Jimmie Akesson and Mattias Karlsson, both leaders of the Sweden Democrats, penned a Wall Street Journal op-ed on Wednesday supporting Trump’s characterization of a Muslim immigrant-led crime crisis in Sweden.
“If anything, he understated them. Sweden took in about 275,000 asylum-seekers from 2014-16 – more per capita than any other European country,” they wrote, adding that “riots and social unrest have become a part of everyday life” and vowing to “make Sweden safe again”.
“Riots and social unrest have become a part of everyday life,” Akesson and Karlsson wrote. “Police officers, firefighters and ambulance personnel are regularly attacked. Serious riots in 2013, involving many suburbs with large immigrant populations, lasted for almost a week. Gang violence is booming. Despite very strict firearms laws, gun violence is five times as common in Sweden, in total, as in the capital cities of our three Nordic neighbors combined.”
They then sent a warning to America.
“For the sake of the American people, with whom we share so many strong historical and cultural ties, we can only hope that the leaders in Washington won’t make the same mistakes that our socialist and liberal politicians did.”
In their piece, the Sweden Democrat leaders also commented on anti-Semitism in Malmö, a much-debated topic in the past few years. “Jews in Malmö are threatened, harassed and assaulted in the streets. Many have left the city, becoming internal refugees in their country of birth,” they wrote.
Swedish Democrats are more conservative than other parties though they are more liberal than U.S. conservatives.
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Sweden’s justice and migration minister Morgan Johansson told The Local on Thursday that the government would submit its own opinion piece to the newspaper to counter the claims.
“I note that it has gone so far that the Sweden Democrats are intentionally harming Sweden by lying about how things are. We can’t let that go unchallenged. They’re painting a picture of a country characterized by violence, when it’s the exact opposite. Not to mention the risk of being the victim of deadly violence in the US is four times higher than in Sweden,” Johansson said.
“I would say that perhaps the US president ought to be a bit more critical of his sources and not get all his news from reports on Fox News,” commented Johansson. He further added that they are urban myths spread by far-right media.
I guess he’s joined the war against Fox.
More than one in five of the foreign-born population is unemployed and it struggles with a critical housing shortage. But Johansson argued that cherry-picking statistics and exaggerating the issues faced by the nation risked harming the debate.
