President Trump has attacked Sweden for its welcoming stance toward immigrants and that’s no coincidence. Let me explain why and talk about the four islamophobes in his inner circle, and their relationship to Trump’s fake-news smear on Sweden. But first a brief update for those who haven’t yet followed this very strange story.
Trump has now clarified the bizarre lie he told at his Saturday rally when he said, “look at what's happening last night in Sweden!” while implying that immigrants were behind a terrible terror attack in the country. But it turned out that the Friday night terror Trump witnessed was just Tucker Carlson bloviating about dangerous Swedish Muslims on Fox News. Here’s the Business Insider account:
The Fox News segment Trump was referring to was an interview between host Tucker Carlson and documentarian and media personality Ami Horowitz that aired Friday night. Horowitz presented a clip from a film documenting alleged violence committed by refugees in Sweden, and the segment went on extensively about an alleged crime surge in Sweden and its links to immigrants.
In fact, a 2016 crime survey found crime rates in Sweden have stayed relatively stable over the past decade.
The whole thing is so absurd that it’s led to a lot of fun and spread large quantities of satisfying satire, such as this Ikea Border Wall (“after the terrible events #lastnightinSweden , IKEA have sold out of this”).
Finally the rest of the world gets to see what those of us living in Sweden take for granted: Swedes have a great sense of humor (I don’t care what the Danes say). I should note that I have lived in Stockholm for a long time and took it personally when Trump’s assaulted my adopted second-country.
We also learned that the former Swedish Foreign Minister, Carl Bildt, can run rings around Trump on Twitter.
Carl Bildt is from the Swedish conservative party, Moderata, so you would normally expect him to support Republicans. Unfortunately for Trump, Bildt also believes in facts, the rule of law and the benefits of immigration. I highly recommend checking out Bildt’s twitter attacks on Trump.
One realizes how upside-down everything is after seeing Carl Bildt and Angela Merkel joining with European left-wingers to fight for liberal democratic values and multi-lateral institutions. (At least Trump is bringing some people together).
Humor is crucial for keeping one’s sanity in a world disturbed daily by whatever Trump has done or said or tweeted by 6 am. But we also have to keep our eye on the ball, and this story has its deadly serious side. Here it is.
Two Swedish policemen with a long experience of fighting organized crime are interviewed by Ami Horowitz for his film, The Stockholm Syndrome. A film that led to an international incident when Trump saw an interview with the filmmaker on Fox News. In the film the Swedish policemen are talking about the increase in crime in Sweden because of the flood of immigrants. Or are they?
Absolutely not, say the two policemen, Anders Göranzon and Jacob Ekström, in an interview with the Swedish daily, Dagens Nyheter. According to them, the interview was only about organized criminal activities and an increase in the number of weapons circulating in Sweden.
It was supposed to be about crime in high risk areas. Areas with high crime rates. There wasn’t any focus on migration or immigration.
But the filmmaker, Ami Horowitz, edited their answers to different questions than the ones he had asked, to make it seem like they were talking about Muslim immigrants. During Tucker Carlson interview with him, Horowitz also alleged that Sweden was covering up a rape epidemic caused by Muslim refugees. An extremely dishonest and deceptive portrait of reality.
The attack on Sweden is not a coincidence either. Ami Horowitz is a right-wing Jewish filmmaker with a history of deceptive and provocative filmmaking used to attack groups on the left. Horowitz also makes films supporting the Israel occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, claiming, for instance, that Israeli checkpoints aren’t a problem for Palestinians.
So that’s one reason for Horowitz to attack Sweden, which has recognized the Palestinian State and long criticized Israel for its illegal settlements. But it’s not just allies of Israeli who are attacking Sweden, its a wide range of right-wingers who don’t necessarily love Israel but share Horowitz’s islamophobia. What is it that makes this little country far up north, that just now reached ten million inhabitants, so interesting? Why all this hatred?
What makes Sweden a target for the extremist right around the world?
The answer to that is easy, it is spelled out in online magazines like Brietbart.com (which is also a big backer of Ami Horowitz). Sweden has long been a symbol of a society that takes care of its inhabitants, where women have a strong position. Half of the government, for instance, is female. And that's an example that the extremist right fears and does not want to stand.
Sweden has also opened its doors to refugees, the latest wave coming from Syria. And what the extremist right hates most is that the majority of these people are Muslim. That makes Sweden the perfect storm for these groups. The irritating thing is that it’s not failing the way it was supposed to. Sweden isn't crumbling under. It has problems of course, lots of them. But it isn't the downfall that the extremist right had hoped for.
That isn’t an insurmountable problem though, not for the manufacturers of “alternative facts” like Breitbart, which was led by Steve Bannon up until Trump picked him as his Campaign CEO and then promoted him to White House chief strategist. Not a problem when they have managed to convince a huge swath of the population that the normal press is just fake news.
And this is where Trump's way of playing in the international arena is based. In Steve Bannon and the other white supremacist Islamaphobes in Trump’s inner circle. Like Steven Miller, who helped write Trump’s America First speech. And Trump’s deputy assistant, Sebastian Gorka, a Hungarian immigrant who worked with Bannon at Breitbart. (Gorka showed up at a Trump inaugural event dressed as a WWII Hungarian fascist, according to the Times of Israel.)
These are strange bedfellows for a Jewish filmmaker like Ami Horowitz. But they share a common hatred of Muslims. And they are good at creating “alternative facts” for the base.
Then there is John Bolton. He was passed over as Trump’s NSA head. But Trump says he will find Bolton a job because he has a “good number of ideas” that “I agree with very much”. Bolton currently chairs the anti-islamic Gatestone Institute. Their website claims that Sweden coddles Muslims and has the second highest rape statistic in the world, with “75% of them committed by Muslims”.
It’s a lie of course but it shows that the Swedish-Muslim rape meme didn’t originate with Ami Horowitz. (Politifact debunks Horowitz here).
The Swedish Muslim rape lie isn’t original to Bolton and Gatestone either, even though they are working hard to spread it across Europe. I first heard about it in 2011 when I documented a Nazi rally in Stockholm. That was well before the current immigration crisis.
I also learned that Nazis have long used this discredited Islamaphobic rape-scare to rally their base. It’s no new trick. The Norwegian racist Fjordman was flogging it on his blog back in 2005. Fjordman was one of those Anders Behring Breivik credited when explaining his terrorism spree in 2011. (Breivik blew up central Oslo, then dressed as a policeman to hunt and brutally murder 69 children at a Social Democratic summer camp).
From European Nazis to American Islamaphobes to Trump’s advisors to Trump’s mouth. That’s the path of this lie. And it’s not just absurdist theater — Breivik shows how it leads to violence.
“Last night in Sweden” is also a lie about a friendly country with whom the U.S. has vital intelligence and defense collaboration that is needed to confront Putin as he contemplates his next moves. The Obama Administration spent years building the relationship with Sweden, a relationship Trump is is willing to trash in a weekend of tweets.
So this is the background to why little Sweden ended up in the news because of a reality that doesn't exist. This is why a funny story about Trump isn’t funny at all.