Quote of the Day:

How can a Swedish woman raped by an illegal Muslim immigrant be so bursting with racial guilt that she hesitates to report the crime to the police for fear that her report might lead to her rapist's punishment or deportation?

–Bruce Bawer in "The Terrifying Way Sweden Is Killing Itself"

 

If you want to learn about a real "rape culture," the one progressives don't want to talk about, go to Sweden.

Bruce Bawer writes this morning that Sweden is committing suicide by refusing to acknowledge the attitudes and often violent behavior towards women of a large segment of Sweden's population, unassimilated immigrants from Islamic countries who have zero respect the rights of women (to put it mildly).

My colleague Carrie Lukas acknowledged that immigration without assimilation can pose threats to the rights and safety of women. Carrie wrote this in the wake of the outbreaks of attacks on women in Cologne and other European cities, perpetrated by men from the Middle East and North Africa, that occurred in 2016 on New Year's Eve.

European elites were in denial about the threat then (which is admittedly one that is difficult for a Western society that prides itself to come to grips with). Bawer writes about how this denial is playing out in Sweden:  

For anyone curious about self-destructive psychopathologies, it is a grimly fascinating phenomenon. Why, of all places, Sweden? How can a Swedish woman raped by an illegal Muslim immigrant be so bursting with racial guilt that she hesitates to report the crime to the police for fear that her report might lead to her rapist's punishment or deportation? Or, more generally, because news of the offense might result in an increase in “Islamophobia?"

This is the kind of madness that's going on in Sweden now. More than any other country in Europe, it has a government and a media that are in denial about the truth, a legal system that punishes those who dare to tell the truth, and a people who have been brainwashed for decades with the vile lie that they have a moral obligation to hand their country over to hostile, despotic strangers from far away.

. . .

Indeed. This is a country where rapes by Muslim men are systematically ignored by the authorities or responded to with minimal punishment. Routinely, Swedish courts refuse to return these monsters – some of whom have repeatedly subjected small boys and girls to violent sexual abuse – to their home countries for fear that they'll be put in danger. In other words, Swedish judges care more about the safety of foreign rapists than that of Swedish children.

(No wonder U.S. News and World Report has just named Sweden the best country in the world to be an immigrant. Yet another cockeyed ranking. The proper question isn't which country is best for immigrants, but which country has the most sensible immigration policy.)

It's a country where even prominent Swedish feminists – fanatical boosters of multiculturalism – are now moving out of Muslim-heavy neighborhoods not only because of the Muslim rapists but because of the Muslim “morality police,” who are less concerned with monitoring rapists than with controlling women's conduct. (One such feminist organized “coffee shop meetings” with Muslim male community leaders in an attempt to resolve the situation, but gave up.)

It's a country where the government rolls out the red carpet for returning ISIS members, giving them special benefits, in hopes that they'll see the light and put down their weapons.

It's a country where, while Muslim rapists and terrorists are forgiven, critics of immigrant conduct are punished. In May, a 70-year-old woman in Dalarna, Sweden, was arrested for writing on Facebook in 2015 about immigrants who “set cars on fire and urinate and defecate in the streets.” (She faces up to four years in prison.)

No surprise, then, that on July 7, Jyllands-Posten reported that the Swedish government plans to alter the nation's Constitution in such a way as to give itself the power to limit online free speech about precisely these ticklish matters. Among other things, wrote Jyllands-Posten, it will become illegal “for certain websites to publicize information about private persons' ethnicity or conviction of crimes.”

As Carrie pointed out, "the triumph of classical liberalism, with the supremacy of the rule of law and elevation of reason, decorum, and nonviolence" have long guaranteed the rights of women in Western societies. "it is understood and accepted that men aren’t supposed to use physical strength to dominate women. If they do, they will be punished – not only with the force of law, but also with public shame," Carrie wrote.

Respect for women was not always the norm, as Carrie pointed out, and it still isn't in many parts of the world. Shouldn't people who come to western nations be required to assimilate and at the very least not believe that treating women as inferiors is a right?

Feminists are loathe to talk about unassimilated immigrants and the harm some pose to our values and to the safety of women. And, yes, it is a difficult issue. But not confronting it is proving, Bawer posits, suicidal in one advanced European nation.