Filmmaker behind Trump’s Sweden comments defends himself: “There is a massive social cost” to Muslim immigration
Filmmaker Ami Horowitz defends his murky stats on Swedish crime but won't explain his relationship with Fox News
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President Donald Trump’s comments and tweets about Sweden have caused quite a stir. Until now, the source of his provocative assertions, filmmaker Ami Horowitz, hasn’t commented in depth, although he has appeared as a squawking head on Fox and CNN. (He has decried The New York Times for stating that he didn’t respond to a reporter for the paper’s story about the Swedish affair. He has claimed that he never was contacted.)
The investment banker turned filmmaker, who lives in New York, has styled himself as a satirist, something like a conservative Michael Moore. His first feature film, a critique of the United Nations, was titled “U.N. Me,” a sly reference to Moore’s “Roger & Me.”
Trump’s original reference was to a Fox News segment in which Tucker Carlson interviewed Horowitz and showed clips from his short film “Stockholm Syndrome,” which asserts a hotly contested connection between a purported rise in violence in Sweden and the influx of immigrants.
During the interview, Horowitz said, “Sweden had its first Islamic terrorist attack not that long ago, so they are now getting a taste of what we’ve been seeing across Europe already.” It appeared to many that the only attack he could have been referring to happened in 2010, when an Iraqi-born Swede blew himself up with a pipe bomb. So when Horowitz said Sweden was “now getting a taste” of what the rest of Europe has experienced — the wave of terrorist attacks that occurred in 2015 to 2016 — he was flipping the sequence of events and therefore incorrect.
Horowitz has now said he was actually talking about an arson attack in October in Malmö that caused smoke damage to a Shiite Muslim community center. But although ISIS claimed a connection to the crime, Sweden doesn’t consider it an attack of terrorism. Horowitz disagreed: “That was a pretty clear act of terrorism.”
In his film, while showing a bombing that appears to be the Stockholm incident more than six years ago, Horowitz says, “Sweden has seen dozens of those people gone to fight for ISIS and they are starting to come back. Sweden has had its first Islamic terrorist attack.”
This would seem to imply that the bombing was a more recent event and the attacker was someone who went overseas to fight for ISIS and came back. Neither is true. Horowitz agrees that this sequence could be misleading. He has said that if he did it again, he would “clean up” that part.
Either way, Horowitz seems to be on the same wavelength as the president. Earlier this month the Trump administration released a list of 78 unreported terrorist attacks that included the arson in Malmö. While the mainstream press and the Swedish government have struggled to make sense of Trump’s Swedish statement, from Horowitz’s point of view the president was on message.
As Horowitz was rushing between media interviews, he responded to a series of email questions. His responses have been lightly edited for style but not altered in any material way.
Did the Trump administration contact [you], either before or after the president referenced your film, in order to verify the facts as you present them?
They have not contacted me.
Are you surprised? Do you think they should?
I am not surprised. Why would they want to reach out to me? I am just a lowly filmmaker.
It’s pretty clear that Fox News has been in touch with you.
Yes, I am in contact with the people that I work with at Fox. They seem to be happy with the traction the story is getting.
Can you provide sources or links for the spike in crime, and rape in particular, that you allege in Sweden? The State Department has indicated a decline in serious crimes in Sweden, and an increase in vandalism and computer fraud. The murder rate in Sweden is ridiculously low, no? [Around one murder per 100,000 people, roughly one-fifth the typical U.S. murder rate.] And it hasn’t gone up. According to Sweden’s own reporting, crime is pretty much flat, no?
So to say crime in general is flat is misleading; heavy crimes, which I am defining as murder and rape are all up. According to BRA, the official crime stat keeper of Sweden, sexual assault has gone up almost 50 percent over the last nine years and has gone up every year since 2006. It went down only one year between 2014 and 2015. To simply point to that year to make a general statement about sexual assault trends is disingenuous.
It is also wrong to point out that the definition of rape has been expanded and that is the cause for the increase (which by the way contradicts their statement that rape is down). The definition was changed in 2005, the increases that I am showing [are] after the change was instituted.
Not to give it short shrift but murder is up 65 percent since 2012. The rise in these stats also come at a time where these same stats in the U.S. and Western Europe have plummeted, giving the rise we have seen in Sweden even more relative statistical heft.
What do you think of President Trump and Steve Bannon’s claims that the media is the “opposition party” and the enemy of the American people?
Obviously the media is an important part of the American system and I think it doesn’t serve a purpose to just throw bombs. But it is also important to keep the media honest and they could learn a thing or two about where we are as a country from the political earthquake in November.
In a recent tweet, you said that everyone was “missing the point” in the coverage of Trump’s statement about Sweden. What did you mean by that?
Because Trump speaks in a hyperbolic shorthand, the media, not necessarily wrongly, focuses on his misstatement and not the reality of the situation. The reality is that there is a massive social cost to Sweden’s lovely humanitarian gesture.