The MSM Faces the Truth About Sweden
Every day since he began running for president, the international media have scoured Donald Trump's statements and actions in search of something to mock. One day last February, they fastened on an unscripted remark he made at a rally in Florida. “We’ve got to keep our country safe,” he told the crowd. “You look at what’s happening in Germany, you look at what’s happening last night in Sweden. Sweden, who would believe this? Sweden. They took in large numbers. They’re having problems like they never thought possible.”
Trump went on to mention Brussels, Nice, and Paris, the sites of recent terrorist attacks. But the media zeroed in on Sweden, because Trump had made it sound as if something specific and terrible, some act of terrorism or Muslim gang crime or some such thing, had happened in that country the night before. As it happened, that was not the case. “There were questions,” reported the Guardian, “about whether Trump had confused Sweden with Sehwan in Pakistan, where more than 85 people were killed in a suicide bombing at the Sufi shrine on Thursday.” The Guardian also cited dubious Swedish statistics purportedly indicating that crime levels in Sweden had been stable for a long time.
As it turned out, Trump had been referring to an appearance on Tucker Carlson's Fox News program by filmmaker Ari Horowitz, who had discussed his documentary about the devastating impact of mass Muslim immigration on Sweden. But nobody in the mainstream media wanted to talk about that. No, they preferred to take the opportunity to present Trump as clueless and irresponsible. The New York Times ran articles two days in a row about his supposed gaffe, and claimed that everyone in Sweden had been “flabbergasted” by it. Swedish officials and journals had a particularly good time dismissing it. Former Prime Minister Carl Bildt tweeted: “Sweden? Terror attack? What has he been smoking?” The newspaper Aftonbladet jokingly provided a list of some not-terribly-earthshaking events that had taken place in Sweden on the night in question. For example: “Due to harsh weather in northern parts of Sweden the road E10 was closed between Katterjakk and Riksgransen.”
(and so the eyes of the MSM continued to be averted and the truth distorted or AWOL)
. . . .
Yet as the months went by, more conscientious observers found other reasons to recall Trump's passing remark. In April, after a terrorist ran down pedestrians with a truck on Drottninggatan in Stockholm, The Telegraph (UK) actually published an article by Hayley Dixon whose headline explicitly raised the question of whether Trump had, perhaps, been right. “Just over six weeks after Donald Trump was mocked across the world for suggesting that Sweden was the victim of a terror attack,” wrote Dixon, “at least three people have been left dead when a hijacked truck ploughed into pedestrians.” Dixon went on to provide an overview – surprisingly honest by mainstream-media standards – of Swedish immigration levels, integration problems, and no-go zones.
Yes, some of us have been writing about these things for a long time. But we've done so in non-mainstream media, at “alternative” websites, and our reports have been routinely smeared in established news organs as exaggerated, hysterical, apocryphal, racist, and/or Islamophobic. We may wish that the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, and the news divisions of CBS, NBC, and ABC – and their equivalents abroad – didn't matter. But they do. To millions of folks who still buy dead-tree newspapers or turn on the TV at dinnertime to get their news, those traditional sources of information, however full they are of fake news, remain their windows on the world. And so when a paper like the Telegraph runs a piece that at least begins to tell the truth about Sweden, it's a big deal. For many readers, it will mark the first time they ever discovered that Sweden isn't a paradise on earth.
Last month, even the New York Times got into the act. Sort of. On December 10, it reported on a Molotov cocktail attack on a Gothenburg synagogue. Of course, being the Times, it managed to sidestep the words Muslim and Islam . . . . .
Four days after its report on the synagogue bombing, the Times ran an op-ed headlined “The Uncomfortable Truth About Swedish Anti-Semitism” in which Swedish writer Paulina Neuding put the bombing into perspective, noting that her country was undergoing a tsunami of violent attacks on Jewish targets. The Times actually allowed Neuding to mention, nine paragraphs into the piece, that the chief perpetrators of these attacks are Muslims.
[Worth a read in its entirety]
https://pjmedia.com/homeland-security/msm-faces-truth-sweden/