Posted by I recently wrote about how Canada is nothing but a country of “hewers of wood and drawers of water.” In this piece, I debunked two theories put forward by others why Canada hasn’t created any meaningful global multinational corporations: Some argue that its because Canada’s population is too small and we are socialists. Unfortunately Sweden, whose population is less than a 1/3 of Canada’s (under 10 million compared to Canada’s 35m) and is far more socialist, has produced a plethora of internationally famous brands and companies like Volvo, SAAB, Electrolux, Ericsson, IKEA, H&M, AstraZeneca, Asea Brown Boveri (ABB), Stora Enso, Skype, and Spotify.
There was one argument made by a Corinne Harvard I didn’t include because it was convoluted and, in the final analysis, didn’t seem to make much sense. It was based on some historical problem with the structure of Canada:
For most of the 19th century, we had no export market, with England having removed the preferential barriers it gave to its colonies (meaning they were lowered for every country… with the cost of transportation, it was now more expansive to buy Canadian products than other imports) and the U.S. keeping its entry barriers high. We created the Canadian Confederation as a solution to this situation, but the interior market remained small and our exports poor… We had very few trade exchanges with other countries until after WWII, but remained highly dependant on the United States up until today. Up until the 50s we were also overly dependant on American direct investments meaning the money came from the U.S. and went back to the U.S.
The problem is that during a 50 year period between 1860-1914 (i.e. prior to the outbreak of WWI in 1914) 1.3 million Swedes moved to the United States. That’s an amazingly huge number considering there are less than 10m people in Sweden today and less than 3.5m in 1850. Part of it was sheer desperation as the great Swedish famine of 1866-68 forced many to leave to avoid starvation. Part of it was to escape religious persecution and a tyrannical government. Part of it was just to find jobs and a livelihood away from a Sweden that was still mostly rural and agricultural and had not developed much of an industrial base to employ a large urban population. Nonetheless, America ended up with a large Nordic population, especially in the colder northern areas between Illinois and Montana which is why, to this day, we have remnant reminders of this heritage in those areas like the NFL football team the Minnesota Vikings. Compared to the problems Sweden had in the past, the argument that Canada’s economy didn’t produce global companies because of lack of export markets in the 19th century ring a little hollow.
One might conclude from what I have written before that I am a typical Canadian socialist who likes to pray at the altar of the Scandinavian model. That conclusion would be very wrong. I just like to be as fair and honest about the facts and history as one can be given that we are all prisoners of our own subjective biases. The truth is, I don’t like Sweden or its model for society. Unlike most admirers, I actually lived and studied there at the prestigious Stockholm School of Economics (Handelshögskolan i Stockholm) in 1994 as an exchange student when I was talking my MBA at McGill University. To most foreigners, Sweden evokes images of a liberal, free-thinking, equal and open society (and hot blonde girls); a utopia of modern social justice. To me, it’s the exact opposite. I have never lived in another country that is more socially-controlled and unfriendly to “foreigners” than Sweden. I’ll discuss this more in depth a little later after I address some more recent news.
Donald Trump blew up the internet (again) on 18 February 2017 when he made a comment during a rally in Florida where he said, “We’ve got to keep our country safe. You look at what’s happening in Germany. You look at what’s happening last night in Sweden. Sweden, who would believe this?” The Swedes were outraged and mocked the U.S. President en masse in the cybersphere. Even former Swedish Prime Minister (he was PM when I was living there in 1994), Carl Bildt tweeted, “Sweden? Terror attack? What has he been smoking? Questions abound.” The story made the rounds in the global liberal press including the Canadian Brainwashing Corporation all questioning the Trump statement and the Fox News report he was allegedly basing it on.
The problem is that two days later, Trump was somewhat vindicated when riots broke out in Rinkeby, a mostly immigrant suburb of Stockholm. The Washington Post covered it, so did the British Broadcasting Corporation. According to reports, “Over four hours, the crowd burned about half a dozen cars, vandalized several shopfronts and threw rocks at police. Police spokesman Lars Bystrom confirmed to Sweden’s Dagens Nyheter newspaper that an officer fired shots at a rioter but missed. A photographer for the newspaper was attacked and beaten by more than a dozen men and his camera was stolen. Bystrom later said that a police officer was slightly injured and that one person was arrested for throwing rocks, news agencies reported. Some civilians were also assaulted while trying to stop looters, he said.” The neighborhood, Rinkeby, was also the scene of previous riots in 2010 and 2013.
I would have completely missed this news if someone I know hadn’t reposted the BBC report on their Facebook page because it didn’t show up anywhere on my newsfeeds or in my local newspaper. I searched for it but there was no report of this incident in the Canadian Brainwashing Corporation and when I narrowed down the search to “Sweden riots”, the only thing that came up was a CBC report of the earlier multi-day riot in the same neighbourhood in 2013.
Maybe the CBC doesn’t consider riots overseas where nobody was killed news worthy (even though they covered the previous riot three years ago). Or maybe they just don’t think Sweden in general, unless its a hockey player being traded, is of interest to Canadians. However, yesterday the CBC covered this:
A transatlantic wave of puzzlement is rippling across Sweden for the second time in a week, after a prominent Fox News program featured a “Swedish defence and national security adviser” who’s unknown to the country’s military and foreign-affairs officials.
Swedes, and some Americans, have been wondering about representations of the Nordic nation in the U.S. since President Donald Trump invoked “what’s happening last night in Sweden” while alluding to past terror attacks in Europe during a rally Feb. 18. There hadn’t been any major incident in Sweden the previous night.
Then, Fox News commentator Bill O’Reilly convened an on-air face-off Thursday over Swedish immigration and crime between a Swedish newspaper reporter and a man identified on screen and verbally as a “Swedish defence and national security adviser,” Nils Bildt.
Bildt linked immigration to social problems in Sweden, lamented what he described as Swedish liberal close-mindedness about the downsides of welcoming newcomers and said: “We are unable in Sweden to socially integrate these people,” arguing that politicians lacked a systematic plan to do so.
But if viewers might have taken the “adviser” for a government insider, the Swedish Defence Ministry and Foreign Office told the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter they knew nothing of him. Calls to Swedish officials Saturday weren’t immediately returned.
The riots of a few days earlier don’t even merit a passing mention to the CBC in this follow up report. They are more than happy to re-hash Trump’s comments from a week earlier and mention that there was no major incident in Sweden the previous night as alluded to by Trump, but absolutely nothing about a four hour riot by immigrants who were shot at by police, cars burned and shops looted two days later in Sweden. I am getting tired of re-stating and justifying my increasing distrust of the liberal mass media. If this isn’t a clear sign of how biased they are in their reporting, I don’t know what is. Trump and his administration are sometimes their own worst enemy by making comments that are fast and loose with the facts. He also has the bad habit of making comments that are incendiary to the left. Both are lamentable. But it shouldn’t distract us completely from the general message he is trying to make nor stop us from engaging in the long suppressed debate about “politically incorrect” issues and “sacred cows” that are very relevant to policy decisions that have to be made. Unfortunately, the media and the left are more interested in playing a game of bombarding us with liberal propaganda and bashing Trump than in engaging in an actual debate and disclosing all relevant information. Increasingly, the inane term “Fact Check” that the media seems to be using a lot lately doesn’t seem to apply to their own lies, selective reporting and politically slanted agenda.
The truth is that Sweden has a crapload of social problems and they are not all related to immigrants. I, and I think most people including the Swedes themselves, would agree with the assessment that “Sweden’s self-image is that of a country with solid liberal values, institutionalized equality, and social justice.” Maybe part of why I am not a fan of the Swedish model is that I don’t share many of those “values”; nor did a younger and more idealistic me that lived there more than 20 years ago.
Principally because I am not particularly enamoured with the concepts of fairness and equality, especially the way that current social justice warriors (SJW) like to define them. To me, fairness and equality are in providing opportunities and reducing blatant discrimination (note I don’t say eliminate because I don’t think that can be done), not in equalising outcomes as the socialists would have it. That’s why I find American libertarian values and the founding principals of the United States of America so appealing. Just read the preamble to the Declaration of Independence:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
And the preamble to the American Constitution:
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
It may sound a little wishy-washy today, but the founding fathers of the United States of America never said their system was the best in the world. There was never that conceit that man, or his institutions, with all his flaws and failings could do more than “form a MORE perfect Union” based on the principles of justice, peace, security, societal prosperity, and the blessings of liberty for now and later generations. They also never guaranteed you “Happiness”, just the “pursuit of” it. In other words, you should have life and liberty (basically freedom) along with a stable and prosperous society, to go about your own business and achieve your own end goals – not have those dictated to you or given to you on a silver platter by the government or the rest of society.
Sweden, for all its faults that I’m going to describe, is a remarkably accomplished country especially given its size and relative unimportance. It never really had an empire, the high point of of the Kingdom of Sweden 1611-1721 only encompassed current day Sweden, Finland, Norway, the Baltic States and small parts of Poland. In 1628, King Gustavus Adolphus commissioned the warship Vasa – a 1,200 tonne wooden monstrosity with three gun decks as a show of Swedish power to intimidate the Polish in their war. In an amazing display of Swedish engineering prowess, the Vasa was unstable and didn’t even make it out of Stockholm harbour before it sank. There it lay submerged for over three hundred years but due to the cold water and anaerobic conditions, the wooden ship managed to survive and was raised in 1961 and restored and is currently on display at the Vasa Museum in Stockholm. Well worth a visit if you happen to be there. Unlike the rest of Europe which was busy colonising the planet, Sweden never really had an overseas empire. Heck even tiny Belgium and the Netherlands had relatively large overseas colonial holdings.
That the inventor of dynamite and founder of Bofors (an arms manufacturer), Alfred Nobel should be equated with the most prestigious Nobel Peace Prize a century later is astounding. That a handful of Swedes and Norwegians should be the arbiters of the greatest work of Literature (almost always Europeans) is an affront to the rest of the planet that goes unquestioned every year. That the whole planet is busy buying crappy low-quality knock-down furniture from IKEA (as well as pronouncing the name completely wrong) while being blissfully ignorant that the founder, Ingvar Kamprad was a Nazi, is a testament to how good the Swedes have ingratiated themselves in a way that makes them almost unquestioned as being “good people” in the international community.
To me, freedom is something that is defined by all the little things that we choose to do, think and say every day. While it is fine to talk about larger lofty ideals like democracy, what is democracy at its essence but the tyranny of the majority. While freedom is never absolute, I find that the balance in the West is increasingly tilted towards oppression when we continue to pass stupid laws aimed at regulating every minor aspect of our lives. On their own, they are mostly minor nuisances or inconveniences but the accumulated impact is far more sinister than we like to think. Everything from trying to ban smoking in a private residence to trying to restrict carbonated beverages (yes, Mayor Bloomberg tried to ban large soft drinks in New York). These are the tiny things that, when put in the context of another society, Westerns see as Nanny-Statism and are very critical of (as in the case of Singapore) but are willfully oblivious to when it is incrementally being implemented in the West.
Singapore is the butt of many jokes by foreigners for its plethora of “silly laws” ranging from the ban on chewing gum, fines for urinating in elevators, spitting on the street and taking Durians (a pungent fruit) onto the subway. It is not so funny if you stop to think about how many of the stupid (and enforced) laws and bylaws that we have passed here. It is illegal to have open alcohol in public in most places, even when not driving. I can’t even stick the cork back into a bottle of wine that I can’t finish and put it in the car with me, not even the back seat (it has to be in the trunk). Believe it or not folks, our laws are becoming so Byzantine and stifling that common sense is no longer sufficient to save you from criminal prosecution from an increasingly oppressive state. When child protective services knocks on your door with police in tow for letting your kids play in your own backyard. When a man gets charged with drunk driving after leaving the closing bar at 2am, then sits in his idling car to stay warm in the -20C weather while waiting for the taxi he called to take him home. The number of Canadians that have been charged recently with hate speech and uttering threats (especially those that are directed at politicians) for postings on the internet has been staggering. In the end, it was the Nanny-Statism in Sweden that bothered me the most; that and the mass of unwritten rules of politically-correctness that pervades that society. My previous experience in Sweden makes me particularly cognisant and sensitive to it, and I see it seeping into every nook and cranny of Canadian and American life as well now.
I remember clearly (but can’t find it now) a political cartoon in Sweden that depicted a man in a bar talking to the bartender. “Jag vilja en stor starköl (I want a large strong beer) the man asks. “Du vilja Pripps, Pripps eller Pripps” (You want Pripps, Pripps, or Pripps) was the reply. Of course, the reason for this was the virtual monopoly that the brewery Pripps had on beer in Sweden (and the restrictions on imports) which meant you had the choice of any beer you want as long as it’s Pripps (apologies to Henry Ford who is famous for his quote of, “Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black.”) By the time I had arrived, the monopoly had become a duopoly but Spendrups still had a very small market share. The Swedes drink like fishes and excessive alcohol consumption has long been considered a major societal problem. The sale of all alcoholic beverages (except for “light beer” with an alcohol content lower than 3.5%) is only allowed through the state-owned monopoly, Systembolaget. Unfortunately, the Systembolaget is not open on the weekends and closes at night (after 6pm) which means that every Friday afternoon, everyone goes queues up to buy their “rations” for the weekend. Apparently, Systembolaget has added limited hours from 10:00-1:00 on Saturdays since I lived there but their lock on the sale of alcohol remains. High taxes on alcohol were also a major source of societal control and planning to restrict consumption. As a results, Swedes in the south (Malmo – Sweden’s third largest city) close to Denmark would often pop across the Baltic and load up on booze; a task made easier after the construction of the bridge connecting them to Copenhagen. The “love boat” (Viking ferry lines) from Stockholm to Finland and the Baltic States was another source of excessive alcohol consumption and importation of booze from the duty free. Government’s attempts to stamp out “unwanted” habits and behavior is common in most places (so-called “sin taxes” on alcohol and tobacco) but Sweden was an extreme case. I was shocked to find that a beer in a bar costs about $10 but was even more amazed when I figured out it was double that a year earlier because the Swedish Kroner fell by 50% during their imploding property bubble and financial crisis in 1992.
While cable television was proliferating in the United States, the choice of channels in Sweden was very limited, again due to state restrictions on broadcasting and advertising. Once when I went to see a movie with some Swedish students but after we finished dinner, all the Swedes wanted to rush to the theater rather than leisurely finish their coffee. “What’s the hurry?” I asked them. They said they wanted to get there early so they wouldn’t miss the commercials (advertisements) before the movie began. Sweden is a society where media was so controlled that the citizens actually wanted and paid to see advertisements for chewing gum and laundry detergent. In the age of the internet and with their admission into the European Union, I think that many of these restrictions have probably been lifted. To be honest, it was nice to completely avoid watching television when I lived there (Baywatch was very popular… tells you there was absolutely nothing worth watching). While the EU and the internet may have forced some relaxation of the previous over-reach of the Swedish government; I think that the underlying belief in what I think of as near draconian social control is deeply ingrained in Sweden culture and values to this day. Nonetheless, the white exchange student’s of my day mostly had a blast; the minorities no so much.
The people that I spent the most time with in my dormitory was a Pakistani law student and a Korean from Norway. I spent virtually no time at all with the local Swedes from my own school outside of a few official events (like the movie night) and nobody made much of an effort to be friendly. We had our own lockable cupboards in the communal kitchen and dining area which I never locked despite stocking my cupboard with all the usual necessities including sugar, salt, flour, soy sauce, spices, instant noodles, pasta, cooking oil, etc. One of the Swedes in our dorm noticed I never locked my cupboard and asked me why I didn’t because people could steal my food. My answer was that we were all fellow students and that if you were that hungry or ran out of flour that you had to take mine you were more than welcome to. For the evil foreign capitalist to make that statement to a socialist Swede solidified my views that image of socialist and egalitarian Sweden was only superficial.
To me, this experience was quite extraordinary because most of my friends growing up were white, most of the people I worked with at Mobil after graduating university were white and most of the students I hung out with at McGill in Montreal were also white. One of the reasons I went to Sweden was I became good friends with three exchange students in Montreal (even though they were going to a different school in Montreal and a lived in a different city in Sweden). For me to feel isolated and left in a minority “ghetto” was an unexpected and unpleasant experience to say the least. And it wasn’t only me.
One of my fellow exchange students was an older MBA student from India who was going to Wharton, possibly the best business school in the world. He and I traveled quite a bit together including a week trip to Norway because he couldn’t stand being in Sweden anymore. He hated the country more than me which is understandable because once, at the student bar that is located in the basement of the the Stockholm School of Economics (which is a little bit of a fortress as you can only get in through the main door or a code locked side door – see photo above), he was harassed by a bunch of drunk young Swedish students threatened him and yelled racial slurs at him. “We don’t like foreigners in our country; go back to where you came from” was the gist of it. The dean was aghast on hearing of this incident and asked if he wanted them to expel the students. My friend took the moral high road and said no. We were all told to avoid the historic tourist district Gamla stan (old town) at night because of all the skinheads and neo-nazi’s who were known to do a lot more than yell verbal taunts at anyone who didn’t look Swedish. Nobody told us that we also had to be wary of white supremacists and bigots in our own University.
Sure Sweden is supposed to be an open and liberal society. The political correctness that is beaten into the population from birth keeps most overt acts of racism from boiling over onto the streets for the most part. But it is, in my opinion, mostly a paper-thin facade and the sense of alienation that foreigners feel there is palpable. I’ve been back to Stockholm probably a half dozen times since my student days; the last time was in the summer of 2010 with my family in tow. Its a beautiful city in the summer and I’m sure most tourists, including us, leave with generally positive views of the peaceful and prosperous country. But a few years before that, when I was in Stockholm on business and taking a taxi back to the airport, I struck up a conversation with my Iranian driver. His English was non-existent so we had to manage with my rusty and not very good Swedish. He had left Iran with his family including wife and two kids but longed for home as he did not felt very welcome in Sweden and didn’t like the Swedes much either.
Following the riots last week, reporters went and interviewed some people in the mostly immigrant neighbourhood of Rinkeby. They interviewed an Indian-born municipal employee, Prafulla Acharya, who said opportunity in Sweden had not been the same for him, although he holds an American MBA. “This is my first respectable job, and I had to make 150 applications,” he said. ”When my Indian colleagues at Cornell got summer jobs, they worked at places like Procter & Gamble,” he added. ”Here they wash dishes.” More than 20 years after I lived in Sweden, it seems that little has changed when it comes to race relations.
Update 1 (3 March 2017): As I reflect on what I wrote about Sweden, I realise that I did ramble a bit about my personal history and experience without making clear what my ultimate point was. It was not to vilify Sweden as being a bunch of racist neo-nazi’s nor to pontificate about the evils of socialism. I actually wanted to make a more subtle point which is that nanny-statism and social control create a society that is, from my point of view, very unfree. The proliferation of politically correct thought and the codification of it in the law with our current so-called hate laws and the aggressive prosecution of them is, I think, a major attack on freedom and are a cancer on our society. Pithy phrases like “hate speech is not free speech” are disingenuous. Free speech, regardless of whether you agree or even vehemently disagree with it should be protected. Period. Restrictions on speech, whether by legal or other means (i.e., student’s protesting to shut down speakers at universities who they find disagreeable) put us one step closer to restrictions on thought as well.
Do not kid yourself, we are fighting a war of propaganda even within our own society; one where the left attempts to discredit the right by calling them ignorant and liars while distorting facts to fit their own agenda. There was a survey funded by the Province of Ontario and the City of Toronto last year to discover what Canadians really thought about immigration and refugees. It was part of the Ontario government’s propaganda campaign, oops I think I’m supposed to say public awareness campaign on Islamophobia. How is this not the government attempting to push their own views, propaganda, and basically brainwashing us while using our own tax money to do it with? The government sponsored survey of over 1,000 Ontarians revealed that:
While the survey’s respondents agreed that immigrants play a valuable role in society (72 per cent) and are an important part of our cultural identity (71 per cent), three-quarters of the survey participants said we need to focus on taking care of the people “here” instead of spending resources on refugees… Only a third of Ontarians have a positive impression of the religion and more than half feel its mainstream doctrines promote violence. Three-quarters of Ontarians said they feel Muslim immigrants have fundamentally different values, largely due to perceived gender inequality. Despite a generally positive view of immigrants, 53 per cent of Ontarians said we should only allow immigrants from countries that have similar values to our own while 74 per cent said we need to be more strict about what kinds of immigrants we accept.
In other words, most Canadians are in favour of immigration and are accepting of it. They just don’t want a lot of people with radically different values and beliefs; especially if they would then turn around and try to force those beliefs on the rest of us. I would add that I don’t have a problem with this, even though I am a minority and the son of immigrants myself. I think that all of us should make an effort to fit into our adopted society and, contrary to what liberals believe, I do not think that means that we have to change our society and values to fit newcomers. We should be accepting of differences and even somewhat accommodating – but respect of values is a two-way road which liberals tend to forget. For pointing this out, average (and generally good hearted) Canadians are tarred and feathered as racists and Islamophobes by the media and pompous liberal intellectuals in Toronto.
I have substantially different beliefs, values and customs than the average white Canadian of European stock. But I do not feel the need nor desire to force these upon the rest of Canadian society. For example, I find some merit in the Singaporean government law that allows parents to sue their adult children who refuse to take care of them in their old age. Filial piety is a concept long lost in the West. It is so archaic that most Westerns will have to look that term up in a dictionary as it fell out of use a long time ago. I’ll save you the trouble and tell you it means; respect for ones parents, elders and ancestors. Canadians believe (rightfully I think) that parents have a legal duty of care to their children because they are dependant – then why should that not apply the other way around when you are elderly and need help? But I feel no compulsion to try to force this belief on others, I can easily live my life according to my own moral code without making others do the same.
But many muslims don’t feel that way and there is a substantial number who do want to change Canada to fit them despite what liberals would have us believe. Here is a very recent petition to Trudeau to push two muslim holidays to be “statutory” national holidays. “Just as Christians celebrate Christmas, Diwali is enjoyed by the Sikhs, Hanukkah celebrated by the Jews, and these are just a few to name. Passing the two muslim holidays (Eid) as a national holiday, is the ultimate form of education and liberation as Canadians, and takes us one step closer to achieving unity.” The difference is that with the exception of Christmas; Diwali, Hanukkah and all the others are not statutory national holidays. The petition ends with the statement, “Now you see one of the reasons this is a big deal, there are a lot of us.” Yeah, there are a lot of Chinese here too but you don’t see us running around petitioning to make Chinese New Year, Mid-Autumn Festival or Buddha’s Birthday a statutory national Canadian holiday do you? And lest you think this is a one-off occurrence, while everyone was focused on Justin Trudeau’s using French to answer an English question during a town-hall meeting in Quebec; they glossed over another question at the same meeting where, “Later, a woman wearing a hijab read from notes, in broken English, asking on behalf of all Canadian Muslims if Trudeau would consider giving them a public holiday for Eid al-Fitr, the holiday marking the end of the Islamic holy month of fasting, Ramadan.”
After President Trump’s executive order banning travel from seven muslim-majority countries followed by the Quebec mosque shooting, the liberal media shrill cries of Islamophobia have only grown louder. Let me be clear – nobody should live in fear, especially in a place of worship. Nobody should have their life threatened because of their religious beliefs and everyone should be free to practice their own faith as long as it doesn’t impinge on other’s rights. But unfortunately, the Toronto Star and the Canadian Brainwashing Corporation likes to run headlines like “Ontario facing epidemic of Islamophobia” just because people voice their real concerns and beliefs in an attempt to shame us into accepting their politically-correct views or at least to keep us silent. This is part of the article the Toronto Star ran:
Like many, Shazlin Rahman, whose family moved to Toronto from Malaysia a decade ago, is still trying to digest what all these changes mean to her as a Muslim. “We have lost our sense of security and safety. A mosque isn’t only a place we go to pray. It is a social hub for us. We can pray at home, but we go there also for social support,” said Rahman, 34, who works at a non-profit organization.
Oh really? I hope Shazlin Rahman was vocal in Malaysia in protesting the muslim Bumiputra’s codified discrimination and racism against the Chinese and Indian minorities. I hope she is as indignant about her home country’s history including the infamous race riots and mass murder of Chinese in 1969. In fact, the racist “affirmative action” laws put in place in Malaysia were a direct result of the riots in an attempt to placate the muslims from further racial violence. I hope that she strongly denounced the prosecution of a Malaysian Chinese couple (with a maximum sentence of 15 years in prison) for posting a photo on Facebook of themselves eating pork during Ramadan. Strangely, I never see the Western liberal media jumping up and down about “Sinophobia” or human rights groups questioning the treatment of minorities in muslim majority countries. Where were the Western liberals while we were busy evacuating our staff from our Jakarta office in 1998 as muslims rioted again and murdered and raped the local Chinese minority (many of whom were there for generations). You could hear a pin-drop through the combined outrage expressed by Western governments, NGO’s and media.
I don’t hate or fear islam or muslims. I have had numerous muslim friends and acquaintances in many of the different places I have lived, including Canada. We can all live together in relative peace as long as we can respect and accommodate each other – but that is a two-way street. I make no apologies and reject the label Islamophobe (as should the majority of Canadians who, as the polls show, hold similar views) as it is a stupid label made up by politically correct morons to stifle debate and free thought. I do not need to “be educated” and I am certainly far from being “ignorant” – unlike many of the brain-washed, over-educated, politically-correct and mildly mentally-retarded smug liberals I have run across.
Update 2 (9 March 2017): Someone wrote this as part of a rebuttal about the current news about possible Russian-Trump connections and Trump’s allegations of wire-tapping. “We DO know that Russian TV paid teen-agers in Rinkby, Sweden, to ‘play up’ to the police in Malmo the day AFTER Trump claimed that Sweden was in serious trouble due to their Muslim immigration.” I thought that this story was dead and buried; I was wrong. I posted this reply:
Do we also know that “Rinkeby” is a suburb of Stockholm and nowhere near Malmo, Sweden’s third largest city? Do we know that Russian TV paid them to riot in 2010 as well? Or maybe in 2013 as well just to be sure that we didn’t miss it the first time.
Actually, I went and looked up those reports and it seems that the Russian news team came after the riot along with other foreign media and was trying to pay the youth to put on a show for them to film. That is very different than paying them to stage the original riot.
It is so hard to cut through all the misleading reports and outright lies from all media sources so one can be forgiven for misinterpreting an article that quotes another report that’s been translated from a foreign language. The original translated report from Danish radio is here. It was picked up by Swedish news and reported here and then went out to the rest of the world via papers like the Independent here. If you get past the headlines which try to make it sound like that Russian TV paid youth’s to riot (part of the Trump is a Russian stooge conspiracy theory), it is clear that these unconfirmed events happened well after the world’s media descended on Rinkeby to cover the riot story. Chronologically, it would be Trump makes dumb statement about Swedish immigrants; two days later riot in Sweden; two days later global media comes and Russian TV allegedly tries to bribe some immigrant kids with Kr400 to do something bad so they can film it. Trying to sort out the truth from the propaganda is becoming very tiresome and time consuming so can the media please do their job properly? Please?