![]() Opinion polls suggest they are growing ever stronger. ![]() The Sweden Democrats are the anti-immigration populist force in Sweden - no longer a fringe element but the third–largest party after the election of 2014. As Peter Ågren, police chief in central Stockholm, put it: ‘Sometimes we do not dare to say how things really are because we believe it will play into the hands of the Sweden Democrats.’ As we now know, police officers in Stockholm are instructed not to reveal the ethnicity or nationality of any suspects lest they be accused of racism. The trouble was that they were trying to deal with a problem but would not speak its name. The police were shocked enough by the harassment to try to come up with a strategy to handle the groups of molesters at the festival - a strategy that was evidently unsuccessful. The police claimed that there were ‘relatively few crimes and arrests considering the number of participants’. The youngest of the victims was 12 years old. According to internal police reports the groups were ‘so-called refugee youths primarily from Afghanistan’. It began in 2014 and it also went on during last year’s festival. During the We Are Sthlm music festival, large groups of young men harassed girls sexually. Then last week Sweden’s own stories began to emerge. Over the last week, we have been told over and over that the real issue is men, not any particular culture - that Swedish men are no better. Another Aftonbladet article said that reporting on the Cologne attacks was bowing to right-wing extremism. An article in Aftonbladet, Sweden’s largest tabloid, argued that it was racist to point out that the perpetrators in Cologne had been described as North African or Arab, since German men had carried out sexual assaults during Bavaria’s Oktober-fest. Instead, we were told that the events in Cologne were not unusual. When hundreds of women were reported to have been molested and abused in Cologne - at the hands of an organised mob - the reaction from Swedish politicians and pundits ought to have been one of outrage. Sweden prides itself on its sexual equality and has even pioneered a feminist foreign policy. ![]() The answer can be discovered in the reaction to the Cologne attacks. ![]() But he ought to be asking this: what made the police and even journalists cover up the truth? Stefan Löfven, our Prime Minister, has denounced a ‘double betrayal’ of women and has promised an investigation. Only now is the truth emerging, both about the attacks and the cover-ups. The Germans were lucky in Sweden, similar attacks have been taking place for more than a year and the authorities are still playing catch up. It took days for police to acknowledge the extent of the mass attacks on women celebrating New Year’s Eve in Cologne. ![]()
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