Bullies march
Racist bullies went on a rampage in Stockholm last night.
Hundreds of masked men marched through Stockholm’s main train station on Friday evening, reportedly beating up refugees and anyone who didn’t appear to be ethnically Swedish.
Wearing all-black balaclavas and armbands, the men “gathered with the purpose of attacking refugee children,” Stockholm police spokesperson Towe Hagg said.
Attacking children – that’s a nice touch. Hundreds of men getting together to attack children; what courage.
Before the attacks, the mob handed out leaflets with the slogan “It is enough now!” which threatened to give “the North African street children who are roaming around” the “punishment they deserve”.
The leaflet refers to the death of social worker Alexandra Mezher, who died after being stabbed at a refugee shelter for unaccompanied children.
So hundreds of men attack random children.
After the attack, the Swedish Resistance Movement, a neo-Nazi group, released a statement claiming the attack had “cleaned up criminal immigrants from North Africa that are housed in the area around the Central Station”.
The statement added: “These criminal immigrants have robbed and molested Swedes for a long time.”
“Police have clearly shown that they lack the means to stave off their rampage, and we now see no other alternative than to ourselves hand out the punishments they deserve.”
I’m so sick of bullies.
Can anyone guess who else the police have lacked the means to stave off their rampage? For quite some time, too.
One problem is that those now have friends in high places. Not yet in actual national government, in this country, but on many lower levels.
I recently changed jobs, and while I was jobhunting I was somewhat seriously looking for work in Sweden. An old American friend has lived for a couple of decades now in Gothenberg (we’ve more or less lost touch, but could get back into contact), I’ve had a lovely time in Stockholm and the other Swedish cities I’ve visited for work, and I think Stockholm is one of the most beautiful cities I’ve ever experienced. And of course Scandinavia always scores high on the quality of life indexes. But last time I was there, a couple of years ago, I found myself getting into disturbing conversations with local academics (who I expect, sensibly or not, not to fall for manipulative bullshit) about immigrants and taxes, and then this kind of thing goes on. I sadly wonder now if I’ve dodged a bullet by not having found a job there.
This didn’t even make the headlines of the news in Europe. An alleged attack of a refugee on a child in a Belgian swimming pool dominated the Belgian headlines for days. Once it was clear there was little to the allegations, the end result is that the alleged attacker is in a fenced institution and the news of his probable innocence never has made it to the news. The press is more and more afraid to report on the facts and less and less critical of what is the mainstream emotion carried by right wing politics.
The Swedes now say they will deport up to 80,000 migrants this year. That will never happen. The swedes still haven’t realized that these migrants are playing for keeps and that the countries they hail from will never take them back. Allen Ginsberg
http://reason.com/archives/2010/05/14/the-poet-versus-the-prophet
John@4:
I don’t find that anecdote about Ginsberg to be particularly enlightening. Frothing with rage at a taxi driver doesn’t seem like an admirable expenditure of effort. Fair enough; express your disagreement, refuse to ride. But abuse the man, shrieking and swearing? Are you endorsing the kind of violence demonstrated by the people in the article?
Do you know any Muslim people, John?
I do. I find this violent racism very frightening.
Every wave of immigrants to Australia has been met with intolerance and xenophobia, and we’ve been multicultural for decades. I can see this struggle to accept different cultures going on for a long time.
*sigh*
And yet…New Years Eve in Köln wasn’t a publicity stunt.
There are two parallel outrages going on at the same time.
There’s only one outrage: based on aggressive people violating vulnerable people based on some or other story of our dark past. The more aggressive the attackers, the darker the story from the past, and the more vulnerable the attacked, the scarier it is.