About Those Swedish Terror Attacks

It now seems that Donald Trump is relying of Fox news for international intelligence. At a rally on Saturday in Melbourne, Florida, he railed against immigration by citing a non-existent incident in Sweden.

“We’ve got to keep our country safe. You look at what’s happening in Germany, you look at what’s happening last night in Sweden.”

Like the Bowling Green massacre, nothing happened in Sweden Friday night. Naturally social media latched on it and it took a life of its own with trending hash tags like #JuSuisIkea and #lastnightinSweden which have generated some very funny tweets.

This is one of my favorites

Even the the Swedish Embassy got into the fun.

Once again the source of Trump’s delusion was Fox News. He caught a segment of the Tucker Carlson show discussing guest Ami Horowitz’s short film that presented Sweden as a crime infested because of an influx of immigrants from the Middle East. Of course the film was a total misrepresentation and, very possibly doctored. The rest of the story from Igor Bobic at Huffington Post:

Two Swedish police officers who appeared in a short film recently highlighted by Fox News ― which appeared to give the president of the United States the idea that the country was a crime-infested hot spot ― say their comments were misrepresented by filmmaker Ami Horowitz.

Horowitz (a former Huffington Post contributor) appeared on Fox News on Friday evening to talk about the film, “Stockholm Syndrome,” which portrays Sweden’s liberal immigration policies in a negative light. In one excerpt that aired during the segment on “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” two police officers are interviewed about “violence spreading across Sweden into the cities” as a result of immigration. [..]

But the two officers told the Swedish daily newspaper Dagens Nyheter that their comments were selectively edited by the filmmaker.

”It was supposed to be about crime in high risk areas. Areas with high crime rates. There wasn’t any focus on migration or immigration,” Anders Göranzon told the paper.

Göranzon said they were “answering completely different questions in the interview. This is bad journalism.”

“It feels like hell,” he went on. “The real questions should be shown along with our answers. We don’t own the rights to the film, but the end result is that we don’t want to talk to journalists after this. We can’t trust each other.”

Crime rates in Sweden have remained relatively flat over the past 10 years, according to the 2016 Swedish Crime Survey, even as the country has taken in hundreds of thousands of immigrants and refugees.

Trump once again opens his mouth and creates an international incident, all be it a minor one. How long before he tweets something that gets us into a war?