When the 'Arab Street' Comes to Sweden
It’s no surprise that U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital has sparked violence in the West Bank and Beirut, or even protests in far-flung Indonesia, which is majority Muslim.
But Sweden? Yet the western Swedish city of Gothenburg, headquarters of Volvo Car AB, saw the firebombing of a synagogue on Friday. The same evening, demonstrators in Malmö, in Sweden’s far south, called for their own “intifada” and threatened to shoot Jews.
What’s going on in Sweden reflects a changed demographic and psychic reality. The “Arab street,” if that abstraction ever existed, is no longer restricted to Arabic-speaking countries. Arab and other Muslim immigrants now living in Europe increasingly play just as active a role in enacting collective political opinion as their counterparts who did not leave their home countries.
Indeed, because Western European states respect civil liberties, allow peaceful protest and punish at least some kinds of violence mildly, Arabs and Muslims living in places like Sweden may have more freedom to protest -- and to go overboard into violence -- than their counterparts in majority-Arab or Muslim countries.
And what’s happening today in Sweden can happen tomorrow throughout the rest of Europe.
The synagogue attack in Gothenburg didn’t come out of nowhere, of course. It’s the product of a gradual process in which Arab and Muslim immigrant and refugee communities in Sweden first grew, then developed pockets of radicalization. Several of the Sweden-based jihadis who went to join Islamic State mostly came from Gothenburg.
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https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-12-11/when-the-arab-street-comes-to-sweden
