Sweden’s Malady

When studying our map of Sweden, we noticed a nondescript town nearby a large body of water. Oh, a big lake! It’s gotta be beautiful there, we thought. The town had a campground and supermarkets within walking distance from the train. Cool, that’ll work for us. Let’s go.

Getting off the train in that town was pretty strange. It was as if we’d been transported to another country, one on another continent.

Perhaps you’ve heard that in recent years Sweden’s crime rate— in the past close to zero— has been on the rise. 

But did you know that it has already risen higher than all its neighbors’ rates combined?

And Swedes, when traveling around their own country, often avoid the middle regions because of high crime from the Muslim communities there.

Some locals even laugh when talking about the gangs who murder each other regularly in the big cities, Malmo and Stockholm. “Gang members are doing us all a favor by taking each other out,” they’d told us.

Swedes are stereotypically kind and accommodating. But isn’t their generosity and hospitality being taken advantage of? Isn’t the Swedish social welfare state being abused to the max? 

What we saw there made us think so.

On June 21st, the very first day of summer, a Polish ferry dumped us off on the southern coast of Sweden. Looking back, that first pretty, little town of Ystad was the highlight of our southern Swedish adventure, while our second stop, Almhult, was both the lowlight and most eye-opening.

Since our visit to Finland last summer had been so positive, we had looked forward all year to a return visit. 

This summer, our plan loosely had been to make our way north towards Stockholm from Ystad. We would explore southern Sweden a bit on our way, then from Stockholm take a ferry to the Aland islands, and from there puddle jump to mainland Finland. 

Our first few days in Sweden began just as they should have: in a lively campground where we met and chatted with other campers and travelers, mostly people who were local or from neighboring countries. They gave us advice on where to go and what to see in Sweden. 

Stick to the east coast, they’d said.

Ystad was certainly an area for the affluent. Property prices were high and the cars fancy. The Swedes there were very active, outdoorsy, and well-dressed. It felt almost like a bubble of preserved, authentic Swedish culture. 

It might seem strange to say we had found a bubble of Swedish culture when we were in the very country of Sweden itself. However, as we moved along, visiting town after town, the overthrow of Swedish culture became increasingly stark and apparent. We’d seen it last year in the north, but wow, was it amplified in the south.

In the 1970’s, the Swedish government devised to bring in immigrants from war-torn Muslim and undeveloped countries, pushing them into the fold of their homogenous, predominantly Christian nation. 

Sweden has since become third in the world for taking in refugees, just behind Canada and Australia. According to official research and statistics: “In 2015, Sweden had a record-high of 162,877 applications for asylum, primarily from Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan—or about 1.6 percent of Sweden’s population of 10 million.”

It is 2023 now, over 50 years since the impetus to replace Swedish Sweden with a mix of Muslim militants set on conquest began. Imagine the changes that can occur within 50 years.

photo source

As travelers who have visited a good number of Muslim and Western nations, we have learned that Muslims who stay in their own countries tend to be everyday people. They are the type that care predominately about their families, spending time with friends, and putting food on the table. Often their Islamic ideology takes a backseat role. 

If you know us well, I’m sure you’ve heard us tell our favorite travel stories, such as the Turkish men who have helped Grace on and off buses, Jordanian men who kindly cut her bangs in a shop intended only for men, Moroccan women who gave Grace kisses on the cheek, and so on. Grace gets some of the best treatment in Muslim countries. It really touches us, since in most places she is ignored.

On the other hand, those who are motivated to move abroad for the purpose of overtaking that country and doing their duty of cultural jihad, those are the ones that can often be found in the West, and are the type that I address here. 

I’ve found that the average Joe is, for the most part, aware of traditional jihad, what it is and how it’s done. Yet there’s also, and it’s perhaps more nefarious, “eccumenical” jihad. This refers to taking over a country from within and culturally, through intermarrying, having many children and out-populating a nation. It is deeply-rooted in and essential to Islam.

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We ran into such cultural jihad at our destination after Ystad.

Our second stop in Sweden was at a campground on the edge of a massive, beautiful lake in the town of Almhult. 

Almhult was located in the direct center of the southern region. We thought we’d just check out this lake on our way towards the coast.

The heavy rain we had in Ystad followed us to each and all of Swedish destinations. Rainy days in a tent, oh yay.

Despite the wet, the lake in Almhult was beautiful and when the shy sun came out to shine, we found great hikes through forests blooming with blueberry bushes. 

Although we were very much in the middle of nowhere and had had a long trek from the train station to get to this campground in the woods, we noticed a large number of women in full head-to-toe hijabs with their families also staying at the campground. 

Muslim men sat around on the kids playground and on benches, just watching people. Since we stayed at this campground for a week, we observed a pattern with the muslim women in particular. 

The women spent much of the day going in and out of the bathrooms. It seemed strange to us. After the bathrooms were cleaned in the morning, we saw that they’d go in, and afterwards leave the place a mess— the sinks and toilets filthy. In the afternoons, they would simply stand around in there, sometimes just turning on the water and splashing it on themselves, getting water everywhere. The sons, aged around ten or older, went in and out of the women’s shower area with their mom and sisters. 

After relating this quizzical tale to a friend in the US, we learned that Muslims in the US were also “commissioned” by their groups with the task of dirtying public bathrooms and that this was a known occurrence, even in schools.

Walking around the town of Almhult, beyond hair salons and tattoo parlors owned by foreigners, there were mostly only Muslims to be seen as well, sitting in the parks or driving around in expensive, new cars.

A beautiful old wooden church in the center of Almhult drew our attention. Hoping to see the inside, we knocked on the door. The door was opened by Maria, an extremely kind woman from Romania. 

Maria was a caretaker of the church. Propping open the door wide for us, she warmly invited us in to look inside and shared both the church’s history and present condition.

For the past 30 or so years, Maria had lived most of her life in Sweden, with regular trips back to Romania. We chatted about the changes she had witnessed in Sweden, with immigration from undeveloped nations and a sharp decline in Christianity being chief among them. 

She spoke of the quiet anger many natural Swedes felt at so much of their tax money and social programs being poured into the pockets of unemployed immigrants. While a typical Swede struggled to make ends meet with the rising cost of living, immigrants received free housing, free cars, high monthly stipends, and incentives to have more children and stay home without working or contributing at all to the country.

We’ve heard the exact same grievances from Germans. 

Maria spoke of the incredible generosity and kindness that she received in Sweden. She saw that the Swedish culture and Muslim cultures were thoroughly incompatible. One culture was always giving, the other always taking.

Sweden had taken its cultural values at one time from the Bible, where grace, loving your neighbor, working hard, and supporting the weak were central.

Values from Islamic ideology glorify power and domination. There was no concept of grace or meekness or integrity.

A few days later, we took Maria up on her invitation to join the Sunday church meeting. It would be small, with most attendants being elderly, she had told us. The church meeting was in fact meager and exceptionally spiritually dead, a sad representation of the current state of affairs. 

One of the women there asked me if I had been around for the fight and stabbing that had occurred at the campground just a day or so prior. 

What? I almost didn’t know how to process what she’d just said.

This must have happened, thankfully, while we’d been out. The lady explained that a group of Muslims had gotten into a violent fight which resulted in an ambulance being called and several arrests being made. 

Yikes. 

My mom and I looked up the news later. While reading about that escapade at the campground, we also soon discovered a plethora of news stories of stabbings and killings and crime in Almhult. We were shocked!

Usually visitors to Almhult were employees of IKEA, received training there, and would pay a visit to the first ever IKEA store before leaving. But we learned Almhult had one more “claim to fame.”

Almhult also claimed the highest crime rate in that region. As for travel locations, we sure know how to pick ‘em. xD

But honestly, I’m glad that we are able to see these things up close and firsthand. It can be hard to grasp the reality of certain situations without having the living experience of them.

From our research on Almhult, we also read of Sweden’s total lack of free speech on the matter of immigration and crime. 

When a police officer in Malmo was interviewed and asked to describe a typical day at work, the officer gave a straightforward reply. He described the shootings, the stabbings, stealing, and chaos that occurred on a daily basis by immigrants from Afghanistan, Syria, northern African countries, etc.

For pointing out some of the ethnicities of those who were causing the crimes, this police officer was charged and sent to jail. 

Happily, this story ended well. When Swedes caught wind of the police officer’s arrest for stating fact, there was a local uproar. Swedes’ demanded the police officer be released, and he was. 

It didn’t take much searching to find other similar stories, but with less satisfying conclusions. 

Our week at that campground was up and after learning about the town, we were more than ready to move on. The Swedes’ advice to stick to the coast now made sense.

Next we did just that and headed out to the coast, jumping around there a bit, always with our compass pointed toward Stockholm. 

Getting all the way to the capital in the summertime was proving more difficult than we’d thought. 

After trying many times unsuccessfully to reach Stockholm, we took the fully booked, never available trains as the sign of a closed door and gave up on getting to Finland. Six weeks of camping in constant rain had gotten to us, too.

Instead we found a great steal on a flight to Scotland and jetted out from Copenhagen.

Just a day after flying out, we saw the news of a whole area of Stockholm being destroyed by Eritreans who were fighting over differences in political opinion on the Eritrean government. It turned into a total riot and wreck.

That made us wonder: what will it take for “enough” to be “enough” and spark the Swedes and the Germans and other Western countries to speak up and stop allowing their nations to be taken over from within? These kinds of immigrants have shown that they have no plan to assimilate or even be respectful to the country and culture. 

We met Swedes who had Muslim immigrants boast to their face that they were going to take over Sweden. They are not shy about this.

While waiting for Swedes and Germans and everyone else to speak out more on this issue, the best thing we can do is to talk to each other. When we are informed and connected, we empower one another to make the changes that need to be made.

Our trip to Sweden this summer didn’t work out at all as planned or hoped, but we did see the true side of things. 

My mom was interviewed at our final campground in Malmo. A local TV network was curious to find out the reason behind the immense surge in campers in Sweden that summer. I think we can all guess why! Keeping up with living and vacation costs nowadays isn’t so easy.

You can catch a glimpse of our little, patched up tent on the Swedish news here!

Thanks for reading, and as always, stay awesome!