If social programs promote harmony, explain the riots in Sweden

Rioters do not riot. Society makes them riot. Rioters are helpless, powerless people who go into the streets to protest the oppressive policies of an unjust society. Ask any academic.

Since its publication in 1968, the Kerner Commission report has been the primary blueprint for thinking about the causes and consequences of riots.  This is not just true of riots in America but riots throughout the Western world.  Whether the riots take place in the streets of Los Angeles, London, Paris, or Stockholm, modern social scientists and liberal pundits think and write about riots with boring, repetitive, and shameless similarity—as influenced by this commission.

Nearly all subsequent riot studies have concluded with proposals for expanding social and economic programs to redress the grievances that “impel” people to riot.  Even the McCone Commission, which investigated the Watts riot (1965) and departed from the view that rioters bore little responsibility for their actions, advocated a massive infusion of resources into the riot communities to deal with social grievances.

Anniversaries of the famed Kerner Commission report are used as opportunities to remind American administrations of their unfulfilled responsibility to the ghettos.  Some leftist academicians openly speak of our obligation to those who had no choice but to go into the streets and burn down significant portions of their own neighborhoods.

Academicians no longer simply confuse explanation with justification; they begin with justification and then find explanations to sustain it.  The Kerner Commission report was originally titled, “The Harvest of American Racism,” and was so dripping in leftist ideology that even President Lyndon Johnson found it unpalatable.  The report’s research director, Robert Shellow, was fired.  But the commission staff continued to include some of Shellow’s intemperate ideology in the final version of the report.

Sanctified with statistics, adorned with social science jargon, and anointed with footnotes, the Kerner Commission report when drilled to the core said this:  Blacks rioted.  Blacks are discriminated against.  Discrimination causes riots.  Removing discrimination and pumping money into the ghettos will prevent riots.

The commission did not engage some rather obvious questions.  If discrimination led to the riots, why were the riots in Northern cities and not Southern ones?  How does one explain the Watts riots, the longest and most devastating of the urban riots, which took place in Los Angeles, a city relatively progressive in terms of race relations?  Why did the riots not take place in an earlier era when discrimination was far more common and damaging?

The  Kerner Commission said what liberal policy makers wanted to hear and became the template for the study of riots.  When riots occurred in London’s Brixton area (1981), the British government’s Scarman Report, sounded like the Kerner Report with a British accent.

Now come riots in Sweden, which present a conundrum for any thinking liberal.  Sweden is the gleaming polity for all those who claim that socialist societies represented the humanitarian ideal of social, political, and economic policies. Sweden is a society where people are encouraged to engage in free competition, but the product of their abilities is redistributed to the needs of others through a tax structure that takes 70% of an average worker’s income.

With its welcoming and compassionate immigration policy and its expansive welfare system, Sweden seems to be a model for the welfare state programs others in the West proposed as a deterrent to riots and a means for the creation of a harmonious and sensitive society.  For liberals, watching a riot in Sweden is like seeing a porn theater open at Disneyland.

Or is it?  Sweden’s liberal multicultural democracy seems to apply to everyone but Jews.  In Malmo, where Danish Jews who fled Hitler were received with open arms by the locals, a new, virulent, Muslim-spawned, leftist tolerated anti-Semitism thrives.  The Jews are now leaving Malmo.

No hate crime against a Jew has ever been prosecuted in Malmo.  Often the police don’t even search for the perpetrators of anti-Semitic crimes.  Ilmar Reepalu, the leftist mayor of Malmo, justifies anti-Semitism as being a backlash to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  The Jews seem to have brought hate upon themselves, according to Reepalu, echoing typical leftist dogma.

The Swedish government is reluctant to challenge the Muslim population.  When riots broke out in late May in the Muslim enclaves on the outskirts of Stockholm, the police chose to adopt a policy of not containing them but rather to let the riots burn themselves out.

The Stockholm riots lasted six days, as long as Watts, the longest of the urban riots of the sixties. One aspect of the Kerner Commission report liberals don’t like to quote is the finding that a serious, strong, well-mobilized police response, in the early period of a riot, quenches it quickly.  It is when the police fail to mobilize and respond decisively that the riot spreads and takes longer to bring to an end.

Liberal Sweden chose the later course, so as not to offend those who were burning cars and committing mayhem in the streets.  Segments of the international liberal media did not focus on the rioters but whether Sweden’s leftist government would be threatened by the rise of the right-wing Sweden Democrats, who could obviously capitalize on the riots as a political issue.  At the Daily Beast, Megan McArdle, following the Kerner doctrine, did not blame the rioters.  Instead, Sweden’s vaunted redistribution policies were found wanting.  The Muslim rioters in Stockholm, like the black urban rioters of the sixties, needed more, more redistribution and above all more jobs.  As to how Sweden was going to provide those jobs amid Europe’s recession, she didn’t say.

Sweden’s problem is obvious to all but liberals. It has opened its doors to a population that does not share its pluralistic values but uses those to perpetuate both its own value system and culture on Swedish soil.  That value system is constantly reinforced by new immigrants and broadcasts from the Muslim world.  Syria produces televised propaganda that comes into Muslim homes and shows how Jews kill Christian children to obtain their blood for Passover Matzo.  Al Jazeera’s popular television preacher, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, broadcasts a mixture of anti-Semitism and fundamentalist Islamic teaching to a large Muslim audience in Sweden.

Immigration works when immigrants not only yearn to come to a new country but also to become part of that country by changing old values and adopting new ones.  When immigrants change geography but do not desire to change history, then all a society has done is to fracture its culture and jeopardize its future.  Neither more redistribution of wealth nor more jobs will solve Sweden’s cultural problem or prevent the next riot. If one wants to understand the riots in Sweden, then one should look at who are the rioters.

Abraham H. Miller is an emeritus professor of political science and a specialist on political violence.  He has written extensively about  riots for both academic and popular venues.  His early work on the Watts riot won a Pi Sigma Alpha Award, for research, from the Western Political Science  Association.