Bruce Bawer on Swedish Tolerance and the New York Times...

Another terrific article from Bruce Bawer...

In the wake of the Stockholm bombing, the New York Times, like most of the mainstream media in the U.S. and elsewhere, has remained depressingly true to form. Wednesday’s Times contained a news article headlined “Sweden Bombing Doesn’t Soil Image of Tolerance” by John F. Burns. You didn’t have to look past that headline itself to be clued in to the story’s grotesquely misguided emphasis. A Muslim sets out to murder Christmas shoppers, and a reporter decides to write a piece about what, if anything, has happened to “images” in the aftermath of this event – and the focus is not on whether or not the image of Swedish Muslims has been tarnished, but on the image of non-Muslim Swedes? Think for a minute about how whacked-out this is. Since 9/11, the media have put such a tortured twist on just about everything having to do with Islam that whenever there’s a terrorist attack, we’re encouraged to see it not a illuminating the nature of Islam but as a test of non-Muslim tolerance. Hooray! Some jihadist tried to blow Christmas-shopping families to kingdom come, but Sweden didn’t turn “Islamophobic” as a result – it passed the test!

Burns writes that “many Swedes have taken comfort from the attack’s most enduring image”: that of “a man in a red jacket kneeling by the dying bomber, asking if there was anything he could do for the man….Many have described it as exemplifying the compassion and tolerance Sweden prizes as part of its national character — qualities, they say, that must not be surrendered in a new era of terrorist threats.”

Compassion? Tolerance? Let’s start with “compassion.” Is this really the mot juste to describe Sweden’s attitude toward its Muslim population? This is a country, after all, where no-go zones have grown and multiplied over the last decade, where the rate of reported rapes (thanks to Muslim youths) has risen to become the second highest in the world (after Lesotho), where anti-Semitic hate crimes by Muslims have become so commonplace that Swedish Jews are emigrating in increasing numbers – and where the people have long been instructed by their masters not to talk honestly about any of this, because to do so is to be racist and Islamophobic.

The see-no-evil, speak-no-evil policy held firm until September, when the Sweden Democrats, the only major party in the country that addresses issues of immigration and integration with candor, won 5.7 percent of the vote and secured seats in Parliament for the first time. (Whether the party itself is an entirely positive phenomenon is another question.) The political and media establishment characterized this as an alarming departure from Swedish “compassion”; in fact it seemed a welcome sign that at least some Swedes have decided to start facing up to reality and taking responsibility for the country they’re going to be leaving to their children and grandchildren. This is, in short, not about “compassion”; it’s about a perverse smorgasbord of cowardice, guilt, and denial that, if not soon overcome, bids fair to collapse the Swedish welfare state, obliterate Swedish culture, and destroy Swedish freedom.

And what about “tolerance”? Yes indeed, Sweden has been incredibly tolerant – of Muslim intolerance. It has tolerated forced marriage, female genital mutilation, honor killing. It has tolerated – indeed, welcomed and celebrated – developments that no democratic society should accept. This “tolerance” is nothing to crow about.

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