Whether in Europe or the United States, the same liberal narrative applies just fine.
This analogy bore itself out in a New York Times article published on Sunday about Sweden that was given coveted front page exposure.
In the piece titled, “How Nationalism Found a Home in Sweden — A Global Machine Fuels the Far Right’s Rise,” investigative reporter Jo Becker, a proud recipient of three Pulitzer Prize awards, points to Russia and the ever-reliable Islamaphobia allegations to explain the problem with non-assimilating Muslim immigrants in Sweden.
Of course, you don’t have to dig far in any piece on “nativism” to find ties to President Donald Trump, especially after last week’s El Paso, Texas, shooting, where the killer penned an anti-immigrant manifesto — the irony being that with all the analysis the left gives the incident, they give the Dayton, Ohio, shooting by an admitted leftist the exact opposite attention.
In just the second paragraph, Becker regales about the “now-infamous comment by President Trump, suggesting that Sweden’s history of welcoming refugees was at the root of a violent attack in Rinkeby the previous evening, even though nothing had actually happened.”
Never mind that an incident did occur two days later.
Welcome to Sweden! Here’s what happened last night . . . still want to mock Trump? https://t.co/AMNB4wS3AW pic.twitter.com/r9daukCqxl
— Conservative News (@BIZPACReview) February 22, 2017
The Times reporter cleverly uses her take on Sweden to link back to the shooting in El Paso, which claimed 22 lives. A shooting many Democrats and liberal media-types are pinning on Trump in an attempt to effect the 2020 election.
“That nativist rhetoric — that immigrants are invading the homeland — has gained ever-greater traction, and political acceptance, across the West amid dislocations wrought by vast waves of migration from the Middle East, Africa and Latin America. In its most extreme form, it is echoed in the online manifesto of the man accused of gunning down 22 people last weekend in El Paso,” Becker wrote.
Noting that Sweden has accepted more refugees per capita than any other European country, Becker attributes an “immigration backlash” to right-wing populism, calling out Sweden Democrats for their “neo-Nazi roots.”
The small nation of 10 million accepted around 193,000 refugees in 2015 and 2016 alone.
In addition to blaming the far right in the U.S. for the anti-immigrant stance there, Becker also faults Russian President Vladimir Putin — seems liberals really do have Russia on the brain. She even throws in a dig at National Security Advisor John Bolton, and the Gatestone Institute.
“To dig beneath the surface of what is happening in Sweden, though, is to uncover the workings of an international disinformation machine, devoted to the cultivation, provocation and amplication of far-right, anti-immigrant passions and political forces. Indeed, that machine, most influentially rooted in Vladimir V. Putin’s Russia and the American far right, underscores a fundamental irony of this political moment: the globalization of nationalism,” she writes.
She later adds, “Russian and Western entities that traffic in disinformation, including an Islamophobic think tank whose former chairman is now Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, have been crucial linkers to the Swedish sites, helping to spread their message to susceptible Swedes.”
According to Becker, the Swedes must be incapable of forming their own thoughts about an onslaught of refugees who are effectively changing the landscape of their country. Swedes are living the consequences of the decisions made by politicians.
One example being that Swedish national TV produced data last year that showed, on average, nearly three out of every five men convicted of rape and attempted rape over the last five years were born abroad.
According to an August 2018 BBC article, “reporting of rape is far higher in Sweden than in most other countries,” though a now-familiar tactic of manipulating statistics, in this case by redefining what is and is not rape, appears to have been undertaken.
Backer proceeds to point to “a host of economic and demographic reasons, many of which predate the latest refugee flood,” to explain some of Sweden’s challenges.
With last week’s (temporary) success in shutting down 8chan fresh in mind, Becker cited sites “injecting anti-immigrant and Islamophobic messaging into the Swedish political bloodstream,” and identified “356 domains that linked to all four Swedish sites,” including Gatestone, which Bolton was part of until last year.
Silencing the opposition, in this case those who oppose unchecked immigration, is a common liberal trait.
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The longest-tenured writer at BizPac Review, Tom grew up in Maryland before moving to Central Florida as a young teen. It is in the Sunshine State that he honed both his passion for politics and his writing skills.
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