AFP, March 16, 2018

Recently, several reports have indicated falling IQs in Scandinavia, leaving the public to ponder the implications of it. A far less scientific speculation by a Swedish lady who argued that continued immigration would result in a further drop of intelligence has, however, landed her in court.

A 65-year-old woman from the city of Jönköping has been charged with inciting hatred against a certain group of people for claiming that continued immigration will lead to lower IQ levels in the Nordic country, Swedish Radio reported.

“If it continues this way, the intelligence in Sweden will reach goldfish levels,” the woman was quoted as writing in one of her posts in the Facebook group Stoppa maktmissbruket (“Stop the abuse of power”).

According to the prosecution, the lady posted disparaging comments about immigrants and Muslims.

The woman’s lawyer Bertil Tengberg argued that it cannot possibly be proved that it was the elderly woman herself who has written the posts, for there is a tenant with access to the computer living in her apartment.

Furthermore, Tengberg claimed that the majority of the posts in questions were opinions about Islam.

“It is not aimed at a group of people but against a religion. You have to differentiate between people and religion. Religious criticism falls under freedom of expression, and therefore the prosecution should be dismissed,” Tengberg said, as quoted by the Samtiden news outlet.

Likewise, he dismissed the term “bearded children,” often used in Sweden to denote adult asylum seekers posing as children for the sake of benefits, as “neither pertaining to skin color nor race.” Incidentally, the National Board of Forensic Medicine concluded that 83 percent of the age-tested unaccompanied refugee “children” proved in fact to be adults.

By her own admission, the lady has been summoned to six police interrogations, most of up to two hours on each occasion. The police also carried out a search and seized her phone and iPad. The preliminary investigation alone is 150 pages thick, Samtiden reported.

“It’s terrible having to feel like a dangerous criminal because you write the truth about what’s happening in our society, while rape is rampant and criminals go free,” she told Samtiden.

In recent months, charges pressed against “crimes of opinion” in Sweden have skyrocketed as a consequence of the self-proclaimed Näthatsgranskaren group (or “Net Hate Examiner”), which systematically searches and reports to the police posts containing “hate speech.”

The group remains largely anonymous, bar its main figure, former police officer Tomas Åberg, and presents itself as independent, yet received a total of SEK 600,000 ($74,000) in state aid via the Swedish Agency for Youth and Society (MUCF) in 2017.

For his merits in combating “hate speech” online and sending over 750 notifications, Åberg was nominated to become one of “Sweden’s heroes” chosen by the Aftonbladet daily. However, his candidature disappeared without explanation following revelations of his previous convictions of animal cruelty.