The Failure of the Swedish Establishment
by Nima Gholam Ali Pour • May 6, 2016 at 5:00 am
- In Sweden's third largest city, Malmö, the children of illegal migrants receive income support payments from the government, and the unemployment rate among foreign-born men aged 18-24 years is at 41%. In Sweden, those who do not have jobs receive generous welfare payments from the local authorities, and families in the country illegally have their rent paid by the taxpayers. It is an open invitation to more migrants to come to Sweden.
- The Swedish establishment tells Swedes that the more immigrants come to Sweden, the richer Sweden will become -- no matter which country these immigrants come from.
- The Swedish establishment is characterized by incompetence combined with an extreme left-wing ideology and a hillbilly-like mentality that refuses to see the rest of the world and the risks involved in it. The Swedish establishment has not dealt with Sweden as if it were a country, but as if it were a village.
- By gross miscalculations, the Swedish establishment has eroded its own legitimacy. Today, fewer than one in four Swedes have confidence in their government. Meanwhile, the Swedish media is a major threat to Sweden's security today: it downplays the migration crisis with ridiculous arguments.
Tens of thousands of migrants have passed through Denmark to enter Sweden during 2015 and 2016, attracted by Sweden's generous welfare payments and free housing.
A major threat to Sweden's security today is the Swedish journalistic establishment: it downplays the migration crisis with ridiculous arguments.
As migrants flooded into Sweden in December 2015, Fredrik Virtanen, a writer for Sweden's largest newspaper, Aftonbladet, wrote an article entitled, "Have refugees forced you to buy worse red wine?" It is not really dangerous, Virtanen argues, that that Sweden was accepting 160,000 migrants; such migratory movements, he wrote, do not really impact anyone's life.
Today, however, we know that many people's lives have been affected by the influx of migrants and that the problems are about more than wine. They are, for example, about sexual assault, the murder of staff in asylum accommodations and chaos in the Swedish school system. But Virtanen was right: red wine is still here.
Turkey: "We Need a Religious Constitution"
by Burak Bekdil • May 6, 2016 at 4:30 am
- The new constitution "will emphasize Islam and faith in Allah." — Abdulkadir Selvi, pro-government columnist.
- "We are a Muslim country. That is why we need a religious constitution," said Ismail Kahraman, Speaker of Turkey's Parliament. He lamented that, unlike in other Middle Eastern countries, the word Allah did not appear in the current version of the Turkish Constitution even once.
- "The chaos in the Middle East is the result of politics instrumentalizing religion." — Kemal Kilicdaroglu, leader of the opposition Republican People's Party.
- "One cannot be secular and Muslim at the same time." — Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Ismail Kahraman, Speaker of Turkey's Parliament, last week stated: "We are a Muslim country. That is why we need a religious constitution."
The Speaker of the Parliament is no ordinary office in Turkey. The speaker comes second in the state protocol only after the president (and even before the prime minister). Such is the seat occupied since November by Ismail Kahraman, an MP from the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Along with Erdogan, former president Abdullah Gul and eight AKP heavyweights (mostly cabinet ministers) Kahraman comes from the ranks of the National Turkish Student Union (MTTB in its Turkish acronym). Another MTTB bigwig, Huseyin Velioglu, later formed what became the militant Islamist group, "Turkish Hizbullah." Especially between 1965 and 1980 when a military coup administration dissolved it, the MTTB operated as the youth organization of Turkish political Islam. Kahraman, in late 1960s and early 1970s, was MTTB's president.
