Juliana Geran Pilon, Senior Fellow, The Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization (AHI), offers “A Political Reality Check for Sweden.” Published in the October 12, 2022, issue of the Jewish News Syndicate, Dr. Pilon paints a sobering account of today’s Swedish society: It is passing through a wave of violent crime unprecedented in modern Swedish history.
Quite naturally, law and order stand as the central concern of Swedish voters. “In just two generations,” she quotes Peder Jensen of the Gatestone Institute as saying, “Sweden went from being one of the safest countries in the world to being one of the most dangerous countries in Europe.” The rise of Sweden Democrats, which has roots in Swedish fascism, to more than twenty percent of vote after less than six percent twelve years ago, attests to that fact.
Voters have implicated Sweden’s immigration policy. Over the past several decades, Sweden has allowed into their country the highest number of migrants per capita in all the countries of Western Europe. Magdalena Andersson, Prime Minister of Sweden, an economist, and head of the Swedish Social Democratic Party, had done little to curtail it.
Most of the immigrants to Sweden have arrived from Muslim countries. They brought with them prejudices; extreme anti-Semitic bigotry counts as one of them. Sweden’s left-wing panders to that anti-Semitism as almost a national policy.
For Sweden Democrats, Pilon chooses to see the glass as half-full. “There are indeed many Jews who are afraid of the Sweden Democrats and see their rise and the electorate’s acceptance of that party as a sign that vigilance towards neo-Nazism and anti-Semitism is eroded even within the mainstream. But there are other legitimate opinions as well. Years ago, Sweden Democrats purged their party of many undesirable elements. They adopted a “strong pro-Israel platform.”
“Changing the terms of the debate is a tall order,” observes Dr. Pilon. “Over half-a-century, ‘liberalism’ has mutated from its classical and Hebraic origins to its opposite: progressive statism. At the same time, the libels ‘fascist’ and ‘Nazi’ are routinely hurled against Israel and the U.S., thanks largely to Soviet-era disinformation long embraced by the left and its Islamist fellow travelers. But narratives can only go so far. Eventually, reality asserts itself through the fog of spin.”
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