A report in The New York Times highlighted the connection between the recent riots in Sweden with earlier events in France in 2005 and Great Britain in 2011. A storm is threatening these countries, and Europe more broadly: fundamental problems with immigration policies and national political identities, and in a tragic way, the whole world is not watching. Rather festering problems are being ignored, with politicians putting their heads in the sand, nicely demonstrated by Sweden’s center-right prime minister, Fredrik Reinfeldt: “Just hooliganism.”

Timo Lyyra, the former assistant director of The New School’s Transregional Center of Democratic Studies, presently working in Gothenburg , Sweden, and my friend, gave a clear response to this know-nothingism on his Facebook page. -Jeff

Hooliganism? No; it’s a conflict in a class society built along racial and ethnic lines and reinforced through, not even always very subtle, social, cultural, economic, and geographic segregation.

The 1st generation is always happy just to be able to bring the kids to safety; the 2nd generation is always optimistic they’ll become like everyone else once they get an education; and the 3rd generation realizes that education helps nothing, and they’ll never get out of the miserable faraway suburbs they’ve been confined to and never become accepted as “real Swedes” on equal footing with everyone else.

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Read more: They’re Rioting in Sweden (and in France and in Great Britain)