The wave of racial violence presently sweeping Sweden, and the radically different ways the government reacts to these individual events tells us volumes about a nation slowly and fatally overdosing on white guilt.
There have been two reasonably analogous killings in Sweden recently, asides a slew of other violence – grenade attacks, gang rapes, shootings. One has elicited an outpouring of grief that would shame the post-Diana, Princess of Wales British. The other warranted barely an embarrassed shuffling of feet in the corridors of power.
The first of these killings was in August. An Eritrean migrant committed what was, if reports are to be believed, a politically-motivated terror attack. Afton Bladet, Sweden’s best-selling daily reported last week the killer’s admission that he decided to strike in “revenge” for having his asylum application rejected by the Swedish state.
Going directly from the migration office where he received the news, he took a packet of kitchen knifes, tested them for sharpness, and stabbed a white, Swedish mother and her son to death in an IKEA store. This was terrorism – politically and racially motivated.
Abraham Ukbagabir was not deranged, but a lone wolf killer – which the state psychiatric report has already confirmed.
The other attack was just last week, a multiple stabbing in a “troubled” school where a native Swede killed a teaching assistant and student. This too was terrorism, politically and racially motivated – made perfectly clear by the suicide note left by the killer, in which he states his desire “to do something about immigration”.
Anton Lundin-Petterson chose the two he killed and others he attacked according to their skin colour – these are not facts that have gone unnoticed by the mainstream media.
Here the similarities end. No attention was spared for the victims of the school attack, with key figures pouring in to offer condolences and to condemn the murderer. Prime minister Stefan Löfven cancelled prime minister’s questions in parliament and immediately made his way to the scene of the crime.
Speaking in the lobby of school, Mr. Löfven told reporters: “This is a black day for Sweden. I think of the victims and their families, students and staff, and the whole of the affected community. No words can describe what they are going through right now”.
Other government ministers, party leaders, European Union Commissioners, even the King got in on the act. The following day, hundreds laid flowers and lit candles outside the gates of the school. And all were united in condemning a terrible act of terrorism. One Swedish columnist went so far as to call it “the worst terrorist attack in Sweden since 1940”.
The reaction to the IKEA attack could not have been more different. The same number of people were stabbed to death in an undeniable act of terrorism, yet life went on as normal – the Prime Minister declined to visit, issued no condemnation, and only belatedly sent a minister to the store three days later.
His Majesty Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden has been conspicuously silent. Hundreds did not flock to the store to lay flowers – yet those killed were not any less innocent, or their families less deserving of sympathy.
Unlike the school attack which was acknowledged as a terrorist attack almost immediately, IKEA is being treated as plain crime. The word ‘terrorism’ has not crossed the lips of Swedish pundit or politician.
In an emblematic exhibition of how grotesquely disfigured the priorities of modern Sweden has become. In the immediate aftermath of the IKEA killings the state engaged in a bout of what amounts to little more than victim blaming.
Rather than looking to the spectacularly violent migrant communities the Swedish state chose to import, it deployed police patrols to protect migration centres from native Swedes they presumed would be looking for revenge. IKEA itself decided the knife was to blame for the attacks, not the killer, and stopped selling them – gun control for a country where they are already illegal.
The clear message the Swedish government spells out is that as a native resident of your home nation, it is always your fault. These double standards on murder are the bitter harvest of white guilt that is killing what was once Europe’s most peaceful nation.
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