In America The Dream Lives
Biden Admin Shatters All-Time Record For Number Of Illegal Alien…
December’s numbers mean that the Biden administration has now experienced ten straight months of 200,000+ illegal alien encounters per month on the southern border. “A reminder, there have been approximately 1.2 million known gotaways at the southern border since President Biden took office,” Fox News reporter Bill Melugin tweeted.
Where once the shooting and bombing was confined to a few, ghettoised estates ringing the city, it has now spread to more affluent parts.
‘It’s our politicians who have blood on their hands.’
‘Sweden has some of the toughest weapon laws in the world, yet still it is cheap and easy to get Kalashnikovs, Scorpions [small machine guns] and handguns,’ says Inspector Berglund.
‘In my opinion we had too much immigration, so we had no chance of helping all the people who came here. …we can’t help everyone.’
He pauses and sighs. ‘But it’s too late to turn back the clock. I’m afraid this problem in Sweden with these shootings is going to last many years.’
The bloody death of a liberal dream: After throwing open its borders to 2million migrants, DAVID JONES investigates how Sweden has been left with an underclass of alienated teenagers, a murderous gang culture and crime spiraling out of control
DAVID JONES: On a bitingly cold morning in Stockholm, two days ago, I stood among 200 mourners in a Muslim cemetery, set in a magnificent pine forest. They had come to bury a 15-year-old Afghan boy who had been shot dead, allegedly by a gangster of the same age. Yet as his coffin was lowered into the frozen ground, it seemed to me that we were also witnessing the death of Sweden’s great multi-cultural dream.
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The murder of 15-year-old Ali Shafaei was no accident, however.
His story serves as a parable for Sweden’s fatally flawed experiment with untrammelled immigration.
Let’s start with some history. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, when Swedish industry boomed, more workers were needed in Stockholm and other major cities such as Uppsala and Lund. They, in turn, required accommodation.
The solution was the ‘Million Programme’. Hailed as the most ambitious housing programme the world had seen, it saw the building of a million new homes in the outer suburbs: mixed communities for the white and blue-collar classes.
Ironically, the centre-Left government declared that these new neighbourhoods would help to create ‘Good Democratic Citizens’.
However, the identikit flats were so small and unattractive that Swedish families moved out as soon as possible, to be replaced by migrant families.
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Perhaps because they have experienced their parents’ travails, she says, resentment runs deeper in second-generation migrants.
‘They join gangs because they want to be part of something,’ she told me. ‘The leaders lure them in when they are very young, by giving them a slice of pizza or a few krona to keep their drugs or guns, then it gradually increases. They get the most status if they kill someone.’
To Ms Bergqvist, the long-term solution lies in addressing these social problems. Meanwhile, however, even she — an avowed socialist — wants Sweden to get tough on gang crime, with better law enforcement and more punitive sentences.
The age of criminal responsibility in Sweden is 15, as opposed to 10 in Britain. Below that age, children are never prosecuted, no matter how grave the offence.
‘I’m Left-wing but it’s different when you work with these kids,’ says Ms Bergqvist, who is in her 20s. ‘My attitude has changed. The gang leaders are using them [the children] and I don’t think they would with a better legal system.’
Making an observation that would have been unsayable in Sweden until very recently, she added: ‘There are no white kids in these gangs, and you have to ask why? It’s not because they are bad, it is because Sweden has failed them. The kids are innocent. It’s our politicians who have blood on their hands.’
Presumably she is referring to the blood of boys such as Ali.
His older brother was first to make the 3,500-mile journey from Afghanistan to Sweden. Ali, his parents and two other siblings joined him in 2019, under a rule permitting asylum-seekers to be joined by family members.
They settled in Skogå, one of Stockholm’s few relatively mixed ethnic suburbs.
The crisis is so serious that, this week, scores of extra police officers were drafted in from other cities and billeted in hotels
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‘Sweden has some of the toughest weapon laws in the world, yet still it is cheap and easy to get Kalashnikovs, Scorpions [small machine guns] and handguns,’ says Inspector Berglund.
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They increasingly use children to do their dirty work because they can slip under the radar more easily than known ‘faces’ and, of course, because, if caught, they are treated with leniency.
Though he is now 17, the Armenian accused of the murder at the fitness centre, if convicted, would be sentenced as a 16-year-old, so he might spend just a few years in a secure centre, undergoing therapy for his ‘safe’ return to society.
Small wonder, we might think, that Sweden’s baby-faced gangsters are so quick to kill.
Why are there so many willing recruits? Inspector Berglund offers a refreshingly honest opinion — one that would doubtless have him facing a disciplinary panel in many woke British police forces.
‘You can talk about culture and integration and, yes, we have failed. But I think it’s like that in many other countries and they don’t have this level of violence,’ he says.
‘In my opinion we had too much immigration, so we had no chance of helping all the people who came here. I’m a real lover of taking people from war zones, or because of their political activity, but we can’t help everyone.’
He pauses and sighs. ‘But it’s too late to turn back the clock. I’m afraid this problem in Sweden with these shootings is going to last many years.’
It is a sobering assessment.
When Ali’s parents began their new life in this self-proclaimed ‘humanitarian superpower’, they must have believed they had delivered him from danger.
As they wept for him in that pine-clad graveyard, the scales surely fell from their eyes.
PA Fraternal Order of Police Lodge No. 38 