The Day the Music Died
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A stunning – and stunningly disturbing - event took place this past weekend. But unless you were scouring the news very carefully, chances are you didn't even hear of it.
The annual Bravalla Festival, one of the most popular summer music concerts in Sweden, was abruptly canceled. There will be no festival next year. Or ever.
Given that tens of thousands of tickets were sold, the problem was not attendance. Nor was there any difficulty booking big-name rap and rock stars. No, this festival was canceled because of something far more ominous – Bravalla has become synonymous with rape and sexual assault.
Festival officials, as they announced the end of Bravalla, complained that "certain men" don't know how to behave. You might wonder if those "certain men" are strapping blonde Swedes with names like Erik, Viktor, and Gustav. But in fact, the assailants are allegedly immigrants from the Middle East, North Africa, and other predominantly Muslim areas of the world.
One year ago the Bravalla Festival gained a measure of infamy when police reported five rapes and a dozen cases of molestation. The story got minor coverage in some media outlets, including the New York Times, which described the assailants as "foreigners" and "refugees." Predictably, the Times also warned of a "far-right" backlash.
This year the situation was even more sickening, with four reported rapes and 23 instances of sexual assault. And the Times? The "paper of record" chose to run a brief Associated Press dispatch noting that the festival has been shut down. Nowhere was there any mention that Muslim immigrants were the likely perps.
Sweden, like many European socialist paradises, has been in a state of deep denial about its refugee crisis. If you believe authorities and tourism officials, immigrants are fitting in quite nicely in the world's most liberal nation. But what about those rumors of "no-go zones," where crime is rampant and where police fear to tread? Well, we're assured that's just "fake news" perpetrated by anti-immigrant groups.
But earlier this year a courageous British reporter named Katie Hopkins decided to take a look for herself. She ventured into some of Sweden's imaginary "no-go zones" and spoke with women who are absolutely terrified of going out alone, day or night. They know that crossing onto the wrong street in some cities is an invitation to harassment, assault, even rape.
These women are also afraid of feminists and liberals, who accuse them of being racists if they speak the truth. Hopkins wrote this about one woman she met in Stockholm: "The migrant men scare her. But it is the Swedish women who have silenced her."
Bravalla is not the only music festival where women are in jeopardy. There were dozens of rapes and assaults at another concert a few years ago, allegedly committed by young Afghan men who had been embraced by Sweden's outstretched arms.
And of course it's not just Sweden. In Germany, New Year's Eve of 2016 was marred by sexual assaults and rapes in many cities. Police reported that more than one-thousand women were victimized by hordes of young men. Again, the perps weren't Wolfgang, Hans, und Dieter. They were described by the women as men of "Arab or North African appearance."
Governments in Europe and a compliant media do their best to ignore the unending and escalating threat of violence. It simply does not fit the liberal narrative, which dictates that all cultures and all religions are pretty much the same. But reality has a very harsh way of prevailing over fantasy.
Sweden has the highest rate of immigration in Europe, having taken in tens of thousands of refugees from Syria, Somalia, and elsewhere. So you can think of the country as the canary in the coal mine. That proverbial canary is now gasping for air as European bureaucrats turn a blind eye.
Most Swedes still embrace their reputation for tolerance and liberalism. Many even seem quite willing to sacrifice a music festival or two if that's what it takes to display their virtue. And they willingly pay exorbitant taxes to subsidize refugees who despise Sweden's libertine culture and sexual permissiveness.
Let's put it this way: The world's most tolerant people are inviting the world's most intolerant people into their nation and their cities. The Swedes believe it's a noble experiment. But whether noble or foolish, it is an experiment doomed to fail.
The Bravalla Music Festival was just one casualty. There will be many more. Ironically, the festival urged fans to "choke hatred and violence and let the music win." Well, hatred and violence won and the music lost.
In the process, another small part of Europe has vanished, thanks to cowardly ideologues who so desperately cling to their open-border, one-world fantasies. A once-great continent and its cultures are slowly dying. To be more accurate, they are committing suicide.
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