Europe's Path to Hatred

On the left's failed immigration leadership

Last week, I had a conversation with a family member about current events. We talked about the Magdeburg attack. We talked about the Pakistani man in London who beat his little girl to death, then fled the country claiming he was justified. We talked about the fact that Sweden has taken more immigrants than any other European nation since the Syrian refugee crisis, and now has the continent’s highest rate of rape.

Indeed, I noted that in 2018, Swedish Television’s investigative program Uppdrag Granskning analyzed 843 rape and attempted rape convictions across Sweden over a five-year period and found that 40% of those convicted were from the Middle East and Africa, even though less than 7% of Sweden’s population comes from those regions. Meanwhile, 42% were native-born citizens, who make up 80% of the population.

To put this in perspective, I explained that should one ever visit Stockholm and take a stroll along the fragrant kiosks of Drottninggatan, or over the cobblestones of the Gamla Stan, and happen to pass a gentleman of Middle Eastern or African extraction, that person is approximately 11 times more likely to be convicted of rape or attempted rape than a native-born Swede, relative to their share of the population.

That represents a risk more than an order of magnitude greater. And to put that in perspective, I said, imagine if the homicide rate in the United States rose from 7.5 per 100,000 people, as of 2022, to 75 per 100,000 people, which is on par with the bloodiest years of the War in Afghanistan. In other words, it would be like the quiet city of Regina, the capital of Saskatchewan, Canada, which had a homicide rate of 7.5 in 2021, suddenly becoming as violent as one of the bloodiest years in one of the bloodiest conflicts in modern history.

As our conversation continued, we talked about how the ongoing Islamization of Europe is profoundly harmful to Enlightenment values, civil liberties, and liberal democracies, including for Muslims, not to mention the safety of young girls regardless of background. Meanwhile, instead of addressing the issue, countries like the UK are aggressively silencing their own citizens if they dare say anything about it.

The problem is so horrifically out of control that English citizens are now being arrested for posting opinions online or thinking in the wrong place.

When I wrote the essay “London Has Fallen,” in order to describe this abandonment of free speech principles, a British friend and journalist, no less, told me the essay was “hackneyed” and that Prime Minister Keir Starmer — who has aggressively rolled back free speech protections in the country, made Britain a global laughingstock over the matter, and even suggested he would support blasphemy laws to protect Muslims — is an example of “real leadership.”

When even journalists are siding with the pro-censorship crowd, you know the rot runs deep. Starmer has since proven his “strong leadership” by killing a free speech law in part because British universities worried it would offend communist China. In October, a man was criminally convicted for silently praying in the wrong place. There are many cases like this, and I shared some of these stories with my journalist friend, who chose to reply with radio silence.

But more recent events, and Elon Musk now weighing in by throwing his support behind AfD and speaking out about gang rapes in the UK, have sparked fresh debate — and fresh outrage. That anger is fueling support for groups such as AfD, not out of bigotry, but out of sheer desperation. But my friends, history bears grim witness to the kind of paths these sentiments invariably pave.