On Wednesday’s Breitbart News Daily, documentary filmmaker Ami Horowitz told the story of his venture into one of the controversial Muslim “no-go zones” in Europe.
Horowitz recalled traveling to Stockholm, Sweden, because, “believe it or not, Sweden has taken in more Islamic refugees per capita than any Western nation, maybe even than any nation on the earth, including Turkey.”
“Over the last two years, they’ve taken in over 350,000 Syrian refugees,” he said. “The reason why I went there was to investigate why Sweden has become the rape capital of Europe. Rape was not unknown, but relatively minor. There were few incidents of rape, let’s say about ten years ago. And rape has absolutely skyrocketed in Europe. So that was the initial impetus on why I went there. Of course, we found out that there was, in fact, a correlation between the immigration and the rape.”
“What happened to me was, when I hear the words ‘no-go area,’ I go. That’s kind of what I do. People like me are not understood by people who are not like you and me,” he told Kassam. “People have a hard time understanding why we do what we do. But you get it.”
“Once we crossed the threshold into this area called Husby – and by the way, I want to point out, beautiful leafy suburb, like all of these no-go areas I went to outside of Stockholm. Really, it’s beautiful. They’re nice, and they’re quiet, nice buildings and wide boulevards. So it looked like there’s not going to be an issue here; this can’t be like a real thing,” he said.
“We cross into it, and I would say not even fifteen, maybe five seconds after we crossed in, five guys approached me and my crew,” he continued. “They said to us, ‘You guys gotta get out of here right now.’ My crew, being Swedish, they turned around and they booked out. I, being stupid, decided I’m going to stay and try to figure this thing out with these guys.”
“Before the words can come out of my mouth, trying to explain what I’m doing there, the five guys jump on top of me. They were punching me, they were choking me, they were kicking me,” Horowitz said. “Normally, when I’ve been in fights before, thank God, I’m not the greatest fighter in the world, within five seconds somebody usually pulls the two apart. And I figured this is a very crowded square. I figured people would have pulled them off me, obviously. And when I noticed that wasn’t happening, I kind of peeked out of – my arms were covering up my head – I peeked out, and I noticed people in the square were pointing. They were laughing. Clearly, nobody was coming to my aid. I knew that if I wanted to get out of this in one piece, I had to get out myself.”
He recalled getting to his knees and pulling the nearest assailant down by the shirt. “I hit him as hard as I could in the throat,” he said. “They kind of let go for just a moment, enough for me to get up and run. The problem was that my legs were all charley horsed because they kept kicking my legs. My arms, my legs, that’s what they were really getting access to.”
“They took me down again, and they dragged me into a building, and I thought to myself, ‘This is where it’s going to end. They’re dragging me out of sight to finish me off,’” Horowitz said. “Within seconds of them starting the attack again – thank God, it was an apartment building vestibule – somebody opened their apartment door, and for some reason, spooked them, and they took off. That’s how I survived the attack.”
Horowitz recalled his assailants “saying something to themselves in Arabic,” in addition to yelling, “What are you doing here? Stop filming! Stop filming!” as they beat him to the ground.
“After that, it was mostly me screaming, like a little kid.” he added.
He noted that he had visited the area the previous day to scope out filming locations, without issue, so he surmised his return in the company of a group carrying video equipment prompted the attack.
“Let’s define what a ‘no-go area’ means, really, at least in Sweden,” he said. “What’s interesting is, there’s an actual debate out there whether or not these places even exist, right? You go to CNN, the BBC, and you listen to people discuss no-go areas in France, in Belgium, in Sweden, in Germany. And there’s an actual debate whether this is real or the figment of the conservative imagination. I can tell you for a fact they exist. And in Sweden what that means is, and this is what the police tell me, they use the words ‘no-go area.’ They said, in their words, ‘If we’re chasing a suspect, and they cross into this no-go area, we simply stop pursuit.’ And if we want to enter this area, we have to go in with an armed convoy, as if you’re going into like the kill zone in Afghanistan.”
“Same goes for emergency services,” Horowitz added. “In fact, the emergency services in Sweden sued the government to not go into these areas unless they’re with military transport – literally what they sued. These areas used to have police stations, like every other suburb in Stockholm. They came under such constant attack, it became so dangerous, they moved out their police stations. This is, again, their words – ‘a state within a state.’”
Kassam said he has personally observed similar problems in ‘no-go’ and “you wouldn’t want to go” areas in continental Europe and the U.K., making mainstream media denials of the no-go zones surreal to his ears. He suspected many of the reporters who deny the existence of these areas simply have never visited one.
“I think there’s a lot of truth to that,” Horowitz replied. “Now, we’ve got to be careful because words matter, and I think the problem with the Left is that words matter less than they do to us on the Right. What I mean by that is, we need to be careful what we define as a no-go area. If I think somewhere is dangerous to go to, and maybe not the best place for a guy with a tefillin and a yarmulke to go to – that’s not exactly what I would call a no-go area. That’s a dangerous area they should probably stay away from. That even exists in the United States.”
By contrast, he said a true no-go area is a place where “literally, you can’t go in if you’re not Islamic, and certainly you don’t go in if you’re the police, unless you have, like I said, an armed convoy, U.S. military style. That’s what I define as a no-go area.”
Kassam disagreed, contending that “any area of any Western country where anyone of non-Arab or non-Northern African descent feels in the slightest bit uncomfortable or threatened, that is a no-go zone because that should not exist anywhere in the West.” He argued that accepting such outrages in the slightest is the top of a “slippery slope” that can lead to more severe forms of ghettoization. Horowitz conceded this was a “fair point.”
Horowitz said he’s doing fine after the attack, which happened a few months ago. “I didn’t break anything. I was just very bruised up,” he said. “Unfortunately, I’ve gotten my butt kicked a few times, so I have a good sense of how to protect myself, protect the vital areas.”
“It felt like an eternity, but it wasn’t more than two or three minutes overall, which, believe me, two or three minutes is a very, very long time when every second is somewhat painful,” he said. “Thank God, I’m fine, all healed up, back to where I was.”
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.
LISTEN:
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.