The roundabout dog is a form of street installation that appeared here and there in Sweden in 2006. Anonymous people placed homemade dog sculptures on roundabouts. Some of the dogs were great works of art, others more home fabrications in different fanciful materials.

Muhammad cartoon an artist

For a few years roundabout dogs were a quite harmless but charming social movement.

In August 2007 the Örebro newspaper 'Nerikes Allehanda' published a cartoon of the prophet Muhammad as a roundabout dog. The cartoon was drawn by the artist Lars Vilks and used as an illustration for an opinion piece about freedom of expression. Lars Vilks' Muhammad cartoon had been rejected by several art galleries because of the exhibitors' fear of retaliation.

Since the publication of the cartoon in Nerikes Allehanda Lars Vilks has lived under constant threat.

He himself has spoken at great length about the threats and has posed for a photo with an axe in his hand.

"I will use it if it's a matter of life or death", he told invited journalists from the Swedish tabloids.
Lars Vilks is obviously enjoying the attention he is creating and he writes regularly about his art and threats in his blog. In late summer this year he blogged that he might go to the Biennial for Contemporary Art at Röda Sten in Gothenburg on 10th September.

He never did.

However, on the night before 11th September the Swedish police task force arrested four young men who thought that Lars Vilks was going to Gothenburg.

The prosecutors and security police made a big issue out of the arrest of four suspected terrorists. Today three of them are detained on suspicion of conspiracy to murder.
Suspicion of terrorist activity has been dropped and attempted murder has been reduced to the purchase of a pocket knife by one of the men shortly before the biennial.

Christmas shopping bomb

This was not the first time that the police were forced to reduce suspicion of terrorist activity to more ordinary crime. For the third time in a short time people have been arrested on suspicion of terror in Gothenburg. In all cases the suspicions have proved to be exaggerated.

Perhaps the police in Gothenburg are particularly zealous. Possibly there has been a tendency to raise the level of the crime when the suspects are Muslims.

Sweden has actually only experienced one significant terrorist act with Muslim overtones and that took place on Drottninggatan in central Stockholm at the height of Christmas shopping.

On 16th December last year two bombs exploded with an interval of a few minutes. The culprit, Taimour Abdulwahab, was killed in the last explosion. He had turned off Drottninggatan and stood on a deserted side street when parts of his bomb vest went off and therefore no one else was injured.

Taimour Abdulwahab was born in Baghdad but moved as a young child to Tranås in Småland in Sweden and had a perfectly normal upbringing. After school he moved to Luton in England to study naprapathy. It was here that he began to devote much more time to religion and became a fundamentalist Muslim.

Just before he blew himself up he had sent a recorded message to the security police and the news agency TT: "Now your children, daughters and sisters will die like our brothers and sisters are dying".
In the message he gave the reason for the bomb attack: Swedish troops in Afghanistan, Swedish oppression against Muslims - and Lars Vilks' roundabout dog.

Now at the end of September Lars Vilks appeared at the large book fair in Gothenburg. This time he showed up in his bullet proof vest.

"Hit here. Hit me hard in the chest", he said to the journalists.

In Sweden the war against terrorism has been helped by a solid, mobile, human art installation.

Differences between people?

At the same time in a completely different part of Sweden, Peter Mangs was remanded in custody charged with three murders and a large number of attempted murders in Malmö. The people who were shot were almost exclusively immigrants doing quite ordinary things like waiting for the bus, sitting in the car or going about the town.
Peter Mangs was born in Växjö, a recluse who moved in a right-wing world at home on his computer.

He scared the whole city to death before he was caught last November. Malmö has a long immigrant tradition and many residents have their roots in other countries. When the shots rang out, therefore, a large percentage of Malmö's population - all those with dark hair really - were encouraged to stay indoors.
Under Swedish law terrorism is "serious intimidation of a population or section of the population".

But the crime for which Peter Mangs is now remanded in custody awaiting trial next year is not classified as terrorism. Many question whether the Swedish police differentiate between threats to native Swedes and threats to immigrants, but, naturally, the security police deny all such insinuations.  

The Swedish security police actually monitor three explicit extreme groups: the white-power Nazi movements which persecute people of Jewish origin, the autonomous groups on the very far-left, and the extreme Islamic groups. It seems that Peter Mangs was close to the first-mentioned while Taimour Abdulwahab can be linked to extreme Islamism.

Slippery threat

The shootings on Utøya shook the whole of Sweden. Norway is country that is close to us and many Swedish social democrats have spent their summers on Utøya. The massacre could just as easily have happened in the Swedish summer idyll. In the script Anders Behring Breivik published on the Internet he directed his hatred against both Norwegians and Swedes.

But where does Anders Behring Breivik belong, seen from the Swedish security police's groupings? Those that direct their hatred against Muslims are hardly an identified group on Säpo's website.

And if truth be told, Taimour Abdulwahab, Peter Mangs and Anders Behring Breivik all moved across borders on the Internet. Extremism becomes a slippery threat on the Internet, hard to catch and not so easy to measure according to police threat norms.

An indulgent interpretation is that it is this uncertainty that also characterises the different assessments by the police.

One thing we know for sure: the breeding ground for extremism and terrorism is to be found in exclusion. Recently on the radio programme Konflikt youth unemployment was described as that which "gives birth to revolutions, feeds wars and tears communities apart".
Sweden has the highest youth unemployment in the Nordic region and one of the highest in the whole of Europe. In the large city suburbs there is increased overcrowding and poverty. Perhaps this is where the work against extremism should start. 
Anyone who is welcomed into the community has no reason to hate.

The views expressed are those of the author.