Jihad and the Collapse of the Swedish Model
http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/2065
From the desk of Fjordman on Thu, 2007-04-19 19:27

I decided to write this essay following the riots in Malmö this weekend. Malmö is Sweden's third largest city and by far the worst city in Scandinavia when it comes to Muslim aggression. I read recently that an Arab girl interviewed in Malmö said that she liked it so much there, it felt almost like an Arab city. Native Swedes have been moving away from the city for years, turned into refugees in their own country by Jihad, not too different from the non-Muslims in some regions of the Philippines, southern Thailand or Kashmir in India, or for that matter Christian Serbs in Kosovo.

Sweden was presented during the Cold War as a middle way between capitalism and Communism. When this model of a society collapses – and it will collapse, under the combined forces of Islamic Jihad, the European Union, Multiculturalism and ideological overstretch – it is thus not just the Swedish state that will collapse but the symbol of Sweden, the showcase of an entire ideological world view. I wrote two years ago that if the trend isn't stopped, the Swedish nation will simply cease to exist in any meaningful way during the first half of this century. The country that gave us Bergman, ABBA and Volvo could become known as the Bosnia of northern Europe, and the “Swedish model” will be one of warning against ideological madness, not one of admiration. I still fear I was right in that assessment.

Jonathan Friedman, an American living outside Malmö, mentions that the so-called Integration Act of 1997 proclaimed that “Sweden is a Multicultural society.” Notes to the Act also stated that “Since a large group of people have their origins in another country, the Swedish population lacks a common history. The relationship to Sweden and the support given to the fundamental values of society thus carry greater significance for integration than a common historical origin.”

Native Swedes have thus been reduced to just another ethnic group in Sweden, with no more claim to the country than the Kurds or the Somalis who arrived there last Thursday. The political authorities of the country have erased their own people's history and culture.

Jens Orback, Minister for Democracy, Metropolitan Affairs, Integration and Gender Equality from the Social Democratic Party said during a debate in Swedish radio in 2004 that “We must be open and tolerant towards Islam and Muslims because when we become a minority, they will be so towards us.”

This is a government that knows perfectly well that their people will become a minority in their own country, yet is doing nothing to stop this. On the contrary. Pierre Schori, Minister for immigration, during a parliamentary debate in 1997 said that: “Racism and xenophobia should be banned and chased [away],” and that one should not accept “excuses, such as that there were flaws in the immigration and refugee policies.”

In other words: It should be viewed as a crime for the native population not to assist in wiping themselves out.

Orback's attitude is what follows once you declare that culture is irrelevant. Our culture, even though we try to forget it, is steeped in a Judeo-Christian morality based on the Golden Rule of reciprocity: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” (Luke 6:31)

Muslims, on the other hand, are steeped in an Islamic tradition based on Muslim supremacy. Muslims view lack of force as a sign of weakness, and they despise weakness, which is precisely why Adolf Hitler stated his admiration for Islam, and thought it would be a better match for Nazism than Christianity, with its childish notions of compassion.

A Swedish man was nearly killed for the crime of wearing clothes with his own national flag while Sweden was participating in the 2006 football World Cup. Some “Multicultural youths” found this to be an intolerable provocation, and the 24-year-old man was run down by a car in Malmö, where Muhammad is becoming the most common name for newborn boys.

Feriz and Pajtim, members of Gangsta Albanian Thug Unit in Malmö, explain how they mug people downtown. They target a lone victim. “We surround him and beat and kick him until he no longer fights back,” Feriz said. “You are always many more people than your victims. Cowardly?” “I have heard that from many, but I disagree. The whole point is that they're not supposed to have a chance.” They didn't express any sympathy for their victims. "If they get injured, they just have themselves to blame for being weak," said Pajtim and shrugged.

The wave of robberies the city of Malmö has witnessed is part of a “war against the Swedes.” This is the explanation given by young robbers from immigrant background in interviews with Petra Åkesson. “When we are in the city and robbing we are waging a war, waging a war against the Swedes.” This argument was repeated several times. “Power for me means that the Swedes shall look at me, lie down on the ground and kiss my feet.” The boys explain, laughingly, that “there is a thrilling sensation in your body when you're robbing, you feel satisfied and happy, it feels as if you've succeeded, it simply feels good.” “We rob every single day, as often as we want to, whenever we want to. The Swedes don't do anything, they just give us the stuff. They're so wimpy.”

“Exit Folkhemssverige - En samhällsmodells sönderfall” (Exit the People's Home of Sweden - The Downfall of a Model of Society) is a book from 2005 about immigration and the Swedish welfare state model dubbed “the people's home,” written by Jonathan Friedman, Ingrid Björkman, Jan Elfverson and Åke Wedin. According to them, the Swedish Multicultural elites see themselves first of all as citizens of the world. In order to emphasize and accentuate diversity, everything Swedish is deliberately disparaged. Opposition to this policy is considered a form of racism:

“The dominant ideology in Sweden, which has been made dominant by powerful methods of silencing and repression, is a totalitarian ideology, where the elites oppose the national aspect of the nation state. The problem is that the ethnic group that are described as Swedes implicitly are considered to be nationalists, and thereby are viewed as racists.”

The authors fear that the handling of the immigration policies has seriously eroded democracy because the citizens lose their loyalty towards a state they no longer consider their own. “Instead of increasing the active participation of citizens, the government has placed clear restrictions on freedom of thought, freedom of speech and freedom of congregation.”

Mona Sahlin has held various posts in Social Democratic cabinets, among others as Minister for Democracy, Integration and Gender Equality. Sahlin has said that many Swedes are envious of immigrants because they, unlike the Swedes, have a culture, a history, something which ties them together. Notice how Swedish authorities first formally state that Swedes don't have a history or a culture, and then proceed to lament the fact that Swedes don't have a history or a culture. A neat trick.

Sahlin has also stated that: “If two equally qualified persons apply for a job at a workplace with few immigrants, the one called Muhammad should get the job. […] It should be considered an asset to have an ethnic background different from the Swedish one.” In 2004, she was quoted as saying that “A concerted effort that aims at educating Swedes that immigrants are a blessing to their country must be pursued,” stressing that her compatriots must accept that the new society is Multicultural. “Like it or not, this is the new Sweden.”

Mona Sahlin was elected leader of the Social Democratic Party, as thus a future contender for the post of Swedish Prime Minister, in 2007.

Why does the government dispense with the social contract and attack its own people like this? Well, for starters, because it can. Sweden is currently arguably the most politically repressive and totalitarian country in the Western world. It also has the highest tax rates. That could be a a coincidence, but I'm not sure that it is. The state has become so large and powerful that is has become an autonomous organism with a will of its own. The people are there to serve the state, not vice versa. And because state power penetrates every single corner of society, including the media, there are no places left to mount a defense if the state decides to attack you.

It has been said jokingly that while other countries are states with armies, Pakistan is an army with a state. Likewise, it could be argued that Sweden started out being a nation with a bureaucracy and ended up being a bureaucracy with a nation. In fact, the bureaucracy formally abolished the very nation it was supposed to serve. Its representatives are no longer leaders of a people, but caretakers preoccupied only with advancing their own careers through oiling and upholding, if possible expanding, the bureaucratic machinery.

Swedes pay the highest tax rates of any (supposedly) free nation, and for this they get flawed social security, non-existent physical security and a state apparatus dedicated to their destruction.

Anna Ekelund in the newspaper Aftonbladet writes that: “We are a people who allow ourselves to be insulted by the government on a daily basis. We are not expected to be capable of thinking for ourselves, of deciding what we will read, or managing our own money. […] Swedes are as co-dependent as an alcoholic's wife. Yet we do not hurry to the ballot box to remove the prevailing systems. Not because we don't want to but because too many of us have painted ourselves into their corners.”

Moreover, Swedes are keenly aware of the fact that their country is viewed by many outsiders as a “model society.” Sweden is a deeply ideological state dedicated to imposing a certain world view on its citizens, and because the state is ideological, dissenters are quite literally treated as enemies of the state.

In the book The New Totalitarians, the British historian Roland Huntford in the early 1970s pointed out that it was easier to establish the Fascist model of the corporate state in Sweden than in Mussolini's Italy for cultural reasons, since Sweden had a centralized bureaucracy whereas Italians are skeptical of state authority. Put simply: Swedes have tended to trust their bureaucrats, which no Italian in his right mind would ever do.

According to him, “The Swedes have a horror of controversy as something unpleasant, inefficient and vaguely immoral. They require for peace of mind, not confrontation, but consensus. Consensus guides everything: private conversation, intellectual life and the running of the State.”

The then Minister of Education, Mr. Ingvar Carlsson, defined the purpose of schooling: “It is to produce a well adjusted, good member of society. It teaches people to respect the consensus, and not to sabotage it” He also on one occasion said that “School is the spearhead of Socialism.” Mr. Carlsson was Swedish Prime Minister as late as 1996. In 2007, now as Sweden's consul general in Istanbul, Carlsson said that the trend towards a Multicultural Europe is unstoppable; therefore, Islam must be recognized as a “domestic” European religion.

Mr. Carlsson's mentor in the Social Democratic Party and predecessor as Swedish Prime Minister (1969 to 1986), Mr. Olof Palme, openly flaunted his disregard, if not contempt for, Western civilization: “The Renaissance so-called? Western culture? What does it mean to us?” Under the watchful eye of the Labor movement, Swedish education has for decades mounted deliberate attacks on Western culture, making it look suspect.

According to Mr. Huntford, “When the Swedes change ideas, they do it to the full, leaving no room for criticism or reservation. The country lacks intellectual defences; anything new will conquer without resistance being offered.” The consensus “assumes that technological advancement is the sole path to happiness, and the Gross National Product the only measure of national success. It also assumes that the good of the collective at all times must take precedence over the good of the individual. It prescribes that the fundamentals of Swedish society must never be questioned or discussed.”

This is how Mrs Maj Bossom-Nordboe, then departmental chief of at the Directorate of Schools, expressed it: “It's useless to build up individuality, because unless people learned to adapt themselves to society, they would be unhappy. Liberty is not emphasized. Instead, we talk about the freedom to give up freedom. The accent is on the social function of children, and I will not deny that we emphasize the collective.”

Roland Huntford ended his book with a warning that this system of soft-totalitarianism could be exported to other countries. He has been proven right since:

“The Swedes have demonstrated how present techniques can be applied in ideal conditions. Sweden is a control experiment on an isolated and sterilized subject. Pioneers in the new totalitarianism, the Swedes are a warning of what probably lies in store for the rest of us, unless we take care to resist control and centralization, and unless we remember that politics are not to be delegated, but are the concern of the individual. The new totalitarians, dealing in persuasion and manipulation, must be more efficient than the old, who depended upon force.”

Following the September 2006 elections, Fredrik Reinfeldt became Prime Minister of Sweden, presiding over a center-right coalition government. This is, in my view, positive. Sweden has been described by some as a “one-party state,” since the Social Democrats have been in power for 65 of the last 74 years. However, the differences between the left-wing and the right-wing in Sweden are not always that big.

The last time these parties were in power, under the leadership of PM Carl Bildt from 1991 to 94, they presided over massive immigration, and have not been vocal in their opposition to the Multicultural policies since. The new Foreign Minister Bildt as a UN Commissioner to the Balkans called for recognizing Islam as a part of European culture.

PM Reinfeldt has stated that the original Swedish culture was merely barbarism: “It can sometimes be good to humbly remind of the fact that a great deal of what constitutes Sweden has been created in [a process of] evolution, exactly because we have been open to accept other people and experiences.”

Reinfeldt said this following a visit to an area called Ronna in Södertälje, near Stockholm. One year earlier a police station in Södertälje was hit by shots from an automatic weapon following a major confrontation between immigrant youths and police. The trouble in Ronna started after a Swedish girl had been called a “whore” and reacted to this. Ethnologist Maria Bäckman, in her study “Whiteness and gender,” has followed a group of Swedish girls in the immigrant suburb of Rinkeby outside Stockholm. Bäckman relates that several of the blond Swedish girls stated that they had dyed their hair to avoid sexual harassment.

I have called Sweden a soft-totalitarian country, but I am sometimes not so sure about the “soft” part. Opinion polls have revealed that two out of three Swedes doubt whether Islam can be combined with Swedish society, and a very significant proportion of the population have for years wanted more limitations on immigration. Yet not one party represented in Parliament is genuinely critical of the Multicultural society.

Is it just a coincidence that the one country on the European continent that has avoided war for the longest period of time, Sweden, is also arguably the one Western nation where Political Correctness has reached the worst heights? Maybe the prolonged period of peace has created an environment where layers of ideological nonsense have been allowed to pile up for generations without stop. I don't know what Sweden will look like a generation from now, but I'm pretty sure it won't be viewed as a model society. And if the absence of war is one of the causes of its current weakness, I fear that is a problem that will soon be cured.

*****

Interesting perspective... I had no idea this was going on Sweden.

From the Globe & Mail back in january:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/GIS.Servlets.HTMLTemplate?current_row=36&tf=tgam/columnists/FullColumn.html&cf=tgam/columnists/FullColumn.cfg&configFileLoc=tgam/config&date=&dateOffset=&hub=margaretWente&title=Margaret_Wente&cache_key=margaretWente&start_row=36&num_rows=1

MEET THE NEW SWEDES

The Globe and Mail's MARGARET WENTE visits the land famous for blue eyes, tolerance and state largesse. That image is changing rapidly, she discovers, and the fallout may be momentous

Saturday, January 6, 2007 – Page F1

MALMO, SWEDEN -- The biggest city in southern Sweden is a festive place in December. The pubs and restaurants are crowded with revellers. The upscale shop windows are ablaze with luxury goods and eight-pointed Swedish stars. Even though they are the most secular people in the world, Swedes take their Christmas celebrations seriously.

But the face of Malmo -- and Sweden -- is quickly changing. Today, the most popular name for a baby boy born in this old Baltic shipbuilding centre isn't Lars or Sven; it's Mohammed.

Most people think of Sweden as a land of tall, blue-eyed blondes. Yet this nation of nine million includes more than 1.2 million people who were born somewhere else. Immigration rates have doubled since the early 1980s, and have almost reached Canadian levels.

Most of Sweden's newcomers are Muslims. Many of them settle in Malmo, which, with a Muslim population pushing 20 per cent of its 285,000 residents, has become one of the most Muslim cities in Western Europe. And Sweden, with 300,000 to 400,000 Muslims, is rapidly becoming one of Europe's most Muslim countries.

If Muslim immigration can work anywhere in Europe, it should be Sweden. Swedes pride themselves on being the most tolerant and least prejudiced nation on the planet. They have a strong belief in welcoming refugees and asylum-seekers from all the war-torn places of the Earth. Their welfare system is extremely generous to newcomers. Their schools are among the best in Europe, and the state is so eager to make the newcomers feel at home that it finances hundreds of schools for Muslims only.

"Sweden is a big country," one woman told me, "and, as a Swede, I believe it is our duty to help others."

I heard this noble sentiment many times. But there's a catch. What if some of the newcomers to Sweden aren't all that interested in becoming Swedish?

A short bus ride from downtown Malmo takes you to Rosengard, one of the city's immigrant districts. Few Swedes ever make the trip, although a large grocery store was built recently in order to entice them to mingle with the newcomers.

Swedish Christmas stars are hard to find in this part of town. Instead, the middle-rise apartment buildings are dotted with satellite dishes that pick up Turkish TV and al-Jazeera. Women in head coverings and traditional Muslim dress are wheeling their baby strollers under the leaden winter sky. In the mall, elderly Turkish men, who came here as labourers in the 1970s, get together for a smoke. You see plenty of teenaged boys but not many teenaged girls. Most of the girls aren't allowed out on their own.

Rosengard, home to around 21,000 people, was built as part of Sweden's futuristic housing dream. In the late 1960s, hundreds of thousands of people still lived in wretched inner-city housing without proper heat or plumbing. And so the government launched the Million Program, a massively ambitious campaign to build no fewer than a million modern, affordable housing units.

Today, Million Program apartments surround every Swedish city, marching on in tidy rows for blocks and blocks. These areas reflect the latest ideas in the urban planning of the time. There are generous pedestrian walkways, green space and car-free zones.

But Swedes don't live there any more. Immigrants do. Rosengard today is occupied mainly by refugees from Iraq, Somalia, Lebanon and the former Yugoslavia. Education levels are low, and roughly half the women who came here last year are illiterate. In many households, the only book is a Koran.

My guide to Rosengard is Ismail, a genial Somali who also works as a liaison with the area's youth. He is fluent in Swedish and English. "Here we have everything," he says, gesturing proudly. He shows me the swimming pool, the soccer field, the indoor hockey rink and the music school, where any child can get free lessons. "We have basketball and boxing," he says. We tour the youth centre, with its new wide-screen TV, and the women's centre, and the large and sunny public library that is stocked with books in a dozen languages. The public services in Sweden's immigrant communities are often better than in the Swedish parts of town.

At the Citizens' Advice Bureau, the friendly Swedish staff offer help with housing, immigration problems and welfare. Anyone can drop in to use the free computers and the Internet. Immigrants get free skills and language training. There are free daycare centres on every block. To give the children a sense of Swedish life, social workers take them on regular outings to the countryside, where they go hiking and horseback riding. "These kids can never say Swedish kids have something they don't have," Ismail says.

Well, there are a few things these kids don't have. Swedish neighbours, for example. Over the past decade, segregation has become markedly more pronounced. There are many Rosengards in Sweden, where the local schools have virtually no ethnically Swedish students. The only Swedes the inhabitants ever meet are the social workers and teachers and police officers, who arrive every morning and go home every night. As one police officer puts it: "The people here don't live in Sweden. They live in Rosengard."

Something else their families lack is jobs. The unemployment rate among adult men here is 60 per cent. In some pockets, it is 80 per cent. Asylum-seekers aren't allowed to work while their claims are heard, and that can take a couple of years. After that, unless you can find a good job, working doesn't pay any better than welfare.

Job prospects for the next generation are also poor. Only half the kids with foreign-born parents graduate from high school, versus more than 90 per cent of Swedish kids. Drugs and petty crime are rampant. "Every year hundreds of these kids leave school -- to go nowhere," the police officer says.

So far, Sweden has escaped the convulsions over immigration that have racked so much of Europe. Its neighbour Denmark, home of the infamous Mohammed cartoons, has pulled up the drawbridge on Muslim immigration, as has the Netherlands. In Britain, Prime Minister Tony Blair has declared that newcomers have a duty to conform to "British values." Violence has forced France into a hot debate over its hostile Muslim underclass.

But in Sweden, the official consensus is that immigration is still working. Many Swedes despise the Danes, whom they regard as racist and nationalist. And so, while other nations tighten their refugee policies, Sweden has been loosening its own. (Virtually all of Sweden's immigrants are refugees and the relatives they bring in behind them.) Sweden is the most popular destination in Europe for people from Iraq, because it is the easiest place to get a residence permit. Residents can become citizens after four years. Last year, Sweden even gave a second chance to rejected asylum-seekers who were hiding in the country. Of 30,000 people who reapplied, about 60 per cent were approved, including 5,300 Iraqis.

The official belief is that if the newcomers are given enough help and time, they will blend into society and become just like Swedes -- only Muslim.

And yet, it's hard for outsiders to become Swedes. The Swedes are among the most homogeneous people on Earth, and the cultural codes of Swedishness (politeness, consensus, the benefits of fresh air and exercise) are deeply entrenched. The Swedes' experience with immigration is relatively short -- less than a generation -- and they just aren't used to diversity. Speaking the language correctly is extremely important -- so much so that Swedes find it hard to understand people who speak with an accent. When immigrants speak Swedish on the TV news, they are often given subtitles.

Not surprising, in such a mono-cultural place, a job application from someone named Mohammed generally loses out to one from Lars. Sympathetic employment officers sometimes advise job applicants who have foreign names to change them so that they can improve their chances.

It would be hard to find a bigger culture gap than the one that exists between the ultrasecular, ultraliberal, ultraliterate Swedes and the increasingly religious new arrivals. Free music lessons are all very well, but what if people feel that their religious beliefs forbid music? Many of the newcomers have other beliefs that are highly unusual for a Swede -- about faith, God, marriage, sex, homosexuality, Jews, the role of women, education and child rearing. And it has begun to dawn on even the most sympathetic Swedes that they will not integrate as quickly as, say, the Chileans who came here in the 1970s. "We have to be patient," explains Liselotte Johannson, who manages a centre for immigrants on the outskirts of Stockholm. "Some people are saying it may take three generations."

Meantime, the protective welfare state is facing a powerful new competitor: Islam. And increasingly it is Islam, not the state, that offers the newcomers a sense of meaning, purpose and belonging.

On the fringes of Rosengard stands the biggest and oldest mosque in Sweden. It was built in 1984, and on Fridays, 800 people come to pray here. Next to it is the Islamic Centre, which offers a variety of services to Muslims, including religious preparations for burial and a medical clinic that performs circumcisions. Muslim families come here for advice on resolving domestic problems (a common one is fathers who announce they will kill their daughters for sexual misconduct, real or alleged).

The Islamic Centre also houses an excellent primary school -- for Muslim children only. Its sun-filled classrooms are full of beaming, gap-toothed kids named Isra, Hussain, Mirel and Yasir. Their parents come from half a dozen countries and speak several languages, but are united by Islam. In one class, a bunch of eager five-year-olds are learning to tell time with a giant paper clock. Their teacher is a vivacious young blonde.

This is one of hundreds of Muslim schools financed by the state. It follows the Swedish curriculum, and most of the teachers are ethnic Swedes. After regular school hours, the kids stay on to learn Arabic and study the Koran.

I ask the school's enthusiastic director, Ann-Louise Wallner, how these kids will integrate into Swedish society. She is happy to explain. "Here the children can have their roots, and they're not questioned all the time," she says. "But we also want them to be integrated. We have our own buses, and we use them to take the children to Malmo and to small villages, where they meet Swedish kids."

The teachers work hard to transmit Swedish social values, she says. For example, they explain that, in Sweden, dogs are not filthy beasts but beloved pets. "When the children use words like 'I will kill you,' we tell them we don't say that here in Sweden."

Bejzat Becirov, the founder of the centre, arrived in the 1970s from Macedonia. He dresses in a shirt and tie, not Islamic robes, and is clean-shaven. His dream is to create a moderate, open version of Svensk-Islam. "This centre is for Muslims from all different backgrounds who believe in the future, and the importance of education," he says. "It's important for Muslims and non-Muslims to look at what we have in common."

He hasn't had an easy time. Mr. Becirov has fought a running battle with Muslims who believe he isn't nearly conservative enough. Then, three years ago, the mosque caught fire, and he saw his dream turn to ashes before his eyes. The cause was arson. No one knows who did it.

Mr. Becirov eventually found the funds to rebuild the mosque and expand the Islamic Centre, which is built along the lines of a classic Arab courtyard. Today, the centre is regarded as something of a showcase for progressive, moderate Islam. It conducts daily tours for students, seniors, journalists and leaders from other religious faiths. Unfortunately, not all visitors are friendly. There is a large, ugly scorch mark on the wall of the prayer room, where someone recently lobbed a Molotov cocktail, and the ceiling of the mosque is smudged with smoke.

Many Swedes believe that Mr. Becirov's form of benign Islam is the kind that will prevail in Sweden. They believe that their famous neutrality is a sort of insurance policy against radical Islamism.

That optimism is not shared by people who understand the fierce ideological competition at work inside the immigrant communities. "You find many people who support al-Qaeda and speak openly about it," says Kassem Hamade, a reporter who covers immigration and Muslim matters for the newspaper Expressen. The militant Muslim Brotherhood controls the biggest Muslim lobby group. And radicals from Denmark have been working quietly in Rosengard to win recruits.

"I am sure they are successful in many cases," says Jahangir Hosseinkhah, who is the manager of training and employment for the district. "There are a lot of young Muslim men who feel betrayed and humiliated. They're also unemployed, so they can't get married and they can't have sex. They're mad at their families, their home countries, their new countries, the U.S. and Israel."

Mr. Hosseinkhah has lived and worked in Rosengard for 20 years, ever since he came to Sweden from Azerbaijan by way of Iran. He is smart and thoughtful, and knows this place from the inside out. Perhaps because he comes from somewhere else, he can see what most Swedes can't: The immigration policy founded on so much kindness and idealism is a disaster.

The main reason is very simple. To become a true member of society, you've got to have a job.

"If you have work, then you have dignity," he says. "You can be a role model for your children and your friends. The job is the most important thing of all."

But Sweden has constructed a mink-lined welfare trap. Instead of turning immigrants into workers, the system turns them into passive welfare dependents. "We think we have to take care of people. But when someone takes care of you, you feel you are not capable. You suddenly feel helpless."

And if you don't need to integrate to survive, why integrate at all?

"People aren't idiots," he says. "When you live in this area, you can shop in Arabic. Your income from social benefits is higher than a salary. There are people who've been living here for 10 or 15 years, and they still need a translator. They don't know Malmo. They don't have any motivation. Why would they?"

Europe's economic model is terrible for immigrants. Cheap labour is the best way for newcomers to get into the job market. But the idea of cheap labour is anathema in Europe, and especially in egalitarian Sweden. That means it's very hard for newcomers to get hired. And Europe is losing jobs, not creating them.

Malmo is part of a prosperous economic belt that includes Copenhagen, which is connected to southern Sweden by a bridge. And Mr. Hosseinkhah gets lots of calls from employers who have work. But most of it is not the kind of work his clients either know how or want to do.

In his view, Sweden has to stop helping people so much. "A woman who got here all the way from Iraq, even an illiterate one, is not without resources," he observes.

A while back, he had a discussion with community leaders who were bemoaning the terrible conditions in Rosengard. "I don't understand," he told them. "People have houses, bread, nice clothes, good schools. The situation here is better than the situation in 70 per cent of the world. So, please, just let them take care of themselves. Respect these people. They are adults."

The Swedes have made another bad mistake, he says. In the name of tolerance and understanding, they have played into the separatist strain of Islam. Even moderates such as Bejzat Becirov, he believes, are not encouraging people to integrate enough. "Generally, I don't see a big movement [among Muslim leaders] to convince Muslims to be a part of the society. They're focusing on a parallel society."

Aje Carlbom, a sociologist at the University of Malmo, has made a close study of Rosengard, where he lived for three years, and he agrees. "I call them moderate Islamists," he says of Mr. Becirov's Islamic Centre. "They believe Muslims should establish their own schools and neighbourhoods. At root, it is a separatist project."

Ironically, the segregation unwittingly encouraged by the policies of the welfare state suits Islamists very well. The newcomers feel no need to integrate, because they already are -- in their own transnational or ethnic networks. They maintain close ties with their homelands and sometimes keep residences there too. "We have a lot of 'refugees' who go home on vacation, with tickets paid for by the state," Mr. Carlbom says. Arabic culture in particular has very strong boundaries. Cousins marry cousins, and no one marries outside the group. But these things are seldom discussed.

"Swedes have great difficulty talking about the problematic aspects of immigration," Mr. Carlbom says. "If you bring up the subject, you're called a racist." And because of Sweden's famous culture of tolerance, the wider society doesn't know what's going on.

Just beneath the surface, though, an increasing number of Swedes know something is going on, and they don't like it. They don't like paying taxes to build swimming pools in neighbourhoods where they have never been, and to support people who will never get a job and do not identify with Sweden. They don't like the rising crime rates in downtown Stockholm -- once among the safest cities in the world -- where people now have to worry about being mugged. Ethnic crime statistics are not kept (so as not to whip up racism), but the criminals are overwhelmingly of foreign origin, and everybody knows it.

Even without the pressures of immigration, the shared values and high trust that are essential to maintain the welfare state have been breaking down. Sweden's working class has been hit hard by deindustrialization, and real unemployment is very high. The official unemployment figures do not include the high numbers of people who are in "job training" or those who retired early at 55, or those who are on long-term sick leave (which is relatively generous, and easy to get). Well-known economist Mauricio Rojas -- an immigrant from Chile, who is now a Liberal member of Parliament from Malmo -- estimates that there may be as many as a million employable people outside the labour market.

Last September, Mr. Rojas's Liberals edged out the long-reigning Social Democrats with a promise to create more jobs. (The Liberals are identified in Sweden as centre-right, which means they are marginally less left than the other parties.) Immigration was not a prominent election issue, and the Sweden Democrats, who are the closest thing the country has to an anti-immigration party, polled a measly 3 per cent.

But in the south, where immigrant concentrations are highest, the party won as much as 25 per cent of the vote in some districts. Two members were even elected to the left-wing Rosengard district council. In a panic, the councillors discussed downsizing the number of seats on the council in order to exclude them, but in the end thought better of it.

It's unthinkable to most people here that social tensions could erupt as they have in France and Britain. But it's not unthinkable to Mr. Rojas. "The Muslims work on values that are totally different from mainstream Swedish values," he says. "Until now, we have kept the conflicts at a manageable level. But there are all the elements for a social explosion."

Back in Rosengard, the helpful social workers aren't thinking about the economy, or the breakdown of trust, or a social explosion. They are dreaming up ways they can be even more helpful.

A highlight of my tour is the Women's Centre, which contains a gleaming new fitness facility built for women only. There is a big room with glossy hardwood floors and a full-length mirror along one wall, and another room with a row of brand-new exercise bicycles and treadmills. In the corner, a lone middle-aged woman in sweatpants diligently treads away.

"Here the woman can come and take off their hijab," explains the fitness centre's director, a lean and healthy Swedish woman in her early 30s. She explains that many of the men were suspicious at first, and insisted on inspecting the classes to make sure there really were no males there. But now they are happy to let their wives and daughters go work out.

It struck me that the concept of a workout must be rather novel to illiterate women from the war-torn villages of the Middle East and Africa, whose cultures probably have no word for "aerobics." So I asked why the centre was built. I got a classically Swedish answer. "We noticed that the women here don't eat very well," says the director, whose real field, she told me, is public health. "They have a lot of health problems. They eat a lot more refined flour and sugar than Swedes do." Although she was too polite to say so, the problem is that Middle Eastern women are too fat.

Another social worker nodded in agreement. "Junk food is really a big problem," she says. What they need is more exercise. The fitness centre will help them slim down, and the exercise instructors will encourage them to eat more vegetables -- just like Swedes. The women, I am told, are very grateful for the classes and the exercise machines.

As the sociologist, Aje Carlbom, tells me: "The Swedish idea is that we will transform them. We will take them out into beautiful nature and let them run in the woods. And then they will become strong and Swedish."

So far, it hasn't worked. But the Swedes are not about to stop trying.

I think there are some parallels that can be drawn here with Hispanic immigration into the US. When you have a growing isolated society, with no need for integration, serious long term problems will being to arise.

I also find it interesting that so many EU nations do not count race in their crime stats. It sounds more like denial than anti-racism.