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A daily brief about the world's most dangerous places from international war correspondent Chuck Holton
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Tuesday Jun 18, 2019
Tuesday Jun 18, 2019
If the major tourist destination where you were considering taking your summer vacation had 18 bombings per month...would you want to know about it? Don't trust the media to tell you. But we will, right here on the Hot Zone.
Okay, so when we talk about hot zones you don't usually think of countries that get several feet of snow each year, and if you had to guess which european countries were the safest, you'd probably tend to think of the scandanavian countries like Norway, Denmark and Sweden. But there's a curious phenomenon taking place in Sweden over the past few years, which has resulted in more than a few deaths, and dozens of injuries.
But the media and for sure the Swedish government don't want you to know about it.
So here's what you need to know, and I'll put this as plainly as I can. Sweden now has more bombings per month than Somalia. You heard that right. There has been a growing epidemic of bombings happening in Sweden over the past few years, and this year by may there had been 93 separate attacks. That works out to 18 per month. In 2018 there were more than 12 per month, so the numbers keep growing. Somalia, by comparison, has about ten per month.
Now pardon my pun, but that's pretty inflammatory stuff. And to be fair when bombings happen in Somalia they tend to be much bigger and more deadly, but in sheer numbers, there is clearly a big problem in Sweden right now. And it's been building for years.
The Swedish government is very, very invested in making sure the news of these bombings gets buried as deep and as quickly as possible. Why? Well, there are several reasons. Let's delve into them.
First, Sweden is a quasi-socialist country. While the state does not own the means of production, which is the definition of socialism, the taxes they charge their citizens are so high that they essentially own the citizens themselves, which some could argue are the true means of production of any society. Think I'm exaggerating? If you make $50,000 a year in Sweden, you pay about 50% of your income to the government in taxes. Then you pay a 25% value added tax on anything you buy with some exceptions like food. A new car can easily cost 100K in Sweden with all the taxes and fees. So if you have to give every penny you make to the government, from january until, say, October each year, before you get to keep anything...let me just ask, what does that make you?
Sure, Sweden has great healthcare, great roads, and a universal welfare system that is one of the most generous in europe. You can afford to do that when you charge people the kind of taxes they do.
At least you can afford it until a few million migrants come knocking on your door. Foreign-born migrants now make up about 20% of the population in Sweden, and this number has climbed precipitously for the last few years. The majority of these migrants who've come in lately are from Syria, Afghanistan, and African countries like Somalia, Eritrea, Sudan, etc. And there are more coming all the time.
I went to Sweden a couple years ago to report on this phenomenon and the effects it is having on that country. What I found was kind of startling.
[package]
Now before I move on I want to reiterate - while there may be actual terrorists joining this flow of migrants, the vast, overwhelming majority of them simply want a better life. And Nobody can blame them for that. But I made what I think is an important distinction in an interview I did shortly after my visit to Sweden. That just because they want a better life doesn't mean they know how to live in a civilized country. Take a listen.
[stinchfield interview]
So last week in Stockholm there were three attacks over a single 24-hour period, and a week earlier in that same city a massive blast blew out all the windows of an apartment building. Shootings have surged, too, but the news hardly reports on those anymore.
Mind you, this is a country with some of the most stringent gun control laws in the world. It kind of goes without saying that grenades and bombs are illegal too. What's worse, even defending yourself from an attack in Sweden can get you arrested. So your inherent right to self-defense is restricted. If you ask me, that's absolutely shameful.
The Swedish government wants so badly to keep these attacks from becoming a stain on their nice, clean, polite image, they've published a website which addresses stories linking immigration to crime and calls them "simplistic and occasionally inaccurate." On that page, the Swedish government tries to insinuate that there has only been one terror attack in their country perpetrated by an islamic extremist. That one was in 2010. They try to explain away the terror attack in 2017 where an Uzbeki immigrant killed Five people were killed including an eleven year old girl and injured 14 others by driving a truck wired up as a car bomb down a crowded pedestrian street. Fortunately for the hundreds of people in the area, the bomb did not go off.
The perpetrator was Rakhmat Akilov, an asylum seeker who claimed allegiance to ISIS. Strangely, though, the Swedish government does not consider this a terror attack because it was not officially claimed by ISIS.
Now it would be wrong to paint all these migrants with a broad brush and say they're all terrorists - actually it's nothing of the sort. Very few of them will ever become terrorists. What these people are is opportunists, if anything. Just like what we are seeing in the western hemisphere, there's an infrastructure that has been created by well-meaning organizations that makes it possible for people from all over the developing world to travel thousands of miles from their homeland and enter illegally into a country with a generous social welfare system. But when they get there, they can't help but bring along the baggage of having grown up in a lawless and failed state. In places like that, the law of the land is the law of the jungle. Kill or be killed, eat or be eaten. Take or be taken from. They just don't know any different.
Many of them also bring a deep-rooted faith tradition, one that will undoubtedly go much further in shaping their worldview and attitudes than the secular humanism, which is essentially a belief in nothing, that so pervades the west. A melting pot with those ingredients soon becomes a toxic and explosive brew, and before long you get what's happening to Sweden.
There are hurting, hungry people all over the world. And we need to help them. It's our duty. But we can't help the rest of the world if we do so in a way that destroys the very systems that give us what we need to be generous. And most of all, this goes to show that if we want to give these people, all people a better way of life, we have to first love them into a better way of thinking. They need to know God's law - the law of love. It's the only law that overcomes the law of the jungle.
That's my sermon for today folks. Thanks for watching. Please like and share it with your friends, and go check out patreon.com/hotzone to subscribe for additional content, free copies of my books, and more.
I'm Chuck Holton and this has been the hot zone.
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