...
I saw it in action when I ran to the scene
of an unexploded hand grenade in a bin outside the police station of a
no-go area of town, near a mosque. I asked the police who the target
was.
They said they didn't know. I asked the Muslim leader at the mosque. He said he thought it was the police.
Then
two women grabbed me and told me not to make this about the mosque, not
to make this a Muslim issue. This was about the police — nothing to do
with migrants. I wondered if they weren't missing the point. A bomb in a
bin.
They know the point. They don't want to acknowledge, or deal with, the point.
A cameraman for the Swedish equivalent of
the BBC asked me why this had to be politicised at all; why couldn't it
just be that someone put an explosive device in a bin?
I looked at him and wondered which one of us was mad.
Later
I went back to walk the no-go suburbs, ending up back in the centre of
the town. A week earlier this place was torched and looted as the world
looked on.
I wondered what was strange,
besides the weird calm. And realised it was that I was the only woman
in the place. Everyone else was young, African and male. Speaking
Arabic. Hanging about, utterly without purpose.
They have a purpose; a lot of people just don't want to deal with what it is. Those that acknowledge it are afraid to speak of it because they'll be punished by their own people.
One lady explained: there is a strange
moral code here in Rinkeby. You are much more exposed to crime if you
are not a Muslim. These boys think they can take everything from a woman
who is not wearing a hijab or at least covers her hair.
Another,
Besse, told me: we don’t go out on the streets here after dark. It is
too dangerous. I have lived here for 25 years and it has gotten worse
and worse. The situation now is so tense that it is impossible for me to
go to, say, the supermarket to get some milk.
Parwin,
a Christian lady, blamed the mosques: it is because of all the things
they are teaching in the mosque. They are Salafists there, just like
Isis. They should close the mosque because that is where these kids have
learned these bad things.
But one
thing they all agree on is that they do not go out. They do not go out
because they are scared — Muslim, Christian, young and old alike.
So, you've got a country that's more afraid of being honest about the problem than they are of the problem. Or, I think more accurately, the people in positions of power are; the people being damaged by this crap know what the problem is, but they're afraid of being attacked by their own if they speak openly about it.
To borrow an old phrase, "No way to run a railroad, boys." And the derailment is going to be a bitch.
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