On October 6, the radio program P4 Halland reported that an imam in Halmstad called homosexuality a "virus." In a video posted on his mosque's YouTube channel, the imam talked about raising children. He said that parents need to make sure their children have good immune systems, as there are many viruses floating around in society -- one of them being homosexuality. The lecture was held in association with the Sobriety Movement's Educational Activities (Nykterhetsrörelsens bildningsverksamhet). Its members immediately terminated their collaboration with the mosque.
Commenting in the Swedish media on the commotion that erupted after the imam's statement, Mohamed Omar, an author and social commentator, wrote that this view of homosexuality is the rule rather than the exception in Swedish mosques: "As a Muslim, I have had the opportunity to visit mosques all over Sweden. Homophobia is the norm everywhere. I have heard far worse things than 'homosexuality is a virus.' In no mosque, I repeat nowhere, have I encountered teachings of tolerance for homosexuality."
The imam's statement was reported to the police, on suspicion of violating hate speech laws, but the investigation was immediately dropped. According to the prosecutor, the main purpose of the lecture was to talk about parenting, not to incite hatred against homosexuals.
October 7: TV4's popular investigative journalism TV program, Cold Facts (Kalla Fakta), revealed that public health centers in areas with high immigrant populations perform so-called "virginity tests" on young girls. The practice was exposed when three young women of Middle Eastern descent were equipped with hidden cameras and sent undercover to three health centers. Another person, posing as the girls' aunt, insisted on "virginity tests." The doctors (several of whom were immigrants) ignored the loud protests from the girls, and examined them against their will. The doctors also offered, for a cash bribe, to issue "virginity certificates" for the girls.
October 12: Amid the snowballing "asylum anarchy" in Sweden, the government decided it was an appropriate time to hold something reminiscent of a revival meeting in Stockholm, under the slogan "Sweden Together." Ingrid Lomfors, the new director of The Living History Forum, a Swedish public authority, opened the meeting by declaring that there is no such thing as Swedish culture -- even though music from the Swedish historical musical Kristina from Duvemåla, written by ABBA members Björn Ulveaus and Benny Andersson, had been played moments before. As public reactions to Lomfors's assertions were negative, even in the mainstream media, the next day she corrected herself, saying that what she meant was that there is no "unchanged" Swedish culture. Hanif Bali, a conservative Member of Parliament of Iranian descent, was one of many who protested loudly against Lomfors's statement:
"To say that we should integrate people, even though there is nothing Swedish to integrate them into, I react very strongly against that. The Swedish culture is unique. Saying that there is nothing inherently Swedish just makes it all the more difficult for the people who have come here to become part of society."
October 13: Three men were arrested as suspects in an August 24 hand grenade attack against police in the Stockholm suburb of Tumba. The hand grenade exploded a few feet from a police van, and the vehicle was riddled with over a hundred pieces of shrapnel. According to the police, it was just a fluke that no one was seriously injured or killed. The police also suspect there is a close connection between the Tumba attack and the armed robbery of a supermarket in Stockholm on October 12. A few days later, one of the three suspects, an 18-year-old man, was remanded on suspicion of armed robbery, aggravated larceny and attempted murder. The other two were released, but remain under suspicion.
October 13: Swedish public radio revealed that the Migration Courts, established in 2006 to give greater legal recourse to asylum seekers, are completely swamped. Previously, the Aliens Appeals Board was the last recourse for those whose asylum applications were rejected. The problem is that more and more rejected applicants now appeal their decisions to the Migration Courts, which on average process about 6,500 cases a year. Members of the Swedish National Courts Administration apparently fear that in 2015, the number of cases will rise to about 13,000, posing a threat to the stability of the legal system and costing the Swedish taxpayers enormous sums.
October 13: Police launched an investigation into the actions of Daniel Sestrajcic, age 39, and leader of the Left Party (Vänsterpartiet) in Malmö. Sestrajcic is suspected of kicking two policemen in the head, while he was protesting the eviction of some Palestinians illegally camped outside an Immigration Service office a week earlier. Sestrajcic, a member of the Swedish Parliament, often takes part in these kinds of demonstrations. He denied the accusations, but the police claim they have the incident on film. Local and national leaders of the Left Party still say they have every confidence in the violent Sestrajcic, who, pending a possible indictment, continues to work .
October 13: It was reported that Swedish schools are now overcrowded, as many schools struggle to cope with the enormous influx of migrants. Minister of Education Gustav Fridolin discovered that many of the migrants arriving do not have any formal education at all, and he wants to open Swedish elementary schools to adult immigrant men, placing them in the same classes as 8-year-olds.
October 15: The Stockholm Cathedral Parish shocked many of its congregants by allowing a Muslim sharia teacher to hold a lecture for students of the Christian faith. Many upset ex-Muslims showed up at the meeting, the purpose of which was, according to Perpetual Curate Ulf Lindgren, to "fight the fear of Islam and other religions." One of those who protested having a Muslim talk about Christian faith was Mona Walter, a former Muslim who converted to Christianity. She posed several critical questions, but before long was shut down. Walter told the Christian newspaper Dagen that "this is tantamount to spitting in faces of those fleeing from the terror of Islam in the Middle East."
October 15: Ahmad El-Moghrabi, age 21, was sentenced to prison. In February, El-Moghrabi, drug-intoxicated, had crashed his luxury car into a Swedish mother and her infant and had then fled the scene. Although the mother suffered severe brain damage and an amputated leg, his sentence stayed at two years and nine months' imprisonment. The court said that the penal value was three years, but took into consideration that El-Moghrabi was under age 21 at the time of the collision. He was also ordered to pay his victims 335,000 kronor (about $38,400 dollars) in damages.
October 15: A 24-year-old Congolese citizen, Loran Guy Mogi, was indicted for the murder by strangulation of his pregnant Swedish girlfriend, Therese Eriksson, in August. After the murder, Mogi fled the country but was arrested at a refugee center in Hanover, Germany, a week later. According to his lawyer, Mogi now feels "great sadness and wishes he could turn back the clock." During the trial, Mogi denied the charge of murder, but admitted abuse and manslaughter. He wanted to avoid deportation, but on November 17, Mogi was sentenced to 18 years in prison, to be followed by deportation.
October 15: The Södersjukhuset Hospital in Stockholm opened what is believed to be the world's first rape clinic for men. More and more men are being subjected to homosexual rape in multicultural Sweden. According to the crime statistics bureau Brottsförebyggande rådet, 370 sex crimes against boys and men were registered in 2014. The actual number of incidents, however, is thought to be significantly higher.
Psychotherapist Börje Svensson, who has met many boys and men who have been sexually violated, says, "Men who are raped do not want to admit to themselves what actually happened; they feel guilty, as if they were somehow complicit. They have a hard time seeing themselves as victims."
October 16: Internal police documents were revealed that show 70% of people who have their asylum application rejected ignore the decision and stay illegally in Sweden. Of the 9,000 deportation cases sent to the police by the Immigration Service this year, 70% had vanished from their registered addresses, and had left the police completely nonplussed. Patrik Engström, head of the Swedish border police, told Swedish public radio, "This means we put out an all-points bulletin for these people but then do not actively look for them. We wait for tips and things like that. We do not have the resources to go out and look in a random fashion." Police now have 21,000 deportation cases piled up.
October 16: Lennart Holmlund, a Social Democratic former municipal councilor of Umeå, complained on Facebook about the Roma people, and is now under suspicion of having violated hate-speech laws. Holmlund had posted a Facebook comment after he read in the local paper that human feces, presumably from the Roma people, had been found around the town. He then wrote that the Roma seem to get a free pass to commit various crimes, and that "Swedes have never ever defecated [bajsat] like that, no way." The councilman argued that one should be able to talk about everything, so long as it is true. However, two days later, he was forced to apologize and stress that he is not a racist.
October 17: The National Police Commissioner of Sweden, Dan Eliasson, said he does not think that there is enough chaos in Sweden to justify tightening border protection. According to Eliasson, hundreds of thousands of migrants entering Sweden in 2015 is not a serious threat to law and order. The same day, the leader of the Sweden Democrats Party, Jimmie Åkesson, demanded that border controls should immediately be established. The Minister of Justice and Migration, Morgan Johansson, recently said that even though Sweden is full and cannot offer a dignified reception for asylum seekers, its borders remain wide open. The Swedish strategy seems to be to keep the borders open and then redistribute the asylum seekers to EU countries that have an immigration policy completely different from Sweden's open borders and generous welfare benefits. Whether other EU countries want to relieve Sweden's burden remains to be seen. Denmark has already declined, saying that Sweden (which has time and again accused Denmark of being racist) needs to clean up its own mess.
October 20: Historian Heléne Lööw commented in the daily Göteborgs-Posten on the many fires at asylum houses -- something that also plagued Sweden in the 1990s. In the interview, Lööw revealed that the people sentenced for attacks against asylum houses at that time were not "right wing extremists" or "marginalized young men," but rather ordinary people with normal social anchoring. "Attacks on asylum houses come in cycles," Lööw said." They are not unique to Sweden. They come in waves all over Europe. In every wave, there can also be elements of 'common pyromaniacs,' attempted insurance fraud -- or pure accidents." What caused the attacks to stop the last time around, according to Lööw, was the closing of asylum facilities as the war in former Yugoslavia ended and the refugees stopped showing up.
October 21: It was reported that the psychiatric evaluation of the IKEA killer Abraham Ukbagabir showed that he had deliberately and consciously chosen his victims -- Carola and Emil Herlin -- because they "looked Swedish." And if he had owned a gun, he explained, he would have used it, because "it would have given his message more weight." The psychiatric evaluation showed that Ukbagabir does not suffer from a serious mental disorder, nor did he at the time of the murders. His trial concluded October 30, and the court announced its ruling right away: Ukbagabir was sentenced to "life in prison," which in Sweden means roughly 18-25 years. He will thereafter be deported -- if it is possible to deport him to his native Eritrea at that time. Right now, there are "impediments" blocking deportations to Eritrea: Swedish authorities care more about the murderer's future in his native country than they do about the risk that he will kill more Swedes.
October 21: It was reported that the Swedish police are being called out to asylum houses more and more often because of brawls, threats and fights between asylum seekers -- on this day, at the facilities in Tomelilla, Söderhamn and Sundsvall.
October 21: The weekly paper Lokaltidningen revealed that weapons smugglers have figured out a way to drive through customs without being pulled over. The customs officers have orders never to stop cars with more passengers than there are customs officers present. During the last few years, the number of customs officers has been severely reduced, a circumstance that weapon and drug smugglers take advantage of. "Of course, the criminals have learned this," said retired District Attorney Sven-Erik Alhem.
"They place five large, sturdy men in a Mercedes or BMW and blow right through customs. Minutes later, we have additional illegal weapons in Malmö. I see this indulgence in a lot of law enforcement agencies, I'm sorry to say. They spend more time placing the blame elsewhere than they do fighting crime."
October 22: Anton Lundin Pettersson, 21, murdered a student and a teaching assistant at Kronan Public School in Trollhättan. Dressed in a Darth Vader mask and armed with a sword and a knife, Lundin Pettersson attacked students of foreign descent. He was then shot to death by the first policemen who arrived at the scene. Prime Minister Stefan Löfven immediately traveled to Trollhättan and condemned the act, calling it a racist deed and "a black day for Sweden." His appearance was quite a stark contrast to his reaction after the equally racist murders at IKEA in Västerås on August 10, when he neither said nor did anything to support the victims.
October 22: Mark Saliba, the elder of two brothers in their twenties suspected of a triple murder in Uddevalla on March 7, was sentenced to life in prison. His younger brother was acquitted. The court ruled that Mark Saliba had shot three young people to death: Rawand Aziz, 22, Alaa Farraj, 21, and an 18-year-old girl. They were all shot in the head, several times, as they lay on the ground. The woman, the girlfriend of one of the other victims, was probably shot because she was a witness. The Saliba brothers, of Lebanese/Syrian descent, have several previous convictions.
October 22: To make Swedish students more migrant-friendly, a school in Östersund crammed 1,200 ninth graders together in a container and had them "apply for asylum." "We used to think they just came here," says a girl in a TV clip, "but now we know what they have gone through, that they had to pay money and stuff." Malin Bäckström, who is responsible for the exercise, according to the daily Östersunds-Posten, said that the reason for it was "to give the students tools to take part in the discussion, and to understand what they are seeing on TV and reading about in the newspapers."
October 23: Akram Ali, Yonés Hachimi and Mohamed Mesawe were indicted for brutally gang raping a Swedish girl in the Fåfängan park area in Stockholm. The three young men, who claim to be teenagers but refuse to disclose what country they are from, saw the girl standing alone and crying at Stadsgårdskajen shortly after midnight on September 9. They approached her and said they wanted to comfort and help her, a comment that likely led the girl to follow them to the Fåfängan area, where they lived in tents. One by one, the young men raped the girl, beat her and half-strangled her. After two hours, the girl managed to flee the scene and stopped a bus. Although she was upset and crying, she had the presence of mind to pick up the condoms the men had used during the rapes. A policeman with a police dog quickly found the young men and arrested them. Even though they were convicted of aggravated rape on November 5, the sentence was lenient. The men were believed to be under 18, and were therefore sentenced to juvenile detention. In six to nine months, they will be cruising Stockholm by night again.
October 25: Sheikh Abdulkadir Mumin, who for ten years lived in Gothenburg, has sworn allegiance to the Islamic State. The news broke on CNN, but the sheikh was exposed as far back as 2001, when, in a Swedish documentary, he asked to have his daughter genitally mutilated. He moved to London in 2003 and Somalia in 2010. Mumin has praised Usama bin Laden and supported Al Qaeda and Al-Shabaab. Magnus Sandelin, author of the book, Jihadi Swedes in the Islamist Terror Networks, describes the developments in Sweden concerning jihadis as disturbing: "The flow is completely different today compared to a few years ago, if you look at... the number of accounts sympathetic towards radical movements."
October 26: Once again, a group of asylum seekers refused to move into their new lodgings. This time, it was a group of about 30 who thought the asylum housing in Lima was not "urban" enough. They said they were afraid of "wild animals in the forest."
October 26: The government struck a deal with the parliamentary opposition concerning immigration policies and temporary residence permits, among other things. But the various exceptions to this new rule are so many that most Swedes frown on the agreement. Six out of ten Swedes now want the immigration rules considerably tightened.
October 26: Malmö police were powerless to stop a criminal gang who had taken over a residential building. The gang sells drugs in the basement, chases away handymen and makes threats against the life of the property owner, Fredrik Malmberg. Security guards are afraid to patrol the building due to the threats, and the Postal Service does not deliver packages to residents. The house in question is on Rasmusgatan Street, which is so crime-infested that even the police seem to have given up on it. Erik Åberg, the police commander in the area, told the website KIT that there is a limit to the amount of time the police can invest in a single address: "Even if we arrest them, they are back on the street again in the near future."
October 27: A three-year-old song from the Swedish Public Television show "Dilemmas with Doreen," (Dilemman med Doreen) suddenly became the talk of the internet. In the video for the song, blond Swedish children (and many immigrant children) can be seen showing the Tawheed-finger -- an Islamist gesture, indicating one god, which has become the foremost symbol of the Islamic State. They are singing, "There is nothing you can do..." To see Swedish children seemingly singing in favor of their own religious extinction upset many people, who gave voice to their disgust in various internet forums.
October 27: Leaked emails revealed that the Department of Finance is now looking for money that could be used to finance the galloping costs of mass-immigration to Sweden. All government departments were prompted immediately to come up with "concrete suggestions for decreased grants, with impact assessments and cost reduction measures that the government can decide on. The suggestions should lead to lowered costs in 2016 and/or 2017, but suggestions leading to permanently lowered costs are also requested."
October 27: Member of Parliament Kent Ekeroth (Sweden Democrats) filed a complaint with the Justice Ombudsman against the Immigration Service and its chief director of Legal Affairs, Fredrik Beijer. According to Ekeroth, the Immigration Service has ignored Swedish law concerning the age assessment of so-called unaccompanied refugee children, who in many cases are actually "men aged 18-40." Even though a law concerning age testing has always been in place, the Immigration Service did not implement assessments until this fall, only now forcing the "children" to prove their age.
October 27: Swedish Public Television's news program Rapport revealed that the Immigration Service will pay 1.4 billion kronor ($160 million) for private asylum housing in 2015. Former record company mogul Bert Karlsson stands to benefit the most, cashing in at 190 million kronor (nearly $22 million) this year. In the early 1990s, Bert Karlsson was leader of a party critical of immigration, New Democracy (Ny Demokrati), which sat in the Swedish Parliament from 1991 to 1994. These days, however, he is making serious money from a policy he was once strictly against. When asked if it was the big profits that made him now develop housing for so-called unaccompanied refugee children, Karlsson replied: "Of course. This is insane. Why do you think all the big venture capitalists are doing this?"
October 27: The Red Cross announced its new "helpline against extremism." The phone line opens November 16 and will be open Monday through Friday between 9 am and 3 pm. The service is a pilot project that will continue until June 2016, after which the government will decide whether or not to make it permanent. The brains behind the support line is Mona Sahlin, the government's National Coordinator Against Violent Extremism." In a press release about the support line, Sahlin said: "As National Coordinator I have identified a great need for support for those close to people who are involved in violent extremism. It can be a mother, brother, soccer coach, teacher or social worker."
October 28: A 24-year-old illegal immigrant from Nicaragua, who brutally raped a 17-year-old woman in a subway station last summer, was sentenced to five years and two months in prison. Apart from the rape, he was also convicted of the violent robbery of a 39-year-old woman. The 24-year-old will be deported from Sweden -- but free to return in 15 years.
While Gatestone Institute stands by the articles written for it to date by Ingrid Carlqvist, Gatestone is no longer affiliated with her in any way.
Vivienne Leijonhufvud