Juan Cole's Uninformed Comment (Again)

Juan Cole


University of Michigan professor Juan Cole, who is one of the nation's biggest apologists for Islamism, is at it again in his blog curiously named, "Informed Comment". In the below article he says Trump lied about a "terrorist attack" in Sweden and then goes to lengths to downplay the problem of immigrant crime in Sweden and Europe.


http://www.juancole.com/2017/02/invents-sweden-immigrant.html#comment-393346

"Trump made up another alleged terrorist attack at his rally on Saturday, this one about a figment of his imagination that did not actually take place in Sweden on Friday night."

Isn't clear to everyone by now that Trump, in his usual clumsy way, was referring to a TV interview he had seen the previous night on Fox News? He was referring to the overall situation in Sweden as reported by Ami Horowitz. But to Cole, Trump was simply lying.

More from Cole:

"This allegation is not true. In fact, in some places immigrants appear actually to cause the local crime rate to fall! A scientific study of crime and immigration in Canada found that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than the native-born. Haimin Zhang of the University of British Columbia writes,

not only do immigrants themselves commit less crimes, they can reduce the crime rates in the long run through channels such as changing the neighbourhood characteristics or impacting the behaviour of natives.”

The same effect can be seen in the United States. Walter Ewing and his colleagues point out,

“Between 1990 and 2013, the foreign-born share of the U.S. population grew from 7.9 percent to 13.1 percent and the number of unauthorized immigrants more than tripled from 3.5 million to 11.2 million. During the same period, FBI data indicate that the violent crime rate declined 48 percent -—which included falling rates of aggravated assault, robbery, rape, and murder. Likewise, the property crime rate fell 41 percent, including declining rates of motor vehicle theft, larceny/robbery, and burglary. According to an original analysis of data from the 2010 American Community Survey (ACS) conducted by the authors of this report, roughly 1.6 percent of immigrant males age 18-39 are incarcerated, compared to 3.3 percent of the native-born. This disparity in incarceration rates has existed for decades.”

I don't disagree that legal immigrants in the US and Canada have lower crime rates. The immigration situation in Europe is vastly different. For decades, Europe imported manual workers with no concern over assimilation. Now they bring in refugees and migrants, largely from Muslim-majority countries, who have no intention of assimilating or respecting the native culture.

Yet, note how Cole tries to downplay the criminal problem in Europe by immigrants. He even goes after Trump's grandfather for something having to do with prostitution! He talks about the wide-sweeping definition of rape in Sweden.

And note how Cole twists the story about what happened a year ago on New Years Eve:

"There was, for instance, the fake news about the alleged Muslim immigrant mass rapes in Cologne a little over a year ago. Breitbart beat the drums for it, but the the story was not true".

What was true that mobs of foreign men sexually assaulted hundreds of women in front of the Dom cathedral in Cologne. Is Cole trying to make the point that no penile-vaginal penetration took place or what???

Cole is once again disassembling. He is trying to use statistics to make the point that immigrants in Europe are committing no more crime than native Europeans. Maybe 5-10 years ago, he could have made that case. It is patently absurd today.

I made the above observations in the reader thread of Cole's blog, but he doesn't post my comments.

Update 2-22 -And either was this.