that remain unclear, the offer was refused.

More than 170 women have now come forward to file criminal complaints about that night,120 of them for sexual assault.
But in the days that followed, most of Germany had no idea what had happened in the heart of one of its biggest cities, as the events went almost completely unreported.

In fact the truth began to emerge on social media within hours. One of the first accounts was posted on the Facebook page of Nett-Werk Köln, a group of around 140,000 members who more usually share tips on party venues and advertise missing cats.
More information emerged on Twitter, and the local Cologne newspapers began to report the story, but still the national media stayed away. Hans-Peter Freidrich, a former interior minister, has accused the media of imposing a “news blackout” and operating a “code of silence” over negative news about immigrants.

Editors have replied that they were following the official account of the Cologne police that the night had been “peaceful”. But it has also emerged that even after the story hit the national media, guests on public service television were asked not to mention asylum-seekers in interviews about the Cologne assaults.

A week after the incidents, government ministers and the Cologne authorities were still insisting there was no evidence refugees were involved. On Friday, suspicions against then were confirmed for the first time, when the federal police said asylum-seekers are among 31 people it is seeking in connection with events inside the station that night. They are wanted for physical violence and theft, but not for sexual assault.

Now, however, the taboo has been broken, and Mrs Merkel’s critics have seized on the suspected involvement of asylum-seekers as evidence of the failure of her “open-door” refugee policy.

“The pressure generated by the images and stories from Cologne makes business as usual impossible,” Spiegel said. “Even if it were now proved there was not a single refugee from the million of last year among the perpetrators, that wouldn’t change a thing.”
More immediately alarming for Mrs Merkel is the criticism from her politcal allies.

“We have to openly and honestly acknowledge that parallel societies have obviously formed and integration doesn’t work everywhere,” Markus Söder,the Bavarian finance minister, said.

Calls are mounting within Mrs Merkel’s own Christian Democrat (CDU) party for a change of course.
“Cologne has changed everything,” Volker Bouffier, the state prime minister of Hesse and a senior figure in the party, said.

“The mood of the party base is at rock bottom,” Carsten Linnemann, a senior MP is reported to have told colleagues at a party meeting. “Cologne shows that if the influx remains so high, integration will not work.”

“Law and order is regularly the number one competence of the CDU in voter surveys.If Merkel cannot deliver a functioning state she will lose votes,” Karl-Rudolf Korte, professor of political science at Duisburg-Cologne university, said.

“Mrs Merkel has recognised the danger,” Philipp Wittrock wrote in Spiegel, “What happened at the New Year has the potentialto change the already tense atmosphere in the country for good, to sow mistrust where there was good will — and to do massive political damage to the chancellor herself.”

“We must check again and again whether we have done everything necessary in regard to deportation from Germany,” Mrs Merkel has said.

But lawyers warn that even if the government makes it easier to deport asylum-seekers, it would still be blocked from returning them to countries such as Syria where their lives would be at risk. Even safer countries of origin could refuse to take their citizens back.
Meanwhile reports of new incidents continue to emerge. Four Syrians have been arrested in the southern town of Weil am Rhein for the gang rape of two teenage girls on New Year’s Eve. News of the arrests was not made public until journalists who had received a tip-off pressed police. It has since emerged one of those arrested is a 21-year-old refugee who has been granted asylum in Germany. The other three are teenagers.

In the city of Bielefeld a crowd of 500 men forced their way into a night club and assaulted women on New Year’s Eve, according to Westfalen-Blatt newspaper. It was not clear whether they included asylum-seekers.
In the city of Hamburg, 108 women have now come forward to report assaults and robberies on New Year’s Eve.
And asylum-seekers are still flooding into Europe. The German interior ministry believes another 1m will attempt to cross Turkey to Europe this year, according to Spiegel.

 

[The Bread Guy]

The German people may very well turn more to the nativist and ultra nationalist political movements (wrongly called "right wing" in the article) in order to "do something" about a problem they perceive and the political system clearly wants to bury. Trying to be evasive and shutting down social media discussion will only add fuel to the fire, with potentially dire results.

Putin's* plan continues apace ...

My plan:
1 Fund Assad's slaughter to make refugees
2 Fund anti refugee parties in EU
3 Get Pro-Putin fascists popular
4 Get them elected

* - At least the plan as laid out by someone running a satirical Putin Twitter feed, anyway  ;D

 

[a_majoor]

Sweden seems to have been making even greater attempts to sweep their problems under the rug. I am wiling to entertain this might be an "active measure" by Putin, but would suspect that the mores likely cause is high ranking people attempting to cover up the incompetent results of their overly idealistic thinking. While leftist economic disasters have generally been successfully hand waved away by blaming the Americans or capitalism, sexual assault and other crimes are right "in your face" and much harder to explain away. If Putin is capable of using active measures to inflame the situation more to his advantage, then he is a brilliant opportunist.

Even without the possible entry of outside parties, politicians and bureaucrats who attempt to ignore the pressing concerns of the citizenry invite a response which is not going to be to their (or possibly our) liking. Marnie Le Pen, Donald Trump and the Ford Brothers represent one aspect of the response that we should expect to see:

http://nyheteridag.se/exposing-major-pc-cover-up-in-sweden-leading-daily-dagens-nyheter-refused-to-write-about-cologne-like-sex-crimes-in-central-stockholm/

Exposing Major PC Cover-up in Sweden – Leading Daily Dagens Nyheter Refused to Write About Cologne-like Sex Crimes in Central Stockholm

STOCKHOLM The Cologne sex assault on New Year’s Eve, where groups of Arab and North African men groped more than a hundred German women, has shocked Europe this last week. But a very similar incident, with a large number of perpetrators and victims, took place in the Swedish capital last summer. That incident however was silenced by large Swedish newspapers and media companies, despite repeated attempts from police officers to contact journalists. This is how leading Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter tried to cover up a politically inconvenient sex assault story.

Nyheter Idag is now able to disclose in detail how major Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter deliberately covered up stories about widespread sexual abuse in central Stockholm in connection with a concert in the Kungsträdgården public square this August. “The mere suspicion that the abuse has been considered as difficult to describe involves a betrayal of the victims”,the newspaper writes about the event, almost six months later.

On Saturday August 15th, the nationally acclaimed and outspoken feminist artist Zara Larsson headlined the youth festival ‘We Are Sthlm” with a crowded concert in Kungsträdgården in central Stockholm. Thousands of young people were in attendance to take part in the event during the last summer nights of the year.

But for an unknown number of young girls the festival soon became a nightmare. Hordes of young men pressed against young girls, fondled and tried to cop a feel over and under skirts, pants and shirts. There were severe sexual assaults happening right in front of the stage, where artists such as Larsson and rapper OIAM performed.

During a single night police and security guards had to intervene against around 90 younger males, but even adult men took part in the abuse, says an eye witness to Nyheter Idag. The eye witness has professional experience from working at the Stockholm Police Department as a psychologist.

The police officer tried to contact Dagens Nyheter several times: “They never called again”

The psychologist who knew of what had happened in Kungsträdgården contacted journalist Hanne Kjöller at Dagens Nyheter, by, among other things, e-mail on August 17. The psychologist says he specifically turned to Kjöller because he knew that she had previously written about controversial topics.

“She was very interested and listened until I told her that all the boys and men that were apprehended were young asylants (unaccompanied is the terminology used by Swedish authorities) from Afghanistan and Syria. I sensed that she changed the tone (of her voice). But she also said that she would contact the police”, he tells Nyheter Idag.

Kjöller got the phone number to one of the police officers who were on duty during the event in Kungsträdgården and could provide a recollection of the events. Nyheter Idag has talked with the police officer who Kjöller talked to in August, and he was eager to tell Dagens Nyheter about the massive cases of sexual assault against young girls in central Stockholm.

“She sent a text message to me once, early on, where she wrote that she was looking for me, she wanted to talk. After that, I tried to get in touch with her, but that was when things started to get awry. She answered sometimes, said she would get back to me. But it never amounted to anything. She was interested in it for half day or a day, then she wasn’t anymore”.

The officer explains that he worked for several evenings during this week in Kungsträdgården square. He tells of how he and his colleagues had to apprehend a large number of young men who sexually assaulted girls, in large part unaccompanied refugees from Afghanistan.
The police officer, who has worked as a police officer for over 20 years, emphatically states several times that the events in Kungsträdgården were systematic and extensive in number. This was what he wanted to tell Hanne Kjöller of Dagens Nyheter.

“We got in touch and talked briefly, and she said she would call back, which she did not. So I looked for her, she did not call back. I tried to reach her at another time, but I never heard back from her again. I called several times, cannot say exactly how many. It was over a three or four day period”.

“The editor at DN dismissed the story as SD falsity”

Time passes and a new year begins – it’s now 2016 and the brutal and massive sexual assaults against young girls that August evening in Kungsträdgården is completely unknown to the public.
But then something happens, a rumor that goes viral on blogs in Germany spreads to the so-called “alternative media” in Sweden. After a day, traditional media in both Germany and other European countries start to report on the same issue.

It is, of course, the Sex Attacks in Cologne on New Year’s Eve.

It came to grow into a major scandal after police initially did not report on the large number of sexual abuses and rapes that occurred on the New Year’s Eve. A police chief was fired and it has been speculated why there was so much silence initially, despite all the sexual assaults. But the scandal was a fact and just over a week into the year, there is no way avoiding the subject – are authorities and the media deliberately trying to cover up sexual abuse carried out by men with migrant backgrounds?

Now something happens at newspaper Dagens Nyheter.

The journalist Hanne Kjöller tries to establish contact with the psychologist on January 7th about the events in Kungsträdgården nearly five months earlier. She writes an e-mail to the psychologist. “Would like to get in touch with you again after what happened in Cologne during the New Year holidays,” she writes. In the e-mail conversation it is apparent that she learned of the sexual assaults in Kungsträdgården already on August 17th, but is only now ready to give attention to what happened.

She also calls the psychologist and records a message on his voicemail.

“We had contact in August. Now, after what happened in Cologne, I would like to talk to you again. It got stuck on certain things when we were doing this in August”, says Kjöller in the voicemail.

Then they get in contact with each other again. The incident in Kungsträdgården was suddenly a very pressing matter for Hanne Kjöller to report on, says the psychologist to Nyheter Idag.

“Hanne Kjöller contacted me again yesterday because of the events in Germany, she said it gave her a bad feeling. She was fidgeting when I asked her why she never contacted the police and never wrote an article”, says the psychologist.

He says that Kjöller claims she never got hold of the police, and that is why no article was ever published in Dagens Nyheter about the incident in Kungsträdgården. But the psychologist also says that he’s been given a different explanation. That Kjöller over the phone told him that “the editor for the Stockholm section of Dagens Nyheter had taken charge of the case herself, and (the editor) considered the story to be “SD fabrications” (SD, or Sweden Democrats, are a populist anti-migration party that for a long time has been at odds with Swedish mainstream media).

“She (Kjöller) said that her editor had used the term ‘SD fabrications’ or ‘SD falsifications’, something like that. I remember that detail specifically”, says the psychologist.

The psychologist takes out his mobile phone, his fingers dances over the touch screen. He is upset because of the way he thinks Dagens Nyheter has handled the issue. In a text message, sent from Hanne Kjöller, she is basically apologizing for the critically important story not having been published.

“But a warm thanks for your tip. I am sorry that we didn’t use it in a better way. Hanne”, the text message reads.

Dagens Nyheter: “A betrayal of the victims”

January, Saturday 9th 2016 Dagens Nyheter runs an article with the headline “Women’s right to party safely cannot be sacrificed”. The article is written by freelance writer Lasse Wierup, Hanne Kjöller’s colleague at Dagens Nyheter. In the article the incident in Kungsträdgården is now mentioned for the very first time.

“One of the police officers who took part in the command, and had to give a lot of time in support of the victimized girls, says that the whole incident was considered very sensitive. The young lads that were sent away were judged to be mostly unaccompanied (asylum seekers or refugees)”, writes Wierup.

Then Wierup continues, pondering why the events haven’t been covered in the media previously. He claims it’s “unclear” (why that is), despite that his colleague Hanne Kjöller, according to the psychologist, explained that the editor at Dagens Nyheters Stockholm section earlier dismissed the whole story as “SD fabrications”.

“Why the widespread sexual harassments, in the midst of central Stockholm, with some minor exception, were left in a media shadow, is unknown to me. But the very suspicion that the sexual assaults were considered awkward to (write about) is a betrayal of the victims”, writes Wierup in the very same newspaper that covered up the whole incident to begin with.

After Wierups article is published, some readers are catching on. Andreas Ericson, editor at the now-canceled magazine Neo, is pondering on Twitter if Dagens Nyheter is withholding some information.

“The information about we are sthlm raises a couple of questions. Were crimes reported? Was there any criminal investigation?”

“The details are sketchy and the source is anonymous. But Wierup has a good eye. The (incidents) were going on “night after night”. Were the news desks told about it?”


Hanne Kjöller: “I feel betrayed”

When Nyheter Idag calls Hanne Kjöller to ask why there wasn’t any article published about the massive cases of systematic sexual assaults in Kungsträdgården she first gets quiet. She then explains that this is an issue that she doesn’t care to discuss.

“I can’t talk to you about what my sources have said to me. I can’t confirm or deny anything”.

Nyheter Idag explains to Kjöller that we are privy to e-mail conversations and text messages between her and the psychologist. Nyheter Idag also explains that the psychologist have told how he feels that she and Dagens Nyheter have obfuscated, covered up, the events that took place in Kungsträdgården. And so Nyheter Idag asks Kjöller to yet again explain how it happened that a story about such serious abuse was never published.

“I’m not going to answer that. No, no, no. I don’t want to talk to you”, Kjöller says and hangs up.

Shortly after the phone conversation with Nyheter Idag Kjöller calls the psychologist. He doesn’t answer but she leaves a voice mail. On the recording Kjöller explains how she feels betrayed because the psychologist talked to Nyheter Idag about how he feels Dagens Nyheter obfuscated the incident in Kungsträdgården.

“Hello, this is Hanne Kjöller. I just had a phone call by a journalist and I feel I would need to talk to you. There may be a couple of misunderstandings, and in addition to that I feel pretty betrayed that you’ve exposed this conversation that you and me had. But please call me as soon as you hear this”, said Kjöller on the voice mail.

A short while after the voice mail the psychologist returns Kjöllers phone call. He’s now upset and makes a point that he doesn’t consider Kjöller the one being betrayed. It is instead all those girls that were sexually assaulted – something Dagens Nyheter chose not to report on despite knowing the story.

When Lasse Wierup then writes in Dagens Nyheter that he doesn’t know why the incident in Kungsträdgården were left in “media shadow”, it only fuels the disappointment the psychologist feels.

“The news tip didn’t get the editor for the Stockholm desk excited”

When the psychologist in the phone conversation with Kjöller mentions that she previously stated that the editor had dismissed the story as “SD fabrications”, Kjöller says that it wasn’t what she said. Instead she clarifies. What she doesn’t know is that the whole conversation is recorded.

“I said that the editor for the Stockholm desk didn’t get excited about this lead. And I left two leads the same day. One she went with, which I can’t even remember what it was”, explains Kjöller on the phone.

Psychologist: “She didn’t go with the lead about how girls were systematically exposed to this and how 90 young lads were apprehended and that it went on every night during this festival? That didn’t have any news value? Do you want me to believe that? Listen to yourself, listen to what you are saying!”

“You don’t even listen to what I am saying. She probably did a judgment call on the credibility in this…”, Kjöller replies.

Psychologist: “But it’s so easy to check! You just got to call the police and get their incident reports. With a phone call you could’ve verified whether I was telling the truth or not!”

“It’s really weird that you feel this… That you don’t want to go public with your name”, says Kjöller.

The conversation continues and Kjöller makes it into about how the psychologist isn’t prepared to speak openly, with his name, about what has happened.

The psychologist explains to Nyheter Idag that he wants to be anonymous due to circumstances related to his job. Nyheter Idag have been given access to emails, text messages and voice mails from Hanne Kjöller.

The psychologist also says he’s contacted two other media outlets through e-mail to tell his account of the incident in Kungsträdgården. He didn’t get any response, thus he gave up on noticing media about what took place last summer.

TwitterFacebook3K+G

 

[a_majoor]

More on how European and American societies are handling the Immigration issue differently. There really is a much different set of cultural assumptions, and American may still be best able to deal with growing numbers of migrants (especially now that more are coming from the middle east). This article also discusses the various issues associated with large numbers of migrants arriving at your shores, with potential lessons for Canada as well:

(Part  one)

http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/01/13/ten-theses-on-immigration/?module=BlogPost-ReadMore&version=Blog%20Main&action=Click&contentCollection=Opinion&pgtype=Blogs&region=Body&_r=0

Ten Theses on Immigration
JANUARY 13, 2016 1:55 PM January 13, 2016 1:55 pm

My Sunday column argued, fairly strenuously, that mass immigration on the scale of the last two years will put more stress on the politics and culture of Germany than any prudent statesman should accept, and that the German government should do everything in its power to not only limit migration but actually restrict asylum rights and begin deportation for some of the migrants who have already arrived.

This is unlikely to happen; even less likely is the resignation of Angela Merkel, which I concluded the column by suggesting would be appropriate at this point. But whatever comes in Germany it seems very likely that immigration, and with it what the former National Review editor John O’Sullivan calls “the national question,” will dominate European and American debates for at least as long as the refugee emergency continues in the Middle East and North Africa. And since the immigration debate has long been dominated at the elite level by voices that blend an economistic view of immigration as always and everywhere a net plus with a cosmopolitan-utilitarian view of open borders (or something close) as a humanitarian obligation, it seems worth laying out some premises that I think ought to underly the conservative alternative to that consensus.

First, though, two links, one on the European debate and one on the American, which I think provide a useful survey of the issues that ought to matter to the right (and not only to the right). First, this Ben Schwarz essay in the latest issue of The American Conservative, arguing that mass immigration is unraveling English customs and norms and identity with unforeseeable results. Second, this Reihan Salam essay in National Review on U.S. immigration policy, making a case for “a new melting-pot nationalism … to counter the ethnic and class antagonisms that threaten our society today.”

Now to my own premises:

1. The nation-state is real, and (thus far) irreplaceable. Yes, the world of nations is full of arbitrary borders, invented traditions, and convenient mythologies layered atop histories of plunder and pillage. And yes, not every government or polity constitutes a nation (see Iraq, or Belgium, or half of Africa). But as guarantors of public order and personal liberty, as sources of meaning and memory and solidarity, as engines of common purpose in the service of the common good, successful nation-states offer something that few of the transnational institutions or organizations bestriding our globalized world have been able to supply. (The arguable exception of Roman Catholicism is, I fear, only arguable these days.) So amid trends that tend to weaken, balkanize or dissolve nation-states, it should not be assumed that a glorious alternative awaits us if we hurry that dissolution to its end.

Nor should it be assumed that immigration can save nation-states from their own internal difficulties, because …

2. Immigration is a perilous solution to demographic decline. One of the common right-of-center cases for mass immigration, offered by politicians like Jeb Bush and optimistic economists alike, is that in an age of falling birthrates the West needs migrants to sustain its economies and support its welfare states. (“New Germans who are today being fingerprinted as their asylum claims are processed will tomorrow care for the elderly and pay the taxes that fund a generous welfare state,” The Economist promised last fall.)

This is true up to a point, but its logic assumes that immigrant assimilation goes reasonably well — that immigrants find it relatively easy to learn the language, to adapt (at least up to a point) to Western social norms, to find and hold jobs in a post-industrial economy, and that they don’t simply become another set of  clients of the welfare state they were supposed to save. And under conditions of demographic decline the pressure to adapt will necessarily be weaker, because there are simply fewer natives around to define the culture into the new arrivals are expected to assimilate. (In the German case, as my column suggested, a few more years of migration at this pace could forge a rising generation in which Middle Eastern and North African immigrants are actually a near-majority.) In which case the odds of fragmentation and balkanization go up, because …

3. Culture is very real, and cultural inheritances tend to be enduring. Present-day America attests to that fact: We pride ourselves (justifiably) on our success assimilating immigrants, but centuries after their arrival various immigrant folkways still define our country’s regions and their mores. The Scandinavian diaspora across the upper Midwest still looks a great deal like Scandinavia — hardworking, gender egalitarian, with high levels of civic trust, higher-than-average educations and incomes, etc. The cavaliers, servants, and slaves migration to Tidewater Virginia obviously still shapes the Deep South’s entrenched hierarchies of race and class. The Scots-Irish migration to Appalachia and its environs is still heavily responsible for America’s sky-high-by-Western-standards murder rate. And of course the wider world is full of similarly striking case studies.

What this implies is that accepting immigrants from a particular country or culture or region involves accepting that your own nation, or part of your own nation, will become at least a little more like their country of origin. With small or slow migrations this may only happen at the margins and it may be swamped by other effects; with large or swift migrations it may happen in more significant ways. But whether the immigrants are coming from Asia or Latin America or the Middle East or North Africa, you will be able to see in those regions at least some foretaste of their impact on your own society. And what you see matters, because …

4. Cultural commonalities help assimilation; cultural differences spur balkanization. That is, the more a foreign-born population has in common with the nation it’s entering — in terms of everything from language to religion to family structure to education levels to cultural habits — the more easily it can make itself truly at home in its adopted country.

And these commonalities are a complex, in which no single variable is necessarily a trump. For instance, race and racism are obviously potentially powerful obstacles to assimilation. But as Schwarz points out, the English experience suggests that racial differences need not preclude immigrant success in cases where other cultural variables favor integration:

Take a black immigrant from Jamaica in the 1950s. He—the first New Commonwealth immigrants were overwhelmingly men—was probably Anglican, likely cricket-playing, and quite possibly a wartime veteran of the British armed forces or merchant navy. Had he been schooled, he would have learned England’s history and been introduced to its literature. (Probably owing to these commonalities, today’s black Caribbean population has the highest rate of intermarriage with British whites of any minority group.) The cultural distance that separated him from a white British native was almost certainly smaller than is the chasm that today separates a white British resident of, say, Sheffield from her new neighbor, a Roma immigrant. Yet that immigrant, having almost certainly arrived from Bulgaria, Slovakia, or Romania, would be classified by UK immigration authorities as a European Union migrant—EU citizens enjoy the unfettered right to live and work in Britain—and would therefore be presumed “white” by researchers making extrapolations from immigration data.

Likewise, immigrants whose ethnicity (or race or religion) looks similar on a bureaucratic spreadsheet can have very different trajectories depending on where they’re actually coming from. A “South Asian immigrant” immigrant fleeing Idi Amin’s purge of Uganda’s Indian petit-bourgeoisie is not a “South Asian immigrant” from rural Kashmir. A “Muslim immigrant” from Istanbul is not a “Muslim immigrant” from eastern Syria is not a “Muslim immigrant” from Afghanistan.

This means, in turn, that the “multicultural” vision of society beloved of the contemporary left can take an almost infinite varieties of forms —and the crucial question for determining the shape and direction of that society is not necessarily how many cultures are represented and welcomed, but which ones, in what numbers, and at what pace. Which matters because …

 

[a_majoor]

(part 2)

5. Punctuated immigration encourages assimilation; constant immigration limits it. Salam’s essay makes this point well:

In Replenished Ethnicity, Stanford sociologist Tomás Jiménez argues that one of the main differences between the Mexican-origin population in the U.S. and the white-ethnic descendants of immigrants who arrived in the early 1900s is that because mass European immigration ended more than 80 years ago, Italian Americans do not generally find themselves in social worlds dominated by recent Italian immigrants. The result is that Italian-American identity is largely symbolic and optional, and Italian Americans are perceived as indistinguishable from other white Anglos. The end of immigrant replenishment led to sharp increases in inter-ethnic marriages for Italian Americans and other white ethnics. Mexican Americans, in contrast, are part of an ethnic community that until recently was constantly being replenished by new Mexican arrivals, which in turn has sharpened the distinctiveness of Mexican identity.

This dynamic applies to other ethnic groups as well. In 2007, Zhenchao Qian of Ohio State and Daniel T. Lichter of Cornell found that over the course of the 1990s, the percentage of Asians marrying whites, and Hispanics marrying whites, fell sharply, a development they attribute to rising immigration. As the size of an ethnic group increases, in-group contact and interaction increases. This in turn strengthens in-group ethnic solidarity while reducing intermarriage.

This effect is particularly strong, as Schwarz notes, when marriage itself becomes a transmission belt for migrants, as it has been for many people (especially women) passing from the Muslim world to England:

Two-thirds of British Muslims only mix socially with other Muslims; that portion is undoubtedly higher among Pakistanis and Bangladeshis specifically. Reinforcing this parallel life is the common practice of returning “home” for a few months every two or three years and an immersion in foreign electronic media. Integration into a wider national life is further hindered—and the retention of a deeply foreign culture is further encouraged—by the fact that most Pakistani marriages, even if one spouse is born in Britain, essentially produce first-generation-immigrant children: the one study that measured this phenomenon, conducted in the north England city of Bradford, found that 85 percent of third- and fourth-generation British Pakistani babies had a parent who was born in Pakistan. (Incidentally, that study also found that 63 percent of Pakistani mothers in Bradford had married their cousins, and 37 percent had married first cousins.)

This pattern applies to economic assimilation as well: The one place where even the most pro-immigration economists generally concede that new immigration drags down low-skilled wages is among the previous cohort of immigrants. Thus the faster immigrant populations replenish themselves, the more slowly they can hope to gain ground economically relative to natives.

When critics of open immigration raise this point, the rebuttal is often that well, the immigrants themselves tend to favor more immigration, so we should defer to their ethnic solidarity rather than trying to impose our view of their economic best interests. But deferring to their ethnic solidarity is a good way to ensure that assimilation happens very slowly, because …

6. Cosmopolitanism is unusual; tribalism comes naturally. The Western way of life – economically individualistic, voluntaristic in religion, defined by nuclear families rather than extended clans – was already unusual (WEIRD, in the jargon of sociologists) by human standards before the current era of mass migration. But it did not aspire to a pure cosmopolitanism: the “individualistic” Westerner in 1960 could still rely on various commonalities (religious, linguistic, social, sexual) handed down from the pre-liberal French or English or Teutonic past. (Schwarz notes the fascinating research showing that English schoolchildren had been playing the same games since the 12th century A.D.)

Now, though, there is a palpable sense in the liberal circles that in the ideal society everyone would be a true citizen of the world, a dilettante of culture and religion, equally comfortable around neighbors of any race or faith or background, with no unchosen preferences or loyalties.

One need not delve into, say, Robert Putnam’s research on diversity and the decline of social trust to see that this is not in fact how most people wish to live. (The recent statistic, somewhat shocking to the creative class, that even in our highly-mobile and deracinated America most people live within eighteen miles of their moms, should tell you something about the resilience of tribe even in a late-modern WEIRDo society like ours.) And if the only model of assimilation you offer new arrivals to your society is a cosmopolitan ideal that’s both unattainable and unattractive to many people, and if at the same time your immigration policies make it relatively easy for them to reject that ideal and build a permanent tribal enclave instead – well, you shouldn’t be surprised if that’s what they choose to do.

Nor should you be surprised that this, in turn, provokes greater tribalism among native dissenters from a pure cosmopolitanism – be they stark dissenters like Trump voters or Le Pen supporters, or milder dissenters like the sixty-three percent of German women who now feel that Germany’s has welcomed too many migrants in the last year. Which brings us to the next point:

8. Native backlash against perceived cultural transformation is very powerful, and any politics that refuses to take account of it will fail. Even if you suppose, that is, that mass immigration would be an unalloyed good in a world where Western populations could manage to overcome their (or what you think of as their) bigotry and nativism and racism, in the world that actually exists politicians have to account for those forces and not simply assume that the right Facebook rules and elite-level political conspiracies can perpetually keep a lid on populism. If you make choices that very predictably empower the National Front or Pegida or Trump, you cannot wash your hands of those consequences by saying, “oh, it’s not my fault that my fellow countrymen are such terrible bigots.” The way to disempower demagogues is not to maintain a high-minded moral purity that’s dismissive of public opinion’s actual shape; it’s to balance your purity with prudence, so as to avoid handing demagogues issues that might eventually deprive you of power entirely, and render all your moral ambitions moot.

In this vein, Tyler Cowen has suggested that because it courts backlash so brazenly, the open borders movement might not necessarily be good for open borders in the long run. But one could go further and say that extremely liberal immigration policies might not be good for liberal norms, period, in the long run. Which matters because …

9. Liberal societies are not guaranteed survival. Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” is an excellent descriptive frame for the contemporary developed world, but it is not an infallible prophecy. The liberal order has been remarkably resilient, the alternatives still look deeply unappealing – but one cannot assume that this pattern will continue indefinitely, or make political choices as though liberalism, pluralism and democracy are fixed features of the modern landscape, rather than still-contingent things.

Which does not mean that liberal societies should be governed in an apocalyptic mood, or that a perpetual “one percent doctrine” should guide leaders facing any policy dilemma. But it does mean that political stability is not something that statesmen can simply take for granted, or leave out of their equations when they think through the long-term consequences of their choices. And when you combine the factors discussed above – the resilience of cultural identity, the power of tribalism, the risks of backlash – then mass immigration on the scale we’ve seen recently in Europe, particularly combined with what may be a long era of relative economic stagnation, offers of the most plausible drivers for a near-future breakdown in liberal norms. So it’s an area where statesmen should proceed with greater caution than they would in normal policy debates, rather than recklessly pushing the fast-forward button on potentially destabilizing trends.

But how much caution depends on context, and here it’s important to stress that …

10. Europe and America are different. I’ve made this point before, but it deserves reiteration: All of the reasons for caution about mass immigration apply on both sides of the Atlantic, but they don’t apply in the same way. America has a longer history of successful assimilation, a melting-pot and mongrel culture that makes hyphenated identities easier to integrate, a geographical separation that (even now) makes it easier to manage immigration flows, and a tradition of religious pluralism that probably offers more room for, say, a conservative Islam to grapple with modernity than does the post-Christian laicité that’s official in France and unofficial elsewhere in Europe.

We also aren’t just a narrow sea away from an array of broken, chaotic, fundamentalism-ravaged societies, and we don’t face the kind of demographic mismatch with Latin America that Europe faces with Africa. Immigration enthusiasts on the right often overstate and oversentimentalize the “Catholic values” that Latin American migrants share with religious conservatives in the U.S., but there is no question, none, that much of Latin America has more in common culturally with the contemporary U.S. than the Iraqi hinterland has in common with contemporary England — or at least the parts of England that haven’t become, as Schwarz puts it, “metaphorical foreign encampments” within a late-modern society.

As someone who is (obviously) skeptical of the elite-level consensus on immigration’s benefits, I’m glad to see the G.O.P. and conservatism tilting away from George W. Bush/Rubio-Schumer “comprehensivism” on immigration policy. But I also think that the stampede to Trumpism is being unduly influenced by a conflation of the American and European situations. Europe faces a real, potentially deep and epoch-defining crisis — a refugee problem that could threaten the very foundations of the continent’s post-Cold War order. America faces a much more normal sort of policy quandary, to which the ideal political response could reach the destination that Salam proposes in his essay — sharper limits on low-skilled migration and a more Canadian or Australian approach to immigration as, effectively, recruitment  — without huge and wrenching shifts, mass deportations, religion-specific entry bans, and all the rest of the Trumpian bill of goods.

So while we should be guided, no less than Europe, by a greater prudence than our leadership has shown to date, we should also recognize that what is (for Germany especially) now a crisis Over There remains as yet an opportunity for us.

 

[a_majoor]

An article translated from Swedish. The police are now classifying crime statistics to mask the numbers of crimes committed by migrants:

https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=sv&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.vf.se%2Fnyheter%2Fallman%2Fbrott-som-beror-flyktingar-hemligstamplas&edit-text=
http://www.vf.se/nyheter/allman/brott-som-beror-flyktingar-hemligstamplas

Crimes involving refugees, confidentiality
Varmland
More crimes occurred in Sweden in the wake of refugee flows last year. But how many crimes involving refugees have police classified.

Related

Events at the refugee accommodation, confidentiality
- There is more crime, there are new crimes and perpetrators. There are simply many more people, says Thomas Mellberg, commanding manage Alma, that the special event called the police.

But how many have done is secret. In December, called VF to take part of all so-called event reports for the special criminal codes or related codes as they are called in the police, with the offenses that occur on the county's refugee accommodation as well as cases where the Lodging victims of crime. But, unable to take part in these events or even find out how many there are. It is classified by the Police Authority. The lawyers refer to case reports belonging to the special event, called Alma, who started last autumn and that is about the refugee situation in the country.

• Why can not the public by what happened on the Lodging?

- I can answer questions about Alma that I work with. How the decision looks and is made is not my thing, says Thomas Mellberg.

- But I do say that as soon as this special event is terminated, it is likely to do before February is over, we will most probably be considerably more open about it.

No one else in the police authority can or will not answer. Thomas Mellberg is the person who the press department will be set up on an interview.

The police set up a special event occurs and then, according to Thomas Mellberg. It makes Alma special is that it covers such a long period of time.

- It is unique and has never happened before. But we have never seen so large flows of refugees as we have done for now in Sweden.

In Alma gather incident reports and crime reports in from all over the country belonging to the special criminal codes and analyzed. To see if it is possible to draw some conclusions in order to change the work, explains Thomas Mellberg.

• How have refugee flows affected the Swedish police work?

- There is a new crime in that there are new people and there are more violations. There are simply more people. And it happens mainly in small regions with long run-times is that there a number one priority alarm about abuse, for example, it takes so long to get there, for example, crime prevention work that otherwise would be indulged, will suffer .

• How to tackle police it?

- My speculation is that it may require a reallocation of resources within the police, but it is a dialogue that ultimately the Commissioner has Regional Directors

 

[George Wallace]

Trouble in the Port of Calais:

Reproduced under the Fair Dealings provisions of the Copyright Act.

Port Of Calais Closes As Migrants Storm Ship
Sky News
23 January 2016

The Port of Calais had to be temporarily closed after scores of migrants stormed on to a ship in the hope of reaching the UK.

About 50 migrants made their way on to a P&O-operated vessel called Spirit of Britain.

The company described it as a "security incident" and reported that its vessels were delayed by 90 to 120 minutes.

Police attended the breach, which lasted about four hours.

DFDS Seaways tweeted late on Sunday afternoon: "The Port of Calais has been temporarily closed due to a migrant invasion, as soon as they are cleared the Port will re-open."

The shut-down followed a protest march in support of the migrants that was reportedly attended by 2,000 people.

A statement from the Port of Dover during the disruption said: "The Port of Calais is currently experiencing migrant activity which has caused disruption to ferry services. Therefore services to and from Calais via the Port of Dover are affected, but DFDS Seaways services are still running to Dunkirk as normal.

"The Port of Dover remains open for business, but the duration of this disruption to services remains unknown."

In August, the UK and France reached an agreement aimed at stopping security breaches and easing the migrant crisis.

The latest incident coincided with Jeremy Corybn's visit to the migrant camps in Calais and Dunkirk where thousands of people are sleeping rough - his first foreign trip as Labour leader.

He said the conditions would be a "disgrace anywhere" - and that thousands of people were living in a "sea of mud".

More on LINK.

 

[a_majoor]

More front line reporting:

http://www.therebel.media/watch_16_year_old_german_girl_tells_merkel_you_have_killed_germany_describes_her_experience_with_muslim_refugees

 

[GAP]

She makes a case

 

[Jarnhamar]

http://www.europeanguardian.com/81-uncategorised/immigration/698-zwickau-germany-refugees-masturbate-and-defecate-in-public-pool

Germany: Migrants masturbate and defecate in public pools

Think I'm going to go ahead and cross Germany off my list of countries to visit in the foreseeable future.  Actually make that all of Europe.

 

[George Wallace]

http://www.europeanguardian.com/81-uncategorised/immigration/698-zwickau-germany-refugees-masturbate-and-defecate-in-public-poolThink I'm going to go ahead and cross Germany off my list of countries to visit in the foreseeable future.  Actually make that all of Europe.

It isn't that bad; just be careful where you decide to go.

 

[Oldgateboatdriver]

http://www.europeanguardian.com/81-uncategorised/immigration/698-zwickau-germany-refugees-masturbate-and-defecate-in-public-poolThink I'm going to go ahead and cross Germany off my list of countries to visit in the foreseeable future.  Actually make that all of Europe.

You're getting worse than my wife: I think she is beginning to feel that venturing anywhere out of North America is impossible .. and even to have doubt about anything in N.A. South of the Mason-Dixon line ???

 

[Kilo_302]

Let's not get hysterical here. This article is about the US but it definitely applies to Europe, where the memories of many people seem to be short.

https://theintercept.com/2015/11/18/syrian-jews-refugees/

During the 1930s and early 1940s, the United States resisted accepting large numbers of Jewish refugees escaping the Nazi terror sweeping Europe, in large part because of fearmongering by a small but vocal crowd.

They claimed that the refugees were communist or anarchist infiltrators intent on spreading revolution; that refugees were part of a global Jewish-capitalist conspiracy to take control of the United States from the inside; that the refugees were either Nazis in disguise or under the influence of Nazi agents sent to commit acts of sabotage; and that Jewish refugees were out to steal American jobs.

Many rejected Jews simply because they weren’t Christian.

In recent days, similar arguments are being resurrected to reject Syrian refugees fleeing sectarian terrorists and civil war.

From talk radio to the blogosphere to leading American politicians, anti-Syrian rhetoric claims that refugees are simply ISIS infiltrators; that migrants are Muslim invaders seeking to establish a “global caliphate” and impose Sharia law on America; and that Syrian refugees are lying about escaping violence and are focused instead on abusing the American welfare system.

And in a rehash of history, politicians are arguing that only Christian, not Muslim, refugees from Syria should be welcomed.
Jews as dangerous revolutionaries and communists

“I have heard on good authority that an Executive order has given immigration authorities permission to let down the usual bars in favor of the so-called Jewish refugees from Germany,” declared Julia Cantacuzene, a Republican activist in New York, according to a front page New York Times article that ran on May 18, 1938. Cantacuzene, the granddaughter of President Ulysses Grant and an ardent opponent of President Franklin Roosevelt, claimed that the Soviet revolution occurred only because Communist agents had snuck into Russia to “instill their insidious poison onto the Russian people.” She claimed that the same would happen here: “Under these lax regulations, many Communists are coming to this country to join the ranks of those who hate our institutions and want to over throw them.”

During congressional debate in 1940, John B. Trevor, a prominent Capitol Hill lobbyist, argued against a proposal to settle Jewish refugees in Alaska, claiming they would be potential enemies — and charging that Nazi persecution of the Jews had occurred “in very many cases … because of their beliefs in the Marxian philosophy.” Trevor had notably helped author the Immigration Act of 1924, a law designed to curb Jewish migration from Eastern Europe, in part because of anarchist Jewish Americans of Russian descent including Emma Goldman.

Rep. Jacob Thorkelson, a Republican from Montana, warned at the time that Jewish migrants were part of an “invisible government,” an organization he said was tied to the “communistic Jew” and to “Jewish international financiers.”

William Dudley Pelley, a leading anti-Semite and organizer of the “Silver Shirts” nationalist group, claimed that Jewish migration was part of a Jewish-Communist conspiracy to seize control of the United States. Pelley, whose organization routinely used anti-Semitic smears such as “Yidisher Refugees” and “Refugees Kikes,” attracted up to 50,000 to his organization by 1934. James B. True, an anti-communist activist affiliated with the Silver Shirt movement, coined the term “refu-Jew” to mock refugees, according to researcher David S. Wyman, the author of Paper Walls: America and the Refugee Crisis 1938-1941.

George Van Horn Moseley, a retired general active in Christian nationalist groups, traveled the country warning that Jews were financing a communist revolution, and that citizens should arm themselves for a coming confrontation. He also protested the resettlement of Jewish refugees and called for forced sterilization of refugees that had arrived in the country.

Breckinridge Long, the assistant secretary of state who was responsible for a series of actions in 1940 and 1941 that tightly restricted Jewish refugee migration into America, was influenced heavily by the idea that Jews were communist infiltrators. According to Wyman, Long’s diary referred to his opponents as “the communists, extreme radicals, Jewish professional agitators, refugee enthusiasts.” After reading Adolf Hilter’s Mein Kampf, Long wrote that it was “eloquent in opposition to Jewry and to Jews as exponents of Communism and chaos.”
Jews will leech resources from America

American voices just as prominent call for Syrian refugees to be settled elsewhere — anywhere but here — anti-Semites used a similar strategy to reject Jewish refugees.

Charles Coughlin, a right-wing Catholic priest who was one of the most popular radio voices during the 1930s, regularly smeared Jewish refugees as foreign agents. Coughlin’s magazine, Social Justice, argued that there is “no well-founded reason for transporting [Jewish refugees] to America. … Soviet Russia, which now claims to be the most prosperous nation in the world, would be an ideal haven for them.”

Sen. Robert Reynolds, a Democrat from North Carolina and an outspoken opponent of Jewish migration, claimed Jews were “systematically building a Jewish empire in this country,” and often argued that Jews were alien to American culture. “Let Europe take care of its own people,” Reynolds argued, “we cannot care for our own, to say nothing of importing more to care for.”

Reynolds disseminated his nativist views through a publication he founded called the Vindicator. The publication carried headlines about the “alien menace” such as “Jewish Refugees Find Work,” “Rabbi Seeks Admission of One Million War Refugees,” and “New U.S. Rules Hit Immigration of German Jews.” Defending himself against critics, Reynolds told Life magazine that he simply wanted “our own fine boys and lovely girls to have all the jobs in this wonderful country.”

Rep. J. Will Taylor, a Tennessee Republican, argued that the New Deal showed more concern for European refugees than for the 10 million American refugees that walked city streets in desperation, according to researcher Wesley Greear of East Tennessee State University.  Similar arguments were advanced by Sen. Rufus Holman, an Oregon Republican, and Rep. Martin Dies, a Texas Democrat.
Jewish Refugees as a Fifth Column

President Roosevelt, who was slow to respond to the need to accept more Jewish refugees during much of World War II, fueled the political opposition’s “fifth column” conspiracies by repeatedly warning that Nazi agents might pose as refugees to gain entry into the country.

The State Department played a key role in fanning fears. Julian Harrington, the head of the visa division, argued that Germany had coerced refugees to spy for the Nazis. Both the Washington Post and New York Times promoted the accusation.

Roosevelt himself publicly imagined how Jewish refugees might be pressured into acting as Nazi agents. “We are frightfully sorry, but your old father and mother will be taken out and shot,” Roosevelt said during a press conference.

As Reason magazine’s Jesse Walker reported on Tuesday, the press also fanned these fears. The Saturday Evening Post told its readers that Nazis “disguised as refugees” were working around the world as “spies, fifth columnists, propagandists or secret commercial agents.”

As paranoia about a fifth column of Nazi infiltrators spread, legislators reacted with a series of anti-immigrant and anti-refugee legislation. The 76th Congress, from January 1939 to January 1941, fielded 60 anti-alien proposals, according to Henry L. Feingold, author of Politics of Rescue. One such proposal, from Rep. Stephen Pace, a Georgia Democrat, demanded that “every Alien in the United States shall be forthwith deported.”

The bills were supported by the American Legion, the Daughters of the American Revolution, and a number of Christian and nationalist organizations.

The editors of The Nation and the New Republic challenged the State Department to prove a single instance of coerced espionage involving Jewish refugees, according to researcher Wesley Greear. The State Department supplied no such evidence.

As Walker also noted in his article, historian Francis MacDonnell concluded that “Axis operations in the United States never amounted to much, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation easily countered the ‘Trojan Horse’ activity that did exist. … Though the Germans practiced espionage, sabotage, and subversion in United States, their efforts were modest and almost uniformly unsuccessful.”

But fearmongering against Jewish refugees certainly influenced public opinion. As the Washington Post’s Ishaan Tharoor reported this week, a poll published by Fortune magazine in July 1938 found that fewer than 5 percent of Americans believed that the United States should encourage refugees fleeing fascism. A poll taken in January 1939 found that 61 percent of Americans opposed the settlement of 10,000 refugee children, “most of them Jewish,” in the United States.

By 1941, the United States severely restricted refugee resettlement, in part through the Smith Act, which gave individual American consuls power to deny refugee visas, and gave Breckinridge Long, the assistant secretary of state who opposed Jewish migration, greater control of refugee policy.

As nativist voices were triumphing over refugee policy, over 6 million Jews were exterminated during the Nazi reign of terror.