As a blogger I am huge fan and very appreciative of the Norwegian essayist that still posts under the pseudonym Fjordman. In saying that I was very gratified to come across a tribute to Fjordman’s posts of his first essays on a tenth anniversary of the first post at his long unused blog (perhaps not online anymore – I haven’t checked). The tribute was posted on February 20, 2015 on the blog Tundra Tabloids.
Update: As I was Googling Fjordman for this post I ran into a Gates of Vienna post written by Fjordman himself talking about this 10th anniversary of his first blog post. I will include that post after the Tundra Tabloids cross post.
JRH 2/28/15
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TEN YEAR ANNIVERSARY FOR FJORDMAN, FIRST BLOG POST PUBLISHED TODAY
By KGS
20/02/2015 13:30
In honor of Fjordman’s ten year anniversary, I republish the first ever blogpost under the name of Fjordman. Sadly, his first ever post could have been penned today with just a few subtle changes. It’s largely through Fjordman’s excellent essays that many of us came to know places such as Malmö, Sweden, or about Muslim rape statistics and government indifference to them and to daily plight of the citizens of the countries that they are sworn to protect.
We owe much to this man who has asked from us so little, who no longer is able to call his home country ‘home’ because of the demonization of his character by the Norwegian political power structure, its media, academy and politicians. Fjordman has had to pay a high political price for his justified views, which is all the more galling, seeing that the politicial (sic) iron triangle just mentioned, still insists that anti-Western Islam is not the problem, only those (like Fjordman) who dare point out how wrong that assumption is.
Sunday, February 20, 2005
Muslim Rape Epidemic in Sweden and Norway – Authorities Look the Other Way
(Note: Updates to this post here: The Norwegian Government – Covering Up Immigrant Rapes and here: Rapes: Nothing to do with Islam?)
Numbers released in January 2005 indicate a sharp rise in the number of rape charges in Malmö, Sweden’s third largest city:
Thomas Anderberg, responsible for statistics at the Malmö Police, says there was a doubling of the number of reported rapes by ambush in 2004, following what was already a decade of steadily increasing numbers of sexual crimes. – I think that’s great news, says Anna Gustafsson, head of the Domestic Violence Unit at the Malmö Police. She suggests that the increase is due to the fact that women who otherwise wouldn’t press charges for rape now choose to contact the police.
In other words, Gustafsson claims that we are dealing with a “technical” increase, not a real one. However, national statistics reveal that reported rapes against children have almost doubled in Sweden during the past ten years:
According to Swedish Radio on Tuesday, statistics from Sweden’s National Council for Crime Prevention show that the number of reported rapes against children is on the rise. The figures have nearly doubled in the last ten years: 467 rapes against children under the age of 15 were reported in 2004 compared with 258 in 1995. Legal proceedings continue this week in a case involving a 13 year old girl from Motala who was said to have been subjected to a group rape by four men. (Note: These four men were Kurdish Muslims, who raped the girl for hours and even took photos of doing so)
The number of rape charges per capita in Malmö is 5 – 6 times that of Copenhagen, Denmark. Copenhagen is a larger city, but the percentage of immigrants is much lower. And it’s not just the rape statistics that reveal a scary increase in Malmö or Sweden. Virtually every kind of violent crime is on the rise. Robberies have increased with 50 % in Malmö only during the fall of 2004. Threats against witnesses in Swedish court cases have quadrupled between 2000 and 2003. During the past few decades, massive immigration has changed the face of Sweden’s major cities, as well as challenged the viability of the welfare state. In 1970 Sweden had the fourth highest GDP per capita among developed countries with income about 6% above the OECD average. By 1997 it was at fifteenth place with an average GDP per capita 14% below average. Malmö has a heavy concentration of Muslim immigrants in particular. According to some estimates, it will be a Muslim majority city in no more than 10 years. Crime is rampant in the growing ghettos:
Becirov runs the Islamic Center of Malmö, on the outskirts of Sweden’s third-largest city. Some immigrant neighborhoods in the city have (official) unemployment rates exceeding 50 percent. Swedish authorities have failed to lift up the area, and seem to be giving the Islamic Center of Malmö a great deal of leeway in attempting to do so. An article that appeared in 2003 noted that “a few” of the 6-to 10-year-old girls were wearing headscarves. On a visit in January 2005, fully 80 percent were covered in class–only a handful were not. In a fit of absent-mindedness, Sweden has suddenly become as heavily populated by minorities as any country in Europe. The percentage of foreign-born is roughly equivalent to the highest percentage of immigrants the United States ever had in its history (on the eve of World War I). Rosengård appears to be all-immigrant. The public schools have virtually no ethnically Swedish children. There are stories–familiar in other parts of Europe where immigrants from the Muslim world have recently settled–of students harassing Jewish teachers and defacing textbooks that treat Jewish themes. Crime is high.
Is it unfair and “racist” to suggest a link between the influx of Muslim immigrants and the growing number of rapes? Not if we compare with the situation in neighboring Denmark, where this trend has been evident for years:
If one leading expert is to be believed, the sharp rise in the number of rapes in this over the last 5 years is largely attributable to a group of unemployed and alienated immigrants. ‘Over the last 5-10 years there has an increasing tendency to marginalise and alienate immigrants,’ says Professor Flemming Balvig, a criminologist at Copenhagen University. ‘As a result, many second generation immigrants have reacted against this through various types of criminal activity, including rape.’
Alarmed at last week’s police statistics, which revealed that in 68% of all rapes committed this year the perpetrator was from an ethnic minority, leading Muslim organisations have now formed an alliance to fight the ever-growing problem of young second and third-generation immigrants involved in rape cases against young Danish girls.
As Robert Spencer has demonstrated, rape can indeed be linked to Islamic teachings of Jihad, and even to the example of Muhammad himself, his Sunna. Above all, it is connected to Islamic notions of the role of women in society, and their behaviour in the public sphere. An Islamic Mufti in Copenhagen sparked a political outcry after publicly declaring that women who refuse to wear headscarves are “asking for rape.” Apparently, he isn’t the only Muslim in Europe to think this way:
The German journalist Udo Ulfkotte told in a recent interview that in Holland, you can now see examples of young, unveiled Moroccan women with a so-called “smiley”. It means that the girl gets one side of her face cut up from mouth to ear, serving as a warning to other Muslim girls who should refuse to wear the veil. In the Muslim suburb of Courneuve, France, 77 per cent of the veiled women carry veils reportedly because of fear of being harassed or molested by Islamic moral patrols.
Hijab, the Islamic veil, is thus not “just a piece of cloth”. It serves as a demarcation line between proper, submissive Muslim women and whores, un-Islamic women who deserve no respect and are asking for rape. The veil should more properly be viewed as the uniform of a Totalitarian movement, and a signal to attack those outside the movement. Judged in the light of the Mufti who said that women who don’t wear it are asking for rape, how on earth can the veil be said to be about “choice”? The freedom to choose not to be raped if you dress in a normal fashion in your own country? Is that what freedom is about in Europe in 2005?
Even though Sweden, unlike Denmark, has almost no public debate about immigration, frustration is very much present underneath the surface. 75 % of Swedes think that many people in their country “dislike” Muslims, more than in any other European nation surveyed. Even in Holland, which recently witnessed violent clashes with Muslims after the murder of Islam-critic Theo van Gogh, the rate is lower than in Sweden. But you’re not supposed to talk about such issues in Sweden. That would be “racist”:
Swedish laws prohibiting “hate speech” against racial minorities have been vigorously enforced. There have, for example, been a number of gang-rapes of Swedish women by Muslim immigrants. But Swedes must be careful what they say about them. On May 25, neo-Nazi Bjorn Bjorkqvist was convicted and sentenced to two months in prison for writing, “I don’t think I am alone in feeling sick when reading about how Swedish girls are raped by immigrant hordes.” [“Jag tror inte jag är ensam om att må dåligt när jag läser om hur svenska tjejer har våldtagits av invandrarhorder”]
All in all, we must say that there is strong circumstantial evidence indicating that the rise in rape charges in the city of Malmö could very well be real, which puts the Malmö Police assertion that this is “great news” in a rather curious light. And the problem is not just limited to Sweden. It exists in Norway, too:
Rape charges in the capital are spiraling upwards, 40 percent higher from 1999 to 2000 and up 13 percent so far this year. Police Inspector Gunnar Larsen of Oslo’s Vice, Robbery and Violent crime division says the statistics are surprising – the rising number of rape cases and the link to ethnic background are both clear trends. But Larsen does not want to speculate on the reasons behind the worrying developments. While 65 percent of those charged with rape are classed as coming from a non-western background, this segment makes up only 14.3 percent of Oslo’s population. Norwegian women were the victims in 80 percent of the cases, with 20 percent being women of foreign background.
An incredibly revealing article that tells us all we need to know about the multiculturalist fetish in Europe and some parts of North America, not to mention the need for change within Islam. Apparently, the Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet reported that 65 percent of rapes of Norwegian women were performed by “non-Western” immigrants – a category that, in Norway, consists mostly of Muslims. The article quoted a professor of social anthropology at the University of Oslo (note: her name is Unni Wikan) as saying that “Norwegian women must take their share of responsibility for these rapes” because Muslim men found their manner of dress provocative. The professor’s conclusion was not that Muslim men living in the West needed to adjust to Western norms, but the exact opposite: “Norwegian women must realize that we live in a multicultural society and adapt themselves to it.”
In January 2005, Norwegian media reported that 2004 saw the highest number or rape charges ever recorded in the capital city of Oslo. Strangely enough, there was now no mentioning of how immigrants were grossly overrepresented in rape cases. Why not? Unless there has been a sudden and unexplained drop in the number of immigrants raping Norwegian women between 2001 and 2004, which is unlikely, the statistics should be at least as staggering in 2005 as they were before. If they are not revealed, it can only mean that “somebody” didn’t like the numbers presented in 2001, and decided to bury them. That “somebody” must be a person at the very top level in the police, maybe even in the government. If so, that is disquieting. What is even more disquieting is that the media are equally silent about this. How come no journalists are digging into the material? And where are all the professional Feminists, in a Scandinavian nation brimming with them?
The conclusion one may draw from this is that the authorities in Sweden and Norway know about, or should know about, a disturbing amount of Muslim immigrant rapes of native Scandinavian women, yet choose not to make this information known to the public. Perhaps it would be just too politically incorrect to reveal the negative effects of decades of naïve immigration policies. Perhaps it would also destroy too many multicultural pipe dreams among the intellectual elites, who have built their current careers and reputations on advocating how culturally and economically enriching this new population mix would be. So in the end, the safety of young Scandinavian women is sacrificed in order to keep the glossy image of a multicultural society intact. It is a chilling demonstration of an Eurabian continent that now appears to care more about not upsetting relations with its immigrant population than about protecting its own citizens.
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Edited by John R. Houk relying largely on spellcheck. Many British influenced words were left untouched and some words left alone out of uncertainty.
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Ten Years On
By Fjordman
February 20 2015
If you appreciate this essay by Fjordman, please consider making a donation to him, using the button at the bottom of this post.
Today, February 20 2015, is exactly ten years since the first time I published an essay under the pen name Fjordman. Time flies. I had been active on the Internet for several years before that date, but I did not have my own website. I did not imagine that I would still be writing so many years later. Yet here I am.
The first essay I published as Fjordman was about the very high number of rapes in Sweden, and how this may be tied to mass immigration. I no longer write about this subject as much as before, but the number of rapes in Sweden is at least as high ten years later.
I was among the first to discuss in English the problems caused by Muslim immigration in Malmö, Sweden’s third largest city. I was often accused of exaggerating or making things up. Meanwhile, Malmö has evolved from stabbings to car bombings. Unfortunately, many of the problems I deal with in my essays have worsened, all over the Western world.
My first blog post got quite a few comments and thousands of readers. That is because it was linked to by Little Green Footballs (LGF). It is hard to believe now, but when I launched my Fjordman blog in February 2005, I got a lot of help from LGF. Back then, Charles Johnson’s LGF was still a large and relevant website. It helped point readers to myself, Gates of Vienna and many other writers such as Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller.
I recently visited LGF, which I had not done for a very long time. Charles Johnson still posts. On Google, he is now called a “political blogger, center-left provocateur.”
Those who have followed my writings since the beginning will recall that the period of the LGF Wars was one of the nastiest events I experienced as Fjordman (until Mr. Breivik showed up). That was when Charles Johnson decided to suddenly switch sides and attack all of his former allies in the nastiest and most dishonest manner possible.
In hindsight, we clearly won this conflict. Today, Mr. Johnson is completely irrelevant, whereas I, Gates of Vienna — and for that matter Robert Spencer at Jihad Watch — are still publishing and actually being read.
The moral? Have patience, and continue stating what you believe to be true based on factual evidence. This will not always be pleasant in the short run, but it will eventually pay off.
Looking back, my view is that the most positive development that has taken place over the last decade is that awareness about the Islamic threat among the general public is now much greater than it was some years ago.
Unfortunately, this knowledge still has not led to any significant change in policy among Western ruling elites. They continue to promote mass immigration and open borders, no matter how many terror attacks occur or how much insecurity our societies suffer from. U.S. President Barack Hussein Obama is arguably an even worse appeaser of Islamic aggression today than he used to be seven years ago. Alternatively, perhaps he is just showing his true colors, since he does not have to worry about being reelected anymore.
Furthermore, the darkness represented by Islamic sharia and Jihadist barbarism is spreading and deepening. That is a sad fact. One only has to look at the videos of mass beheadings produced by the self-proclaimed Islamic State (ISIS) in the Middle East to realize this. These videos are now watched with great enthusiasm by militant Muslims in cities across the Western world.
I did not know the film director Theo van Gogh when he was murdered by a militant Muslim in the streets of Amsterdam in 2004. More recently, however, Muslim terrorists have been targeting people whom I know and have met multiple times, also in Scandinavia. Since 2005, I have joined the rapidly growing number of people in Western Europe who can no longer have a publicly listed address or telephone number. The threat seems to be getting closer every year. It is no longer abstract.
I have experienced many ups and downs over the past decade. Needless to say, being dragged into the events caused by the deranged mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik in 2011 easily constitutes the low point of my adult life so far. I was forced to evacuate my home and go into forced exile from Norway due to the extremely negative and largely baseless media exposure I received because of this case and Breivik’s so-called manifesto. The weeks after the deadly July 22 attacks is the only time that I have ever seriously considered giving up writing. After a while, I decided to continue. Yes, I lost the protection of a pen name. However, many people write under their real names, even if they face harassment for it. I see no reason to do less than they do.
The most positive thing that has happened to me in the past decade has to be all of the wonderful people I have met. This may sound like a terrible cliché, but I really have been blessed to meet many courageous, funny, smart and wonderful individuals while doing this work. They are one of my main sources of inspirations to keep on going. I am eternally grateful for their company.
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