Right-wing Americans have been dissing Sweden for decades. At first it was because of its socialism; no patriotic American could understand or credit the good it seemed to be doing to the country in so many ways. I remember years ago while in the US reading in a paper that Stockholm’s murder rate was higher than Chicago’s. More recently it’s been because of Sweden’s generous immigration policy, which must be posing an existential threat to the country, surely? Remember Trump’s reference to Moslem riots in Sweden six months ago – ‘Who would believe it! Sweden!’ – which turned out to be totally fictitious: see https://bernardjporter.com/2017/02/24/rinkeby/. But the Trumpists haven’t learned – or, probably, wanted to.

Robin Ramsay has sent me these two pieces of ‘fake news’ from more recent American blogsites:

https://www.jihadwatch.org/2017/06/sweden-on-the-brink-of-civil-war-national-police-chief-help-us-help-us; and http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-06-24/leaked-police-report-exposes-23-muslim-controlled-no-go-zones-sweden-plagued-violenc.

(And you should look at some of the BTL comments on these.) They are, of course, utter nonsense. One has a picture of posters allegedly put up by Swedish jihadists to mark ‘Sharia Law’ areas, written in English! Sweden has immigration problems, sure, but nothing like as serious as this. Indeed, this other US website shows how the others were conned:

http://www.snopes.com/sweden-crime-no-go-zone-police/

(again, from Robin). But I doubt whether this will persuade patriotic Americans. They believe what they want to. Sweden is a standing rebuff to all they hold dear: free market capitalism, Christianity, punishment, guns. So it can’t be real.