In the Swedish city of Gothenburg, Muslim youth have hurled petrol bombs at police cars. In the city's Angered district, where more than 15 police cars were recently destroyed, teenagers have been pointing green lasers at the eyes of police officers, some of whom have been temporarily blinded.
In Gothenburg's Backa district, youth have been throwing stones at patrolling officers. Gothenburg police have also been struggling to deal with the problem of Muslim teenagers burning cars and attacking emergency services in several areas of the city.
At the same time, Muslim immigrants are becoming increasing assertive in demanding special rights and privileges for Islam in Sweden.
In February, for example, a mosque in Stockholm received final approval from the mayor's office to begin sounding public prayer calls from its minaret, the first time such permission has ever been granted in Sweden.
A majority of the members of the city planning committee in the southern Stockholm suburb of Botkyrka voted to repeal a 1994 prohibition on such prayer calls, thereby opening the way for a muezzin to begin calling Muslims to prayer from the top of a 32-meter (104-foot) minaret at a Turkish mosque in the Fittja district of the city.
The issue was put to a vote after Ismail Okur, the chairman of the Botkyrka Islamic Association (Islamiska föreningen i Botkyrka), filed a petition with the city in January 2012 demanding permission to allow public prayer calls at the mosque.
In an interview with the Swedish newspaper Dagen, Okur said earlier generations of Muslim immigrants "did not dare" to press the issue, but that he represents the "new guys" who are determined to "exercise their right to religious freedom" in Sweden.
When told that Sweden has historically been a Christian country, Okur responded: "So it was perhaps before, during the 1930s and 1940s. Now it is a new era. We are more than 100,000 [sic] Muslims in Sweden. Should we not have our religion as well, especially here in Botkyrka, where we are so many?"
Swedish multiculturalists agree. The Multicultural Center (Mångkulturellt centrum) in Botkyrka recently called on Swedes to "separate whiteness from Swedishness in order to be a socially sustainable future Swedishness."
On the other hand, a growing number of Swedes are beginning to have second thoughts about the long-term sustainability of multiculturalism and mass immigration.
Immigration Minister Tobias Billström recently marked a turning point in the debate when he told the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter that Sweden needs to tighten rules for asylum seekers and other would-be immigrants to reduce the number of people coming into the country.
"Today Sweden is one of the countries that receives the most immigrants in the EU. That's not sustainable," Billström said. "Today, people are coming to households where the only income is support from the municipality. Is that reasonable?" he added.
Reflecting the unease about immigrants among many voters, an anti-immigrant party, the conservative Sweden Democrats, have risen to third-place in the polls ahead of a general election set to take place in September 2014.
But the riots in Stockholm imply that the damage has already been done. The fatal flaw of Swedish multiculturalism has been to grant asylum to hundreds of thousands of immigrants who have no prospect of ever finding a job or making a meaningful contribution to Swedish society. Many immigrants are, and will remain, wards of the state.
The Malmö-based Imam Adly Abu Hajar, in an interview with the newspaper Skånska Dagbladet, recently summed it up this way: "Sweden is the best Islamic state."
