by Starvid
Mon Jan 11th, 2016 at 10:35:52 AM EST
The shock created by the mass sexual assaults in Köln is spreading like rings on the water. It has now reached Stockholm - and uncovered an alleged police/media cover-up of mass sexual assaults here as well.
Swedish police face allegations of covering up mass sex assault
Sweden is facing its own version of Germany's Cologne scandal with police in Stockholm pledging to investigate allegations of covering up mass sexual assault at a festival two years ago.
Swedish police promised urgently to investigate the claims reported first by liberal newspaper Dagens Nyheter that a gang of youths -- reportedly mostly from Afghanistan -- groped and molested girls as young as 11 or 12.
The allegations, which date back to the 2014 youth festival We Are Sthlm, are yet to be confirmed. But they are still likely to cause a political scandal perhaps even greater than the reaction in Germany because of the success in the Nordic country of an anti-immigration party, the Sweden Democrats, that has in recent months periodically topped opinion polls.
This is what has happened.
front-paged, discussion about events in Cologne in the comments - Bjinse
This summer and last summer, mass sexual assaults, groping and so on, allegedly took place during a multi-day oper air concert in central Stockholm. The girls who were assaulted were as young as 11-12. The perpetrators were recently arrived Afghan asylum seekers, so called "alone arriving refugee children". They get special privileges for being under 18, so it is rational for them to claim to be under 18. Their age is never checked, which means that many of them are 20, 25, 30 or even older. Yes, if that sounds insane to you, then welcome to Sweden.
This summer the editorial page of the paper of record, Dagens Nyheter, got a tip from a psychologist working for the police about this. Initially the paper was interested, but when it understood that the perps were refugees, its interest suddenly waned.
Then Köln happens, and another guy at DN writes a news article, kind of in passing, reporting that the same thing happened in Stockholm.
The alternative immigration-critical online news-site Nyheter Idag discovers that DN got the tip-off this summer and chose not to dig. The guy who runs the paper calls the person at the DN editorial page, and she blows him off. What she doesn't know is that he records the call...
The DN journalist then calls the original source, and tells him she feels let-down that he has contacted Nyheter Idag. She talks to his voice-mail.
Nyheter Idag uploads both the calls on Youtube and writes a story on how DN perpetrated a cover-up for political reasons.
DN panics. Their number one objective now becomes finding someone else to blame - the police. So they start writing articles on how the police let the girls down, and claim that the police did this because they didn't want to aid the Sweden Democrats - they have a direct quote on this from a local chief of police. Ironically, this is likely the same reason why DN didn't write about it either.
Obviously, if the police is adapting its work to aid or counteract political parties this is an even greater scandal - a threat to Swedish democracy itself.
The chief of police however claims he has been misquoted, and that they performed the cover-up not because they were afraid of aiding the Sweden Democrats, but because they were afraid it would increase xenophobia in general. At the same time he claims that the political correctness of the media hampers the work of the police, because they can't publish descriptions of suspected criminals without being criticised by the media for being racists.
Suddenly lots of people and media outlets start reporting that this very same thing, un-reported sexual assaults by groups of refugees, has happened in several places
all over the country.
Last fall, the political point of culmination regarding immigration was reached in the political sphere, when the centre-left government implemented measures to radically reduce immigration.
This might very well be the somewhat dealyed culmination point for the media.
Already we see mea culpa articles on why people didn't dare report the full picture on immigration issues for all these years, and why debate was stifled, what the causes were, and how we should make sure this is not ever repeated again.
It will be interesting to see what the effects on public opinion will be. Even before this, almost a quarter of voters (and a third of male voters) supported the Sweden Democrats. This scandal is most unlikely to hurt the party's prospects.