‘What’s Going On?’ – BBC Wakes Up to Sweden Bombing Epidemic Years After Breitbart

sweden
STIG-AKE JONSSON/AFP via Getty Images
Jack Montgomery

The publicly-funded British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) has woken up to Sweden’s bombing epidemic years after Breitbart News.

In an analysis article titled ‘Sweden’s 100 explosions this year: What’s going on?’, the BBC acknowledged the epidemic of gang crime, gun crime, and criminal use of explosives which Breitbart London has been reporting for years — while the mainstream media scoffed and continued to hail the country as a Scandinavial left-liberal paradise.

“Swedish police are dealing with unprecedented levels of attacks, targeting city centre locations [as well as heavily migrant-populated suburbs],” the so-called public interest broadcaster conceded.

“This category of crime was not even logged prior to 2017. Then, in 2018, there were 162 explosions and in the past two months alone the bomb squad have been called to almost 30,” they reported.

The report managed to avoid directly citing the immigration connection for over twenty paragraphs, however, and then only addressed the issue obliquely, observing that  “Swedish police do not record or release the ethnicity of suspects or convicted criminals, but intelligence chief Linda H Straaf says many do share a similar profile.”

That profile, according to Straaf, is “second- or third-generation immigrants” in “socio-economically weak areas” — what some would call no-go zones — but the BBC was quick to follow this acknowledgement with a quote from a left-liberal criminologist downplaying this reality:

Amir Rostami says ethnicity rarely plays a big role in gang membership in Sweden. “When I interview gang members… the gang is their new country. The gang is their new identity.”

However, Rostami did tell the BBC that the use of hand grenades in Sweden, in particular, is almost without parallel, “the only relevant comparison [being] Mexico, plagued by gang violence.”

“This is unique in countries that pretty much don’t have a war or don’t have a long history of terrorism,” the academic admitted.

Breitbart News received (erroneous) pushback for reporting that the prevalence of grenade attacks in Sweden is comparable to Mexico as long ago as 2017, years before the mainstream media in the form of the BBC appears to have finally acknowledged the scale of the crisis.

Indeed, Oliver Lane, who now leads Breitbart’s London and Europe bureau, was reporting on the ground in Sweden as long ago as 2015, interviewing top police officer Torsten Elofsson, a 42-year veteran of law enforcement in the no-go zone pockmarked city of Malmo, shortly after his retirement.

“Malmo is infamous for explosions,” he told Lane, long before the BBC thought to ask “What’s going on?”

“Yet thankfully nobody has been killed by the explosions yet – some of them are just used to frighten people,” he added.

Sadly, this is no longer the case.

“Many people think the media and the politicians have merged together to make people believe that it is safe and sound to live here, and there are no problems,” Elofsson added.

“The media says immigration is always a positive thing because we have an ageing population and we need a young workforce to come from other countries. People don’t buy that picture 100 per cent. Living here you can see a lot of the crimes are committed by people originating abroad.”

Indeed, the left-liberal media-political establishment were certainly quick to close ranks when U.S. President Donald Trump made his (in)famous statement about “what happened in Sweden” in 2017, with commentators in Sweden, the United States, and the wider West all rejoining that there was, in essence, nothing to be alarmed over.

The BBC appeared to acknowledge this reflexive defensiveness, if only tacitly, in its own article on “What’s going on”, quoting Stockholm University professor Christian Christensen as confessing to a certain surprise at the lack of coverage of explosions in the broadcast media — but at the same time revealing that there is a concern “that Sweden is used symbolically as proof of problems with immigration, proof of problems with leftist policies”.

Sweden’s immediate neighbours are proving increasingly reluctant to go along with the charade, however, with their fellow Scandinavians in Denmark electing to close their border with the country — despite both being members of the European Union’s frontierless Schengen area — as a result of Sweden’s gang violence and explosions problem spilling into their own country.

The BBC may not deserve too much credit for finally acknowledging that all is not well in the left’s symbolic utopia turned embarrassing cautionary tale, however, given the virulently anti-Trump New York Times conceded the point to Breitbart some 20 months ago — still late, but not so late as their British fellow-travellers.

Which mainstream media outlet proves to be the last horse to cross the finishing line on the subject remains to be seen.

Follow Jack Montgomery on Twitter: @JackBMontgomery
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