Low-Water Marks Over Europe

Our Swedish correspondent LN has compiled a report on the state of the journalistic art in today’s Sweden, with special attention given to the journalistic endeavors of Andreas Malm.


Low-water marks over Europe
by LN

Do you think something is skewed in Europe? With the state of Greece? With the states of Portugal and Spain? With the Baltic states?

The self-made Greek economic difficulties are by now of worldwide fame. Greece has even been referred to as behaving like a “banana-republic/monarchy”. The economies of the other states mentioned are not very much better.

But that is not enough! Other states of the European Union are also — but from other points of view — skewed or even, using a qualifying Shakespearean word, rotten. For example, the banana-monarchy of Sweden. Probably there is no other Western state where journalism has reached, in both the direct and the figurative sense of the word, such an extreme state of baseness.

In Sweden the majority of journalists suffer from an insurmountable fear of reporting the political truth to their readers. Swedish journalists despise their readers, who are neither supposed to be able to, nor should be allowed to form an opinion of their own. If not deprived of the truth, Swedish readers must be educated, and, like toddlers, told what to think and how to behave. The job of Swedish journalists of the predominant Politically Correct, cultural Marxist, Islam-apologist species is not to report truthfully, but to interpret and to propagate the authoritative truths of the proper socio-liberal/communistic political opinion — and to conceal from the public anything awkwardly Politically un-Correct.

The people’s republics of eastern Europe, not forgetting the German Democratic Republic (DDR), were physically closed down in 1989. However the left-wing radical body of Swedish journalists — in their hearts, consciously or unconsciously, great fans of the DDR ‘Socialist Unity Party’ and the Stasi — decided to carry on the proud commie tradition. (By the way — the chairman of the Swedish Journalists’ Club [Publicistklubben] is a former KGB spy.)

According to the Association of Swedish Journalists (Svenska Journalistförbundet), 70% of the members give their votes to the Social Democrats, whose leader is Mona Sahlin, or the Left party, whose leader, Lars Ohly, is a pronounced crypto-communist.

Nor are the broadcasting or so-called “public service media” — Swedish Radio and Swedish Television — very interested in forwarding any awkward and uncomfortable truths, only the Politically Correct versions. Journalists of the true stamp also work there, of course. And management superintends them, so that the self-censoring conformist codex is faithfully followed.

A not atypical representative of the Swedish body of journalists is Andreas Malm, born in 1977.

Since 2005 he has belonged to the editorial staff of Dagens Nyheter Kultur. He does not seem to like very much the fact that (the major) part of his readership does not wholly agree with him. To him, having different views automatically makes one an Islamophobe or a Nazi.

During the 2006 Lebanon War, Andreas Malm declared himself a big friend of Hezbollah and Hamas, and, as you will see, he has detected a widespread and undeserved Islamophobia to be found in Europe, and this is also gaining acceptance in Sweden. He wrote a book on this theme in 2009.

He has temporarily left his career as a journalist to begin studying for a doctorate in climatology at the University of Lund. He is of the sound but anti-Arab opinion that humanity totally must wipe out any dependence of fossil fuels.

The Gates of Vienna reference to the German translation of Fjordman’s book Defeating Eurabia gave topical interest to the following (now quite famous) “journalistic” piece by Andreas Malm, which was published in Dagens Nyheter (The New York Times of Sweden) on February 11th, 2008:

Reveille for the fearful

A growing number of books argue that Europe is turning into an Islamic terror empire. The worst inferno is reported to be found in Sweden. Andreas Malm here introduces the literature of Eurabia.

The Muslims are here to take over. Soon they will be in the majority. Their migration to Europe was never an escape from misery, but a “deliberately planned act of subversion”: they have come to “establish a Caliphate where Sharia laws will apply.” Within a few generations “converts out of Islam will be executed, thieves will have their arms amputated” and “adulterous women will be stoned to death”. Muslims are not content with anything less than that you “give them all the power and let them oppress you”.

WHAT is this? The latest pamphlet from the Sweden Democrats? No. This is a best-seller from the world’s largest publisher of English literature, Random House. The book While Europe Slept was nominated in 2007 for the prestigious American literature prize, the “National Book Critics’ Circle Award”.

The author, Bruce Bawer, an American liberal, with a strong inclination towards the conservative side, a cultural critic, an essayist at newspapers such as The New York Review of Books and Christian Science Monitor, and the author of acclaimed books about Christian fundamentalism and gay rights.

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Now he wants to tell us the truth about Europe. The worst is the inferno in Sweden. Sweden is Europe’s “ground zero”. In Stockholm, Muslim youths are drifting about “chasing non-Muslims out of swimming halls.” They “are terrorizing schools”, “are attacking firefighters and ambulances.” The most popular t-shirt among them displays the words “2030: then we will take over”.

THE ARCHITECT of this hell is the Swedish political establishment. From Johan Norberg — one of the Swedish debaters who Bruce Bawer indicates as one of his sources of knowledge, along with Dilsa Demirbag-Sten and Mauricio Rojas — he has learned that Sweden, although not a ‘one-party state’, is definitely a “single-idea-state”, where obsequiousness to Islam reigns. Thus the Swedes are suffering now under a growing Muslim population, who are “disproportionately inclined to violence”, which have made the frequency of murders “twice as high in Sweden as in the United States”, and which are most deranged in the town of Malmö: where the “rape rate is five or six times higher than in Copenhagen and child rape has doubled in ten years”.

So it continues.

AT all this, one could smile. You could laugh and put it aside, as a curious postcard from a hallucinating fool. Unfortunately, that is not possible. This conception of the world that Bruce Bawer conveys is about to settle down in the brain of the Western world. One of many examples is precisely the stream of books, in which Bawer’s is included, which in the past two years have been written on a single, very familiar theme: Western civilization, with its enlightened, advanced, liberal values, is threatened by Islam.

The basic text of the genre is a study by the British amateur historian Bat Ye’or, now a celebrated guest on an academic tour from Yale to the Hebrew University. In the book Eurabia from the year 2005, she made a sensational disclosure about contemporary history.

IN 1973, the Arabs suspended their sale of oil to Europe. Thus they obtained a stranglehold on the continent. To reopen the oil taps the Arabs demanded harsh conditions, and the then EC immediately prepared itself to surrender.

With this in view, the EC formed, under the dictates of the Arab League, the body ‘Euro-Arab Dialogue’, or EAD. Never heard of EAD? That’s right: since 1973, EAD has ruled Europe, has thrown its network over companies, universities, and the media, and made it so that “a foreign lobby has infiltrated the parliamentary systems”, and yet the whole time succeeded in remaining “totally unknown to Europeans, even though its occult machinery has carried out Europe’s irreversible transformation “.

EUROPE is no more. European civilization has, after plans by EAD, dissolved itself in favor of a hybrid between Europe and Arabia: you may not know it, but you live in Eurabia.

In Eurabia, the Arabs reign, which group is synonymous with Muslims. In Eurabia, Europe has become “an appendix to the Arab-Muslim world” and the native Europeans have been reduced to dhimmis, the status that Islam throughout history has forced upon conquered peoples. This means that Europeans must humbly put up with Muslim laws and rules. Like all dhimmi peoples, they must “walk to the left side of Muslims, in the gutter, and accept violations and infringements so as not to anger their Muslim masters”.

IN THIS VEIN it continues for more than 400 pages. One might think that Bat Ye’or’s theory should be ‘deported’ to the most soiled booksellers. Instead, her concept has stuck in the Western discourse on Islam. In 2005, Fox News sent a series of reports from Europe, in which Malmö was depicted as a Mogadishu controlled by Muslim warrior-gangs roaming about: the vignette of the series was “Eurabia”. Francis Fukuyama, a prominent intellectual, to say the least, says in the liberal Slate Magazine that “ There is no question that what has come to be called “Eurabia” constitutes a major problem for democracy [in Europe]”.

Prominent British historians like Niall Ferguson have praised Bat Ye’or: “Future historians will one day regard ‘Eurabia’, the term she has coined, as prophetic”, this man writes on the book’s cover.

However, not everybody in the genre is as bushy as she is. One of the most recent contributions, The Last Days of Europe, by the respected historian Walter Laqueur, is a more low-key variation of the same diagnosis: “Europe today is like Rome just before the Fall”.

WITHIN A FEW generations Europe will be a museum, tacked into the streets among all the mosques, the swarthy beards and the burkas, where tourists can view the relics from “the highly developed civilization that once led the world, gave us Shakespeare and Beethoven”. Since Islam is a very violence-prone culture, the Muslim ghetto inhabitants in the middle of the heart of Europe will have established an anti-society, whose constitution is the love of “violence for violence’s own sake” and “the urge to destroy everything around”. Laqueur argues that these Muslims must be called by their real name. They are “barbarians”.

When The Wall Street Journal reads Laqueur’s book it is “one of the most compelling in the long series of volumes by authors on both sides of the Atlantic depicting Europe’s decay”. One work with the opposite temperament is America Alone by the rabid right-radical Mark Steyn, but the thesis is the same: “our world is about to perish, because Muslims are multiplying, and start wars against everybody else”.

Like his peers, Steyn is endlessly obsessed with demographics, which in this discourse has the same role as eugenics in anti-Semitism; “the deepest reason for September 11”, he explains, “is that in the 1970s and ‘80s the Muslims produced children, while Westerners abandoned that habit”.

AND WHAT reception has this bestseller received? Christopher Hitchens, one of the most prominent Templars in the Liberal neo-secularism brotherhood, in the New York magazine City Journal praised Mark Steyn’s new book as “extremely persuasive”, a warning that we must “recognize the extraordinary threat and the possible need for extraordinary responses”. Meanwhile, as Europe was turned into a Eurabia under Muslim terror, the Europeans have thus slept sweetly. But behold: now, finally an awakening is occurring.

In the Eurabia literature it is spelled: Pia Kjærsgaard, Pim Fortuyn, Jean-Marie Le Pen, Filip Dewinter, our own Jimmie Åkesson [leader of Sverigedemokraterna]. Bruce Bawer is shouting with joy as he reads about how the public’s hostility towards Muslims is rising, and a growing number of politicians in Europe “are arguing that Islam cannot be reconciled with European values”. A drowsy Europe is now starting to suspect “the harsh choices: total surrender or mass expulsion”.

BUT THERE ARE alternatives to mass expulsion. Mark Steyn has another solution. It was tested in Srebrenica, Prijedor, Sarajevo. He writes in a passage that has attracted a certain attention after Christopher Hitchens recounted it in his complimentary review: “Why did Bosnia descend into the worst slaughter in Europe since World War II?”.

“Thirty years before the collapse, the Serbs’ share of the Bosnian population had fallen from 43 to 31 percent, while the Muslims had increased from 26 to 44 percent. In a democratic age, you can not overcome demography — except through civil war. The Serbs knew that, just as other Europeans will understand it in the near future: if you can not propagate faster than the others, what remains but to shoot them?”

— Andreas Malm

Published 2008-02-11 15:45

Additional notes from LN:

Searching “Eurabien” on Google gives 40,400 hits. Searching “Eurabia” gives 1,310,000 hits — ERGO: “Eurabien/Eurabia must be some insignificant triviality”.

The Euro-Arab Dialogue

The Euro-Arab Dialogue as a forum shared by the European Community and the League of Arab States arose out of a French initiative and was launched at the European Council in Copenhagen in December 1973, shortly after the “October War” and the oil embargo. As the Europeans saw it, it was to be a forum to discuss economic affairs, whereas the Arab side saw it rather as one to discuss political affairs.

Francis Fukuyama: Europe vs. Radical Islam — Alarmist Americans have mostly bad advice for Europeans

Christopher Hitchens: “Facing the Islamist Menace” by Mark Steyn

Andreas Malm: Därför ska vi stödja Hizbollah (That is why we should endorse Hizbollah), Expressen, 2006

Andreas Malm: Hata muslimer nya folksporten (Hating Muslims is the new popular sport), Expressen, 23 mars 2009.

Cavatus has written informatively about the journalistic situation in Sweden here.

Note: some of the quotes in Mr. Malm’s article that appeared originally in English have been translated into Swedish and then back into English. Therefore it is quite possible that they are not rendered here verbatim.