An immigrant restaurant owner who fled Iraq 20 years ago has left Sweden and returned to his home country because of the violent crime he faced in his Stockholm suburb.
I moved to Sweden because it was a safe country.Now I’m moving from Sweden because it’s not safe anymore.
The man, speaking under the alias ‘Amin,’ said in an interview with Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter that he was the object of threats and violent attacks by criminal gangs and was forced to pay them to avoid harassment.
Amin came to Sweden after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, started a business, got married, and had children. But his successful restaurant was threatened by growing criminal activity in the area. A drug cartel began to extort business owners, typically demanding $1,000-5,000 per month to ‘protect’ them. Businesses that refused to pay suffered vandalism and threats.
”Imagine how it feels if you work ten hours a day.And then some disgusting person comes and threatens you and says nasty things to you,” Amin said.
Refusing to give up his hard-earned money, he was faced with increasingly violent threats. “I’ll destroy your whole d**n face. Your family won’t recognize you anymore,” one gang member says in an audio recording Amin collected as evidence. Over a decade, he was repeatedly threatened and assaulted.
The threats and violence forced him to close his restaurant, and the tense situation also led to his marriage falling apart.
Amin’s experiences highlight the growing insecurity in Swedish cities, where gang crime increasingly disrupts everyday life for many residents.
Once a homogenous country where every murder made the front page of every newspaper, had from the beginning of 2024 until May 15th experienced 109 shootings with 14 dead and 19 injured. During the same period, police recorded 50 bombings, 29 attempted bombings, and 74 preparations for bombing attacks.
Last year, the total number of shootings recorded by police in the country was 363, with 53 deaths, as well as 149 bombings.
Back in Iraq, Amin has again opened a restaurant and says about his current situation, “I live like a king! I am developing, I feel good. It is much safer in Iraq than in Sweden.
As I’m running out of material, here’s a fairly hard-hitting article from The Conservative Woman.
I particularly like the quote from Dr Richard Lindzen:
‘So here we are, confronted with policies that destroy Western economies, impoverish the working middle class, condemn billions of the world’s poorest to continued poverty and increased starvation, leave our children despairing over the alleged absence of a future, and will enrich the enemies of the West who are enjoying the spectacle of our suicide march, a march the cowardly energy sector accepts, being too lazy to exert the modest effort needed to check what is being claimed.
During the weekend I’ll think about whether it’s worth continuing when people like The Daily Sceptic, The Conservative Woman and Simon Webb’s History Debunked videos do what I do but do it so much better.
I know I should be researching and writing my own blogs. But when I came across this 4-minute YouTube video about a rather embarrassing situation in Germany concerning the wonderfully explosive features of electric vehicles with lithium ion batteries, I thought it might amuse those of my readers who are not yet convinced that electric milk floats pretending to be cars are necessarily the transport medium of choice for our future.
I think I’m running out of ideas and may soon decide to stop plaguing the world with my ignorant opinions. But before I go, here’s probably one of the simplest charts ever published:
Surely even a climate catastrophist or a UK politician or the useless BBC should be able to see that there is no point in the UK committing economic suicide in order to supposedly save the planet from what the world’s greatest climatologist, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, calls “Global Boiling”?
As regular readers will know, the only reason the UK has managed to reduce its CO2 emissions is through de-industrialisation. Dear MPs, please use your limited brains to try to understand the following three charts:
Chart1: UK manufacturing as a percentage of GDP:
Chart 2: Number of people employed in UK manufacturing:
Chart 3: UK share of global GDP:
Truly, I despair at the stupidity/evil of our ruling political, media and academic elites
Here’s our Prime Minister giving the details of the massive investments in Britain which he has apparently almost single-handedly managed to secure:
It’s quite impressive how he managed to do all this while also deciding which of his £32,000 of new suits and pairs of glasses to wear.
If I had any concerns, they would be around the fact that at least £25bn of the £63bn is for supposedly ‘renewable energy’ projects which will receive massive taxpayer subsidies to get to Net Zero by moving Britain from cheap, reliable fossil-fuel energy to eye-wateringly expensive, unreliable and intermittent ‘renewables’.
Anyway, here’s a tweet/X from Labour’s multi-talented, hockey-playing, (IMHO) free-speech-loathing Education Minister – Bridget Philipson – celebrating the great Sir Keir’s monstrous success in securing this £63bn in investment and 38,000 new jobs for Britain:
Hooray for honest Sir Keir! Hooray for Labour!
I’m not a cynic. So I’m delighted at this incredible (or beyond credible?) achievement as Sir Keir bats for Britain. But, I’m disappointed to find that there are some people, who seem much better informed than myself, who might be inclined to question Sir Keir’s and the fragrant Bridget’s claims that this £63bn was actually generated during Labour’s enormously successful first hunded days in government (the first seven minutes of this video):
I’ve just realised that Ed MIliband will actually manage to cut our energy bills.
Last week a warning was apparently sent out to energy suppliers warning of possible shortages and blackouts (can I write ‘black-outs’ or is that racist?) due to cold temperatures and a lack of wind and sun to power our envy-of-the-world (or should that be ‘laughing stock?) ‘clean energy superpower’ country
Can’t you see eco-fascist Ed ‘the idiot’ Miliband’s cunning plan – to cut our energy bills by cutting our energy?
As Maureen Lipman from the BT ad might have said “The man’s a genius!“
There has been lots of huffing and puffing by the chattering classes about the massive amounts of sh*t our water companies have been enthusiastically pouring into our rivers and seas. But the water companies squeal that it’s not their fault and claim that they need to hugely increase our water bills in order to have enough money to improve their networks. So let me give you the figures that many of our elites, and especially the useless fake regulator Ofwat, avoid mentioning.
When the water companies were privatised in 1989 they had no debts. Since then, the mostly foreign-owned water companies, instead of investment and improvements to infrastructure, have since taken on over £60 billion of debt, while at the same time their owners have withdrawn £85 billion in shareholder dividends and other payments. So, that’s borrowing of £1.7bn a year and shareholder dividends of £2.4bn a year. Currently, around 20% of your water bill is used just to service the water companies’ £60bn+ debt. That leaves preciously little money for fixing leaks, reducing sewage spills or investment in new infrastructure. Some of the water companies have been regularly making profits of 30% to 40% in Britain while only making 5% to 10% in their better-regulated home markets. The whole thing is a massive scam and ordinary British homes and businesses are the victims.
Thames Water, for example, which is bleating about supposedly being on the verge of bankruptcy, has been lobbying the government to let it increase bills by 40% after the company’s 35-year history of giving out £7.2bn in dividends – and racking up £14.7bn in debt. Around 28% of Thames’ revenue from bills is spent paying interest or fees on debt on average between 2019 and 2023. Thames’s high debt levels have put it on the brink of collapse while its shareholders are drowning in an ocean of our money.
However, the situation is even worse than it appears from the above figures. Some water companies, owned by foreign financial groups, have set up companies in offshore tax havens like Jersey and these companies have made loans to the UK water companies at interest rates which are comfortably above the level the water companies would have had to pay any other lender. This has allowed some water companies to make hidden and untaxed profits in the offshore tax havens of their choice. So the real amounts the water companies have extracted from British home- and business-owners will actually be well above the £85bn paid out in dividends.
Regulators without regulation
I first started writing about this massive scam in my 2008 book “SQUANDERED: How Gordon Brown is wasting over one trillion pounds of our money“.
At the time our useless fake regulator, Ofwat, was trying to pressure Thames Water to reduce its 30% (I think) level of leakage. Thames Water agreed to spend an extra £30m a year if Ofwat allowed Thames to increase prices by 21%. This £30m a year represented just 2% of Thames Water’s turnover at the time. But Thames’s German owners seem to have gleefully flipped the bird to Ofwat. They sacked about one third of their 6,000 employees to give annual savings of around £45m, paid the company’s chairman £6.3m in salary and bonuses and sold the business for over £1bn more than they bought it.
When asked by the Public Accounts Committee PAC) in mid-2007 about Thames’s massive profits while failing to fix leaks, Ofwat’s pointless boss proudly declared: “We have contemplated an enforcement an enforcement order in every year since Thames started failing”. One member of the PAC replied: “We are not interested in contemplation: we are interested in action”.
Water rip-off!
I don’t blame the water companies for their predatory behaviour. They’re business and their job is to make as much profits as they reasonably can. I blame our useless expenses-thieving, do-nothing politicians, our ignorant write-anything-for-money, prostitute supposed ‘journalists’ and the worthless, over-paid, over-pensioned, self-serving bureaucratic garbage at Ofwat for allowing this massive scam to continue for 35 years fleecing British homes and businesses while enriching the water companies’ owners.
Here’s just one of the many utterly-futile complaints I’ve made to our useless, UK-hating, Labour-loving, migrant-hugging, climate-crisis-proseletysing BBC recently.
YOUR COMPLAINT:
The usual BBC Pro-Labour Bias
When reporting about the Labour Party, the BBC reporters constantly claim Labour are “investing” in public services. The definition of “investing” is “put (money) into financial schemes, shares, property, or a commercial venture with the expectation of achieving a profit.” This does clearly not apply to public services. What Labour are doing is “spending more” on public services and there is no prospect of a financial return or profit.
Could the useless Labour-adoring BBC please stop using the word “investing” for money wasted on our failing, self-serving ludicrously-misnamed public services and start using the word “spending”?
And here’s their answer:
Reference CAS-7930099-X7S4C6
Dear Mr Craig,
Thank you for contacting us in relation to our broadcast of Breakfast on 24 September and for sharing your thoughts with us.
We note your concerns relating to the use of ‘investment’ when referring to government spending, we have reviewed this for you.
At this time, the BBC had been covering the Labour Party conference with Breakfast looking ahead to the upcoming speech from the Prime Minister. As part of this coverage, our political correspondent Henry Zeffman reported from the conference centre and focused on what was to be expected in the speech, looking at what areas Keir Starmer would focus on such as increased investment in public services. Later in the programme we also spoke to Pat McFadden who provided some insight into what that would mean.
The wording used on this occasion was simply a reflection of what the Prime Minister was expected to say in his speech where he spoke at length about public services. A key part of the role of our political coverage is to offer analysis on any given story and we would assure you that we think carefully when selecting which terminology to use. We would also assure you that in all our news coverage we are committed to reporting fairly, accurately and with due impartiality. We are editorially independent and not subject to political influence or agenda.
We very much value your feedback. Complaints are sent to senior management and we’ve included your points in our overnight reports. These reports are among the most widely read sources of feedback in the BBC. This ensures that your concerns have been seen by the right people quickly, and helps to inform decisions about current and future content.
Recently I’ve made 4 or 5 complaints to the useless, UK-hating, migrant-loving, anti-semitic BBC. I guess this shows what an empty life I must have to waste my time in this way.
Anyway, here are just two of my most recent complaints. Hopefully you’ll notice two issues:
the BBC reply never actually addresses the point I am complaining about
both replies are rather similar, so they must be a standard reponse the BBC issues to fob off any complaints about pro-Arab-terrorist, anti-Israel BBC bias
YOUR COMPLAINT:
Anti-semitic bias of BBC reporter
When reporting on an Israeli strike to kill a senior Hezbollah commander and some of his subordinates in Beirut, the reporter (I think it was Israel-hating Orla Guerin) blamed Israel for not giving a warning of the attack to the building’s residents. Did it not occur to the BBC reporter that, had Israel given a warning, then the Hezbollah commander would have escaped?
As for any civilians killed in the attack, I would have thought that innocent civilians (if there are any) would have realised that it’s not a great idea to hang around when senior Hamas or Hezbollah commanders are having a meeting anywhere near you!
Dear Mr Craig,
Thank you for contacting the BBC and for watching the BBC News at Six.
We were sorry to read you had concerns about an item on the programme on 20 September.
We watched the programme back, in light of your concerns.
Orla Guerin reported from Beirut. In introducing the report, she set out the situation for viewers. She explained what Israel had said in reaction to the strikes in Lebanon, and that ‘Hezbollah has been returning fire’.
Our overall coverage of the blasts in Lebanon caused by exploding communication devices, widely believed to have been carried out by Israel, has made clear the context in which these attacks have taken place.
We have detailed the simmering tensions and cross-border fire between Hezbollah and Israel since Hamas’ attack on Israel on 7th October last year, explaining both the actions taken by Hezbollah and the aims and nature of the organisation; our reporting has reflected that Hezbollah are proscribed as a terrorist organisation by several governments including the UK and Israel.
Indeed, before going to Orla, Jane Hill made this clear on this edition as well.
We have explained that Hezbollah members were the intended targets of these attacks. However, it is legitimate that we have also reported on the type of injuries sustained by casualties, and that civilians.
This is clearly an ongoing story and we will continue to follow developments closely with due impartiality, providing our audience with comprehensive information.
That said, your concerns were noted.
Please be assured that your concerns were sent to senior staff at BBC One and senior management via our daily report.
Thanks again for taking the time to get in touch.
YOUR COMPLAINT:
Simon Jones called Hezbollah terrorists “fighters”
Hezbollah, like Hamas, have been designated as a ‘terrorist organisation’ sponsored by Iran and dedicated to the total destruction of Israel and the extermination of all Jews. Yet Simon Jones referred to Hezbollah members as “fighters” in a piece sympathetically portraying them as victims of Israeli actions.
Dear Mr Craig
Thanks for contacting about BBC News.
Our coverage of the blasts in Lebanon caused by exploding communication devices, widely believed to have been carried out by Israel, has made clear the context in which these attacks have taken place. We have detailed the simmering tensions and cross-border fire between Hezbollah and Israel since Hamas’ attack on Israel on 7th October last year, explaining both the actions taken by Hezbollah and the aims and nature of the organisation; our reporting has reflected that Hezbollah are proscribed as a terrorist organisation by several governments including the UK and Israel.
We have explained that Hezbollah members were the intended targets of these attacks. However, it is legitimate that we have also reported on the type of injuries sustained by casualties, and that civilians, including children were also killed and injured. We have examined the implications of these extraordinary attacks in terms of an escalation in the already volatile situation in this region and the significance of this new type of technological warfare.
This is clearly an ongoing story and we will continue to follow developments closely with due impartiality, providing our audience with comprehensive information.
We have shared your feedback with senior editors at BBC News.
Usually a politician’s resignation letter starts with some waffle about ‘what an honour it has been to serve with you, but….’. Not so with Labour MP Rosie Duffield’s which lambasts multi-tier Keir for his greed, corruption, nepotism and betrayal of Labour values.
Duffield, from the little I understand, had previously locked horns with ‘I-don’t-know-what-a-woman-is’ Starmer and the Labour Party as she was, it seems, the only Labour MP to insist that there are just two biological sexes. So she was a bit of an embarrassment to her cowardly, trannie-hugging Labour colleagues and they’re probably glad to see the back of her.
Anyway, here’s her resignation letter in case you haven’t already seen it:
Page 1:
Page 2:
Page 3:
One of the cleverest videos on YouTube?
Something to cheer us up on a cold autumn morning as the BBC cracks open the champagne to celebrate the closure of Britain’s last coal-fired power station and the last functioning blast furnace at the Port Talbot steel works. Of course, these two monumentally-stupid and economically-suicidal decisions will result in the loss of thousands of real jobs. But the overpaid, over-pensioned paedophiles and sexual deviants at the BBC couldn’t give a damn for the now unemployed workers.
David Craig, on October 19th, 2024
