Bet Mark Steyn has come to really hate being proved right all the time.
I may not know much, but I know Malmö – although eighteen years ago one of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s many in-house lefties, Jill Singer, accused me of exaggerating the city’s transformation. I offered to fly the late Ms Singer and an ABC crew to Sweden so that she could accompany me on what, by 2006, had already become my annual ritual in Malmö. The eminent presenter declined, being more concerned, fulminating-theocrat-wise, by George W Bush, on the grounds that “a faith-based US President …scares the bejesus out of me”. So, as in previous years, I walked my walk alone:
After that conference with Lars in Copenhagen a couple of years ago, I took the train over the water to Malmö in Sweden. Malmö was one of the first Christian cities in what was then Denmark. It’s now on course to become the first Muslim city in Sweden. I sat and had a coffee in a nice little place in a beautiful medieval square in the heart of town. Aside from a few modernist excrescences, it would not have looked so different in the early days of the Lutheran church. I got lucky, and fell into conversation with a couple of cute Swedish blondes. Fine-looking ladies. I shall miss Scandinavian blondes when they’re extinct. At dusk, and against their advice, I took a 20-minute walk to Rosengård. As you stroll the sidewalk, the gaps between blondes grow longer, and the gaps between young bearded Muslim men grow shorter. And then eventually you’re in the housing projects, and all the young boys kicking a soccer ball around are Muslim, and every single woman is covered – including many who came from “moderate” Muslim countries and did not adopt the headscarf or hijab until they emigrated to Sweden, where it’s compulsory, at least in Rosengård.
Do you remember the rationalization Israel used at the Oslo Accords? “Land for peace”? In Sweden, which is about as far as you can get from Gaza and the West Bank, they’re also trading land for peace, and as in Gaza unlikely to wind up with either. The Jews are already fleeing Malmö: Soon it will be like Tangiers or Baghdad or any other Arab town with a weed-strewn, decaying “old Jewish cemetery” and no one left to tend it. But it’s not just the Jewish graveyard that’s destined to be abandoned, but the Lutheran ones, too.
I would urge anyone to do that twilight walk from downtown Malmö to Rosengård, as the blondes thin and the bearded men multiply. That’s Europe’s future walking toward you.
For around a decade-and-a-half it was a more-or-less scientific experiment. Until the Covid clobbered my jetsetting, each year I would mark the precise point at which the last blonde was glimpsed and the beards took over – and each year that point advanced just a little more towards the centre of Malmö. By 2008 (which is a long time ago now: Greta Thunberg was in kindergarten) the “foreign-born” population of Rosengård was already 86 per cent. Sixty per cent had not completed elementary school.
How’s that working out? Sweden is not to everyone’s tastes, but it was, until recently, a peaceful and well-ordered society. Today, in a wholly transformed land where you can be shot dead in the crossfire at a pub and the courts say child gang-rape does not count as a serious crime, you might think that the ire of ethnic Swedes would be directed other than toward Jews. But in 2016 in Östersund I talked to a young lady whose daughter and her friends had been sexually assaulted in the municipal swimming baths by “migrants”. The staff who witnessed it sized up the cocksure young lads, swimming in the pool (in defiance of regulations) in their urine-stained and malodorous underwear, and declined to attempt their removal.
“There must have been other men there,” I said. “Didn’t they do anything?”
My friend laughed. “Swedish men are manginas,” she said – a portmanteau of “man” and “vagina” with which I was not hitherto familiar.
It is the logic of arithmetic: Follow the science, as Greta’s climate chums say. A keffiyeh is a little light accessorising; the full body bag will come later. So I’ll repeat my observation from almost two decades back: The Swedes are also trading land for peace, and will wind up with neither. A society that has nothing to die for has nothing to live for, and thus the last Europeans rush to embrace those who will supplant them.
This is what you get when you put in weak leaders.
I have friends in Malmö who tell me it is a war zone. They teach the kids to jump in the bushes to get away from sexual predators (Muslims) instead of stop, drop and roll.
When they went woke and let everyone in, it was beginning of the destruction of a very pretty country. It was nice to visit, now not so much.
Let that be a lesson to America about immigration, especially illegal. Those leeches are in Sweden for the free money the socialist system gives them. They return the favor by raping the women and blowing stuff up. Their murder rate is skyrocketing.