BRUSSELS -- We now know that there has been a cover-up by governments and the media in Western Europe about the potential danger of immigration from the Islamic world. It was a conspiracy involving politicians, police officials, and journalists.

The European public was programmed by a relentless media campaign to believe immigration was good; criticism of immigration was racist.

Six months before the deadly Islamic terror attacks in Belgium, left-wing demonstrators were playing dead in the streets of Brussels, protesting for more immigration from the Middle East and against stronger borders in Europe -- stronger borders that might have saved the lives of 34 people killed in Brussels last month.

Sold a Bill Goods?

The Left's mantra has been "no walls, no borders." But many Europeans now realize they were sold a bill of goods about open borders and immigration by the political and media class.

Voices who warned about the threat from open immigration were either branded racist or simply ignored. Belgian Jewish leader Joël Rubinfeld warned CBN News a year and a half ago that the Belgian government was too soft on Muslim extremists, and that more attacks were coming.

"We say you need a very long fork to eat with the devil. I think there is no fork long enough to eat with Islamism," he said.

And the multicultural charade has now clearly crumbled -- in Germany when the city of Cologne was caught trying to cover-up massive New Year's sex attacks, in Sweden where the public learned that the police and media covered up large scale sexual assaults at a summer music festival in Stockholm last year, and in Brussels, which became a home to some of the most dangerous terrorists in Europe.

In cities across Western Europe, women are now afraid to walk alone at night on the street. Muslims make up almost half of Belgium's prison population, and Jews everywhere live in fear of anti-Semitic attacks.

This didn't just happen, but in many cases the information has been suppressed.

Immigration Cover-Up

Sweden has been notorious for censoring the problems of immigration. Newspapers obscured the faces and changed the skin tone of crime suspects with immigrant backgrounds, while showing their faces as if they were white native Swedes.

The Swedish police even had a special code when handling immigrant crime: code 291.

"Code 291 -- and this is in all the Swedish newspapers now -- the police were told to cover up any crime related to the refugees. Do not tell the media. Do not leave a paper trail," Swedish policy analyst Tino Sanandaji told CBN News.

"Apparently now we're finding out there were hundreds of violent crimes," he said.

Some Swedes have become so frustrated with the censorship that they go to social media to get the truth out themselves. For instance, one YouTube video posted by "The Angry Foreigner" begins with, "Hey, welcome to Sweden. This is the number one rape capital of Europe."

A lot of Swedes now realize they've been lied to, and they're wondering what else the government and media have been hiding from them.

A Muzzled Media

"You have a lot of problems that were never reported until literally days ago," Sanandaji said. "It was factually true, but they decided that it was against their ideological agenda. They covered it up. Now we're finding it out."

The man who found evidence that one of Sweden's largest papers covered up the sex assaults in Stockholm is journalist Chang Frick, who says journalists have been either too afraid or not allowed to report the truth.

"I read books about the Soviet Union and everyone was checking each other. This is the situation we have in Sweden. But it's more in a soft way," Frick said. "You don't get in jail for having the wrong thoughts. You would lose your job. You would get socially stigmatized."

The paper, Dagens Nyheter, says the claim that it was part of a cover-up is "a lie," and that it could not confirm the story.

Blood on Their Hands?

Ingrid Carlqvist, a distinguished fellow at the Gatestone Institute, has been telling Swedes for years that they were being misled about immigration. Now, she feels vindication.

"I've been trying to tell the Swedish people this for five years or something. And everyone said, 'No, it couldn't be like that. Politicians don't lie like that. Journalists are honest. They couldn't lie about this, no, no, no,'" she said.

"Now everything has exploded, and there is not a living person in this country who can go on (covering their eyes)," she said.

Swedish immigration policy changed. It was forced to because it faced a system-wide collapse. There are now guards on the border, and some Swedish papers have reported more openly about the problems of immigration.

But if you think the European Left has learned its lesson about the danger of open borders, you would be wrong. After the Brussels attack, there were several articles essentially blaming terrorism on racism and calling for continued opened borders.

There are refugees who need help, but Europe's misplaced generosity has brought war to its doorstep. And some believe that politicians, police officials, and journalists now have blood on their hands.

*Dale Hurd also reported from Stockholm for this story.