Posted By Bruce Bawer
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 essentially verboten –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 of children, 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?
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 essentially verboten –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 of children, 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?
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