By Bruce Bawer, FPM
The Norwegian Royal Palace, located in the heart of Oslo, is surrounded by a pleasant little park called Slottsparken. It contains lawns, flower beds, and a rippling brook spanned by a footbridge. Behind the Palace is a small cabin where members of the palace guard spend their down time napping and watching TV.
A less charming feature of the park is that it’s also been the setting of several rapes – no fewer than five of them between June and October of 2011 alone. Things got so bad that the Radisson Hotel – which is just across the street from the park, a minute’s walk from the Palace – began to provide its guests with rape alarms to wear when going out for a stroll.
A newspaper profile of one of the 2011 Slottsparken rapists provides a pretty representative picture of the kind of individual who commits most of these crimes. The perpetrator was a young Iraqi man who came to Norway in 2003 as an asylum seeker. His asylum application was rejected, but – as is standard practice – he was allowed to stay anyway. Three years later, he brutally raped an 18-year-old girl outside Oslo’s City Hall and was sentenced to four years in prison. In 2009, after his release, a deportation order was issued; he challenged it in court; in 2010, he lost his case. Nonetheless, he was again allowed to stay. A year later, still in Oslo, he raped a woman outside the Royal Palace.
A Muslim asylum seeker; a rap sheet; a meaningless deportation order: in today’s Scandinavia, these are among the standard bullet points on many a rapist’s résumé.
Yes, as I’ve noted before, Scandinavian policing could be better. Much better. Especially in Oslo, where the force is woefully undermanned and underfunded. Seeing officers at work, you can get the impression they’re still being trained out of a manual from half a century ago, when Oslo was as sleepy, well-behaved, and foreigner-free as Andy Griffith’s Mayberry. Last September, an Oslo rape victim complained publicly that the cops had waited six months to take witness testimony from her thirteen-year-old son. Such stories are common. And not just in Oslo: this languorous approach to law enforcement is a familiar phenomenon throughout the Nordic countries, where the only real crime, it can sometimes seem, is to display a sense of urgency about anything.
But Scandinavia’s rising rape figures aren’t the fault of the police. As everyone without blinders on knows by now, this is a story about failed immigration policies and about Islam, which teaches contempt for infidels – especially unveiled women. As Scandinavia’s Muslim population has risen, so have the rape statistics.
When I wrote two years ago about the rape crisis in Oslo, its rape statistics had eclipsed those of Stockholm and Copenhagen, earning it the title of Scandinavia’s rape capital. Since then, however, the incidence of rape in Sweden has climbed precipitously. Daniel Greenfield reported in January that “Sweden now has the second highest number of rapes in the world, after South Africa, which at 53.2 per 100,000 is six times higher than the United States. Statistics now suggest that 1 out of every 4 Swedish women will be raped.” (Another recent study also puts Sweden at #2, but has Lesotho in the #1 spot.)
Over the last seven years, the number of rapes in Sweden has nearly tripled. During the first seven months of this year, a thousand rapes were reported in Stockholm – a 16 percent jump from last year. In three hundred cases, the victims were girls under age 15. This month the Danish paper Den Korte Avis reported that rape is now at least five times more common in Sweden – where public discussion of immigration problems is essentiallyverboten – than in Denmark, where the subject has been openly debated for years (leading to mild reforms that have prompted bien pensant Swedes and Norwegians to slam Danes as racists).
There’s overwhelming anecdotal evidence that rapists in Sweden – like those in Denmark and Norway – are disproportionately Muslim. The Swedish government collects statistics on such matters, but won’t release them. If it’s taboo in Sweden to discuss the country’s rising Muslim population, Den Korte Avis observed, what’s even more taboo is linking it to the rising number of rapes. An independent study, however, concludes that 85 percent of rapists in Sweden are foreign-born – primarily from North Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia.
As Scandinavia’s rape crisis has intensified, new features have emerged. For one thing, it’s spread from the cities to the provinces. There’s been an uptick in kinds of rape – such as gang rape – that were hardly ever seen in Scandinavia before. Today’s rapes, moreover, tend to be more violent than yesterday’s.
Then there’s the increasing number of child rapes – not only the rape ofchildren, but also rape by children. Last November, a 17-year-old Afghan “refugee” brutally raped a 14-year-old girl in Malmø, Sweden. (The prosecutor might have asked for an expulsion order, but chose to request only the usual – short – jail term.) In January, in the same city, a 13-year-old girl was gang-raped by four boys. Two of the culprits were handed over to social services because they were only 13 and thus too young to prosecute; the other two, both 15, were arrested and charged, which outraged their lawyer: how dare the state put children on trial!
The Scandinavian cultural elite’s determination to dodge the truth about rape and Islam is unflagging. Earlier this year Norwegian sociologist Preben Z. Møller published The Struggle over Rape, in which he rejected “cultural” explanations for rape, arguing – as if it were a fresh idea! – that rape is a product of poverty and social exclusion, “a way for the individual to fit into a brutal world.” How, then, to account for the surging rape numbers in Sweden, which considers itself a model of economic equality and social inclusion? How to explain away the correlation between the rape data and the immigration data? Yet the hokum peddled by the likes of Møller is fervently embraced by powerful Scandinavians who’d prefer to dodge the truth than deal with it.
And it’s not just Scandinavians: The Economist, which has been whitewashing the Islamization of Europe for years, recently called Sweden’s high rape statistics “a bit of a puzzle,” saying that “the most likely explanation” for them “is that Swedish women feel particularly confident in reporting sexual assaults, whereas women elsewhere keep quiet.” Needless to say, the fact that Sweden has Europe’s second-highest percentage of Muslims went unmentioned.
So it goes. Meanwhile, back in Oslo, a woman was raped last Friday on a tony downtown street. The same night, a man described as “African” violently raped a woman in Oslo’s upscale Grünerløkka neighborhood. (After Pakistanis, Somalis are Norway’s largest non-Western immigrant group.) Another “African” man is wanted for raping a woman in the quaint Telemark town of Kongsberg. And, oh yes, weekend before last there was yet another rape in Slottsparken. Perhaps it’s time for the royal family to face the fact that the neighborhood is going to hell in a handbasket and move. But where?
The links to the websites showing “studies” and “statistics” do not work. I hope its an accident because the claim that sweden is the #2 worst country in the world in terms of rape seems bizarre to me…
bernard ross Said:
Not while Obama and the democrates are in office.
@ M Devolin:
oops oops
How is Mr. Harris “disturbed”? He’s simply voting for a country and a people who have never taken shit from the jihadists. Time we all started giving the Russians a nod for their no-nonsense way of dealing with the jihadists. Over here (never mind Europe) we can’t even profile Islam the religion for its crimes against humanity without being labelled a bigot. Just because Mr. Harris praises Russia’s no-nonsense style of policing its state does not mean he is a fan of Joseph Stalin. Because I support Americans does not mean I am fond of past presidents who were slave owners.
@ Laura:
ooops
@ honeybee:
You’re surprised at this? Arnold’s hero is joseph stalin. Arnold is a bit disturbed.
You can have it.
Anyway, Russia will be eventually taken over by muslims just as Europe is.
ArnoldHarris Said:
Arnold, really, Russia? My Great-Aunt Annie said she was never so gad to leave a place!!!!!!!!
Well said, Mr. Harris.
The only country in Europe which resists the dreadful inanities of modern liberalism is Russia. That’s just about the only white-populated country in which homosexuals will be given no opportunity to mock normality through legalized marriage with one another, and in which sexual perverts who assault children, when caught, are typically and properly beaten to death in their tough-as-nails prisons. Likewise for gangs of Muslims raping Russian women.
If I were compelled to choose a place to live outside the USA if Israel were not achievable as an above, Russia would be that place. America increasingly resembles as empire well into its permanent dissolution, while the Russians are rediscovering and putting back into its proper place their own unique and sturdy Russian souls. I can only hope with equal longing that Israel similarly ditches liberalism, reasserts the authentic Jewish idea, and grows in the triumph denied out Jewish nation for 30 centuries, along with the dignity that can be achieved solely by having national power and being fully aware of it.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
The idiot Scandinavians have invited a plague into their countries. The citizens suffer, and their arrogant rulers … who are protected … don’t give a damn. And they still don’t give a damn. And if they are stupid rather than cynical, they still can’t learn.
But who are we to criticize? We’ve got a bigoted Muslim in the White House and he’s surrounded himself with a cadre of Anti-Semites and America-haters.
@ bernard ross:
SOME Scandinavians have been personally affected, and I’m quite sure they “get it”. The others – that is, most of them – are affected by their “collective” mentality led by the government and its media lapdogs, and unlike that poor girl (who no doubt “gets it”), are comfortably remote from it.
What I’m trying to say, in more graphic terms, is that one doesn’t really “get it” until the knife is actually at, or close to, YOUR throat, not someone else’s. Hence the term “armchair general”. It takes true compassion to feel the knife at someone else’s throat, and despite the moral exhibitionism of both government and media (not just in Sweden), they simply don’t have it.
bernard ross Said:
Scandanavians suffer from a pecular form of terminal niefivty
keelie Said:
the Scandinavians are personally affected and they still don’t get it.
@ bernard ross:
One would think that our intellectual superiors in the media would be able to think this through with relative ease, and very quickly solve this “puzzle”.
I’m quite certain that if they had been personally affected by this type “puzzling” situation, it would have been solved instantly.
honeybee Said:
a Horde of jihadists and drug dealers. Perhaps the US should also stop libeling Israel and stop supporting pal jew killers. One set of lies always begets another, its offspring.
I love it! Enlightened Europe traded 6 million productive, loyal citizens – Jews for 20 million 7th century rapists and societal parasites. I just love it! Warms the cockles of my heart and restores my sense of justice.
bernard ross Said:
Do you have any idea who is coming over our Southwestern borders?
@ bernard ross:
Do have have any idea of what is coming over are Southwestern borders? Not just Mexicans and drugs!
Actually, it is the story of justice: that which they desired to visit upon the Jews has been visited upon them. The jew libellers, and those who give moral support to jew killers, are experiencing the power of the covenant. Perhaps they should stop libeling the jews, withdraw support from jew killers and protect the jews remaining in their care. As long as they continue with their lies the same lies will perpetuate their blinders and punishment.
a puzzle? I think not.
Norway has something like 1,000 Jews and Sweden about 15,000, so they should be easy for Israel to absorb. Once they have left, I say let the Scando-Nazis and Islamo-Nazis fight it out in the streets in a long, bloody civil war – they certainly deserve each other.