<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<rss version="2.0"
	xmlns:content="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/"
	xmlns:wfw="http://wellformedweb.org/CommentAPI/"
	xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
	xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"
	xmlns:sy="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/syndication/"
	xmlns:slash="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/slash/"
	>

<channel>
	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; Norway</title>
	<atom:link href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/tag/norway/feed/" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" />
	<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com</link>
	<description></description>
	<lastBuildDate>Wed, 31 Dec 2014 16:20:06 +0000</lastBuildDate>
	<language>en-US</language>
		<sy:updatePeriod>hourly</sy:updatePeriod>
		<sy:updateFrequency>1</sy:updateFrequency>
	
	<item>
		<title>NATO’s Next Secretary General: Jens Stoltenberg?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/fjordman/natos-next-secretary-general-jens-stoltenberg/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=natos-next-secretary-general-jens-stoltenberg</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/fjordman/natos-next-secretary-general-jens-stoltenberg/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 27 Mar 2014 04:40:43 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Fjordman]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[angela merkel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[jens stoltenberg]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Military]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[NATO]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Norway]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=221999</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why the former KGB ally is not fit for the job. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/jens-stoltenberg.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-222000" alt="jens-stoltenberg" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/jens-stoltenberg-450x330.jpg" width="270" height="198" /></a>The Norwegian press has been buzzing with rumors lately that Jens Stoltenberg &#8212; who until the autumn of 2013 was the Prime Minister of Norway &#8212; is a serious candidate for becoming the new Secretary General of the Western defense alliance NATO. The former Danish PM Anders Fogh Rasmussen is stepping down from this position later in 2014.</p>
<p>Apparently, German Chancellor <a href="http://www.thelocal.no/20140320/stoltenberg-had-long-discussions-with-us-on-nato-role">Angela Merkel</a> proposed Stoltenberg for the job. Merkel made her proposal directly to US President Barack Obama, who agreed that he was a good choice for the role. Stoltenberg allegedly spent months discussing the role with the US Secretary of State John Kerry and his security advisor Susan E. Rice while he was in New York, ostensibly in his role as UN Special Envoy for Climate Change.</p>
<p>This is not a done deal yet, however. One of Mr. Stoltenberg&#8217;s <a href="http://www.vg.no/nyheter/utenriks/eu/artikkel.php?artid=10146692">presumed rivals</a> for the job as head of NATO is José Barroso, Portugal&#8217;s former Prime Minister and also a former Communist. In 2014 Barroso will be stepping down as President of the European Commission, the unelected and unaccountable government for half a billion people in the EU. Barroso has held this job for ten years. Other possible NATO candidates who have been mentioned are Franco Frattini, Italy&#8217;s former Foreign Minister, and Radoslaw Sikorski, Poland&#8217;s current Foreign Minister.</p>
<p>The decision on who will become the next formal head of NATO has thus not been made yet. However, Jens Stoltenberg himself is taking this possibility so seriously that there are already rumors that he might soon be leaving his current position as the leader of the Norwegian Labour Party.</p>
<p>My opinion as a Norwegian is that Mr. Stoltenberg is personally unsuited for the task of being the Secretary General of NATO. Assigning him the job will further weaken the organization. Yes, this is mainly a symbolic position with limited power. However, the world is full of symbols because we realize that symbols can be important in real life. Elevating Jens Stoltenberg to such a position would send out the wrong signals.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">For instance, it is a documented fact that Jens Stoltenberg was one of quite a few left-wing politicians in Western Europe who had a file </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/fjordman/the-norwegian-lefts-kgb-romance/">with the KGB</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> because they considered him to be a </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.vg.no/nyheter/innenriks/artikkel.php?artid=5916647">friendly contact</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">. There are no indications that he did anything that was outright illegal with these friendly talks, but they were certainly unwise and reflect poorly on his character. The KGB was the secret police of the totalitarian entity known as the Soviet Union. Back then it was NATO&#8217;s primary enemy and a very real military threat. It would look strange if a man who was classified as a friendly contact by NATO&#8217;s primary enemy a generation ago were to become head of NATO today.</span></p>
<p>Moreover, as Norwegian Prime Minister, Jens Stoltenberg has in recent years been very weak in dealing with Islamic aggression.</p>
<p>Norway shares a border with Russia, as it previously did with the Soviet Union. I am not one of those who compare the Russian President Vladimir Putin to Hitler. This is hysterical hyperbole. However, Putin is certainly a ruthless Machiavellian character. While in power, Stoltenberg was not convincing when dealing with Putin or the Russians. He has a track record of being weak against almost any potential aggressor.</p>
<p><a href="http://gatesofvienna.net/topical/mullah-krekar/">Mullah Krekar</a> is perhaps the most notorious militant Muslim in Norway, where he is currently serving a prison sentence for death threats. He has previously praised the terrorist leader <a href="http://www.vg.no/nyheter/innenriks/artikkel.php?artid=592482">Osama bin Laden</a> and stated that Muslims will <a href="http://www.dagbladet.no/nyheter/2006/03/13/460523.html">conquer Europe</a>. Krekar in 2013 advised Muslims in Norway to vote for Stoltenberg&#8217;s <a href="http://www.thelocal.no/20130829/vote-labour-says-jailed-islamist-mullah-krekar">Labour Party</a>, as this would be the best option for the continued Islamization of the country. PM <a href="http://www.thelocal.no/20130918/norway-pm-demands-progress-boss-apologise-for-sneak-islamization">Jens Stoltenberg</a> responded by chastising the opposition Progress Party for having used the term &#8220;stealth-Islamization.&#8221;</p>
<p>The famous cartoons of Islam’s founder Mohammed, originally printed in the Danish newspaper <i>Jyllands</i>-<i>Posten</i> in September 2005, were republished by a tiny Christian newspaper in Norway whose editor was <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQD7JcORv-s">Vebjørn Selbekk</a>. He reprinted them because it was natural to show what the news story was about. As a result of this, he soon received dozens of explicit death threats from Muslims. Some of these were very graphic, describing plans to cut his throat in his bed. He had enjoyed a quiet family life prior to this. Now suddenly everything was turned upside down. Bodyguards instructed his family on how to check for bombs under their car.</p>
<p>In addition to the many Islamic threats against him, Selbekk was strongly pressured to back down by leading Norwegian politicians such as Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Støre of the Labour Party. PM Jens Stoltenberg, at a point when Selbekk’s family were living with constant death threats, pointed him out as personally responsible for inciting the attack by an angry Muslim mob on the Norwegian embassy in Damascus, Syria. He and his government thereby indirectly gave legitimacy to Islamic death threats against one of their fellow citizens.</p>
<p>Then Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen of Denmark showed some spine in 2005-2006 when faced with aggressive Islamic pressure in the same situation. Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg of Norway showed none. In Oslo, Selbekk was forced to <a href="http://www.nrk.no/norge/selbekk-beklager-dypt-1.518242">apologize</a> to Muslims in a press conference organized by the Stoltenberg government.</p>
<p>One of those who had incited anger and hatred among Muslims by this time was Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood. A delegation supported by the Stoltenberg <a href="http://www.dagbladet.no/nyheter/2006/02/14/457855.html">government</a> was soon sent to have talks with Mr. Qaradawi in Qatar. He there accepted Norway’s apologies to Muslims.</p>
<p>In 2008, members of the Muslim Brotherhood were invited for talks with the Foreign Ministry in Oslo. One of those who took part on behalf of the national authorities was <a href="http://www.vg.no/nyheter/innenriks/artikkel.php?artid=530563">Gry Larsen</a>, a former leader of the Labour Party’s youth movement AUF. The freethinker <a href="http://www.aftenposten.no/meninger/kronikker/article1240651.ece">Walid al-Kubaisi</a> has correctly indicated that the Brotherhood represent a dangerous Islamic movement with totalitarian goals. Kubaisi in February <a href="http://www.dagbladet.no/nyheter/2006/02/13/457665.html">2006</a> warned that by applauding Vebjørn Selbekk&#8217;s forced public apology to Muslims, the Stoltenberg government and Norwegian authorities could be seen as submitting to Islamic aggression against their own citizens.</p>
<p>Jens Stoltenberg seems to be just fine with the ongoing Islamization of his country and his continent. Meanwhile, he has expressed great concerns about <a href="http://www.dagbladet.no/2014/01/13/nyheter/innenriks/utenriks/politikk/samfunn/31245635/">global warming</a>.</p>
<p>NATO was designed to defend the West against expansionist Communist aggression from the Soviet Union and its satellite states. With some justification, many observers see the organization as a relic of the Cold War.</p>
<p>The greatest threats to the Western world today are:</p>
<p>1. Legal and illegal mass immigration from the global South, which has now grown so numerically large that it threatens the long-term stability and future of the Western world.</p>
<p>2. Islamic expansionist aggression and the renewed threat from Jihadist terror.</p>
<p>Yes, Russia, China and other countries are economic and potentially military rivals. Furthermore, there is always the threat of military and industrial espionage, among other things. However, the greatest threat to the future existence of the Western world is Third World mass immigration, and Muslim immigration in particular. NATO needs to deal forcefully with these threats in order to stay relevant and credible.</p>
<p>This task is complicated by the generally Islam-friendly attitudes and open borders-ideology of the ruling Western elites. Moreover, the rapidly re-Islamizing country of Turkey is still a member of NATO. The United States Government has long pushed for Turkey to join the European Union (EU). The EU itself is currently engaged <a href="http://ec.europa.eu/dgs/home-affairs/what-is-new/news/news/docs/20131216-roadmap_towards_the_visa-free_regime_with_turkey_en.pdf">in talks</a> about giving nearly 80 million Muslims from Turkey <a href="http://euobserver.com/enlargement/122350">visa-free access</a> to the EU.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">At some point NATO has to decide whether it wants to be a credible defense alliance, or whether it simply wants to be the armed wing of Amnesty International. If the organization picks Jens Stoltenberg as its next Secretary General, it has chosen the latter option.</span></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
<p><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf" target="_blank"><b>Subscribe</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <i>The Glazov Gang</i>, and </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>LIKE</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> it on </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>Facebook.</b></a></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/fjordman/natos-next-secretary-general-jens-stoltenberg/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>36</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Arctic Jihad</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/fjordman/arctic-jihad/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=arctic-jihad</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/fjordman/arctic-jihad/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 18 Mar 2014 04:05:01 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Fjordman]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[attack]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jihad]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[North]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Norway]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Terrorism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[tolerance]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=221220</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Radicalism climbs to Europe's northernmost regions. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/IMG_0921-1024x768.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-221221" alt="IMG_0921-1024x768" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/IMG_0921-1024x768-450x334.jpg" width="315" height="234" /></a>Finnmark is the northernmost county in Norway, as well as the northernmost part of continental Europe. Apart from a few Arctic islands such as the Norwegian-controlled archipelago of Svalbard, the next stop is the North Pole. Even in the near-Arctic region of Lapland in northern Norway, Sweden and Finland, you can now encounter significant numbers of </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" title="" href="http://www.finnmarken.no/nyheter/ost_finnmark/article7131570.ece" target="_blank">Muslim</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> immigrants from as far away as Somalia or Pakistan.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">In 2013, it was announced that a specialist abattoir in northern Norway had slaughtered the country’s first ever </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" title="" href="http://www.thelocal.no/20131202/norway-produces-its-first-ever-halal-reindeer-meat" target="_blank">halal reindeer</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> meat, with a view to selling it to top-end restaurants as far afield as Dubai. Mehtab Afsar, the General Secretary of the Islamic Council of Norway and one of those who oversaw the slaughter, was pleased with this.</span></p>
<p>The problem is, halal meat is not the only thing available once Islam enters a given territory.</p>
<p>In <a title="" href="http://www.thelocal.no/20140224/norway-terror-threat-to-rise-in-2014" target="_blank">February 2014</a>, Lieutenant-General Kjell Grandhagen from the Norwegian Intelligence Service (NIS) warned that the terror threat against Norway is rising due to the return of battle-hardened militant Muslims who return after participating in Jihadist activities during the civil war in Syria. Benedicte Bjørnland, the head of the Norwegian Police Security Service (PST), in early March 2014 warned that Norway had &#8220;<a title="" href="http://www.dagbladet.no/2014/03/04/nyheter/innenriks/pst/politiets_sikkerhetstjeneste/trusselvurdering/32133101/" target="_blank">failed</a>&#8221; as a society due to the dozens of young people becoming radicalized and going abroad to fight in conflict areas such as Syria.</p>
<p>Tromsø is the largest city in northern Norway, as well as the world’s northernmost university town. There was strong public <a title="" href="http://www.nordlys.no/nyheter/article5351286.ece" target="_blank">resistance</a> a few years ago when the sizable <a title="" href="http://www.alnor.no/en_about_alnor.htm" target="_blank">Muslim community</a> in Tromsø wanted to build a mosque there with financial support from Saudi Arabia.</p>
<p>Those who currently travel to Syria from all over Western Europe include Muslim immigrants from many different countries, as well as a few white converts to Islam. In Norway, many of the volunteers come from the Oslo region, where the bulk of the local Muslims live. However, it has been confirmed by the security services that some of the Syria-bound Jihadists come from as far north as <a title="" href="http://www.nordlys.no/nyheter/article7219756.ece" target="_blank">Troms</a> county, far above the Arctic Circle.</p>
<p>Jørn Holme, as the then head of the Police Security Service (PST), stated in 2007 that native Norwegians are “<a title="" href="http://www.nrk.no/nyheter/1.3585847" target="_blank">stupid</a>” and inexperienced concerning diversity and Multiculturalism. This makes them confuse Islam with Islamism. Since native Norwegians are allegedly stupid, Holme feared a lynch mob against Muslims in the event of an Islamic terror attack in the country.</p>
<p>Knut Storberget of the Labour Party agreed with Holme on this issue, fearing that Islamic terrorist attacks might create “stigmatization” of Muslims. Storberget served as the Minister of Justice and the Police in the cabinet of Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg from October 2005 until November 2011.</p>
<p>Notice how these two individuals, who were at that time in charge of their country’s security, seemingly feared potential verbal abuse by Muslim immigrants more than the possibility that their own countrymen might get killed by Muslims.</p>
<p>Hugh Fitzgerald, an insightful critic of Islam, in 2007 called for the resignation of PST leader Jørn Holme over his comments and for suggesting that Islam is no more violent than Christianity. In Fitzgerald’s view back then, in order to improve the security situation in Norway Jørn Holme “<a title="" href="http://www.jihadwatch.org/2007/09/fitzgerald-the-head-of-norways-security-service-a-bit-stupid-yes-but-not-as-regards-diversity.html" target="_blank">should be</a> immediately fired. He should be replaced by someone with a solid grasp of Islam, and therefore of the permanent threat that Islam represents to the legal and political institutions of Norway, to its social arrangements, to free inquiry and to art, to the physical well-being of Infidels.”</p>
<p>What Jørn Holme and Knut Storberget did not say in 2007 is that an attack carried out by a Muslim man had already taken place in Norway and very nearly succeeded in killing many people. For some reason, this is not always classified as terrorism, even though it had many of the hallmarks of being an Islamic Jihadist terror attack. Moreover, this event did not lead to widespread stigmatization of Muslims in Norway. The writer <a title="" href="http://orjas.blogg.no/" target="_blank">Elin Ørjasæter</a> later <a title="" href="http://www.uriasposten.net/archives/40099" target="_blank">published</a> an insightful reader’s comment about this subject.</p>
<p>On September 29 2004, <a title="" href="http://www.vg.no/nyheter/spesial.php?id=924" target="_blank">Brahim Bouteraa</a>, a rejected Muslim asylum seeker from Algeria, entered the cockpit of an airplane in northern Norway and attempted to crash it. The plane was flying from the town of Narvik to the town of Bodø in Nordland County, north of the Arctic Circle. The lives of all those on board were narrowly saved solely due to the resolute intervention from a couple of male passengers. The plane was literally seconds away from crashing when the pilot finally managed to regain control over it, 30 meters above the ground.</p>
<p>One of those who intervened was Odd Eriksen, a politician from the Labour Party. After this incident, he served briefly as Minister of Trade and Industry in the government of PM Jens Stoltenberg. Eriksen is no coward and deserves full credit for taking action. He physically struggled with the attacker and tried to hold him down, but he didn’t fully succeed in doing so. It was only when another passenger, Trond Frantzen, intervened that they finally managed to get the Muslim attacker under control and gave the pilots enough breathing space to save the plane from crashing.</p>
<p>Afterwards, the two men who attempted to overpower the attacker said very different things about how they had experienced this dramatic episode. Eriksen, who tried but failed to hold the hijacker down, stated that he “felt so sorry” for the Muslim asylum seeker who very nearly killed him. Frantzen, on the other hand, the man who actually succeeded in restraining the attacker with the aid of Eriksen, stated that at that moment he was “<a title="" href="http://www.ranablad.no/nyheter/article1270731.ece" target="_blank">fully intent on</a> killing him.” Frantzen grabbed the man by the throat and shouted “Lie still or I will kill you!” straight to his face. At this moment, Trond Frantzen was thinking about the Islamic terror attacks and airplane hijackings of September 11 in the USA three years earlier. He was also looking at his 15-year-old daughter Marlene at the back of the plane, and desperately trying to save her life.</p>
<p>The interesting thing is that if you ask random Norwegians about this attack, more people will probably remember Odd Eriksen than Trond Frantzen. Odd Eriksen is a good Social Democrat who feels sorry for everybody, even those who try to murder him. He is a man of good intentions, exactly as many educated Scandinavians see themselves or want to see themselves.</p>
<p>Trond Frantzen, on the other hand, is the hero who actually saved the day and ultimately the lives of all those on board the plane. However, he is a man who would use anger, aggression and lethal force to protect his own life and the life of his daughter. He is therefore a man of action who is sadly out of place in the age of “dialogue,” a relic from a past of traditional masculinity.</p>
<p>As one Norwegian reader commented, we have become a society nearly devoid of aggression. We feel sorry for those who try to murder us. This makes us very vulnerable when faced with brutal aggressors. We as a society have to recognize that force and aggression are sometimes needed to protect what matters most to us.</p>
<p>Another point worth emphasizing is that this Muslim man, Brahim Bouteraa, has been partly written off as crazy, even though he was judged sane by psychiatrists and sentenced to <a title="" href="http://www.vg.no/nyheter/innenriks/artikkel.php?artid=269821" target="_blank">17 years</a> in prison. He was described as a <a title="" href="http://blog.bearstrong.net/archive/weblog/001434.html" target="_blank">very devout</a> Muslim who wanted to become <a title="" href="http://www.vg.no/nyheter/innenriks/artikkel.php?artid=247553" target="_blank">an imam</a> and open a mosque in the town of Narvik. Bouteraa had been member of a <a title="" href="http://www.vg.no/nyheter/innenriks/artikkel.php?artid=268808" target="_blank">militant</a> Islamic group in his native Algeria. Before his attack in Norway, the security services (PST) had been warned about his “<a title="" href="http://pub.nettavisen.no/nettavisen/innenriks/article353603.ece" target="_blank">religious excesses</a>.” He cited some texts in Arabic, possibly Koranic verses, immediately before the attempted hijacking, and then screamed “<a title="" href="http://pub.nettavisen.no/nettavisen/english/article284934.ece" target="_blank">I’m going</a> to crash this plane.”</p>
<p>Yet despite all of this, there is a tendency in Norwegian mass media, if they talk about this case at all (they rarely do), to view it as an isolated incident involving a mentally disturbed individual as perpetrator. This trend is, sadly, not unique to Scandinavia. It is endemic all over the Western world today.</p>
<p>In the USA, Nidal Malik Hasan, a U.S. Army Major, murdered 13 people and wounded 29 others during an attack at Fort Hood, Texas, on November 5 2009. There is every indication that this pious Muslim man, who shouted “Allahu akhbar!” during his massacre, carried out an Islamic Jihadist attack. Despite this, the Obama Administration labeled the shooting a case of “<a title="" href="http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/editorials/fort_hood_diversity_rules_JYs7ebOl6EQmoxkv6cROCI" target="_blank">workplace violence</a>,” refusing any mention of Islam or Jihad.</p>
<p>After a trial where he was found guilty on all accounts, Nidal Malik Hasan was sentenced <a title="" href="http://www.foxnews.com/us/2013/08/28/jury-set-to-deliberate-fate-fort-hood-gunman/" target="_blank">to death</a> on August 28, 2013. He has openly and repeatedly given a specifically Islamic justification for his mass murder and said he did it on behalf of Islamic militants abroad.</p>
<p>It is easier to pretend that the Jihadist threat does not exist, of course. Yet for how long can we keep up this illusion, while continuing to import en masse Muslims who long for Jihad?</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
<p><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf" target="_blank"><b>Subscribe</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <i>The Glazov Gang</i>, and </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>LIKE</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> it on </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>Facebook.</b></a></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/fjordman/arctic-jihad/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>96</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Doublethink in Norway</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-bawer/doublethink-in-norway/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=doublethink-in-norway</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-bawer/doublethink-in-norway/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 11 Feb 2014 05:35:22 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Bawer]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[elite]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islamization]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[multicultural]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Norway]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Orwell]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=218384</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[It's all about sharia law...except that it's not.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/norsk-flagg-islam.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-218385" alt="norsk-flagg-islam" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/norsk-flagg-islam.jpg" width="271" height="208" /></a>These people! Over and over, they mock the idea that there exist such things as stealth Islamization and the appeasement thereof, and viciously demonize as bigots, racists, and Islamophobes those who speak frankly of such matters. And over and over, they engage in that very appeasement themselves.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Case in point: Norway. Let&#8217;s start by going back to 2009, when Siv Jensen, head of the Progress Party, </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.aftenposten.no/nyheter/iriks/politikk/Advarer-mot-muslimske--ghettoer-i-Oslo-5564982.html">used</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> the term </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">snikislamisering – </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">“stealth Islamization” – in a speech at her party&#8217;s annual convention. Noting that even ambulance crews, firefighters, and police officers didn&#8217;t dare to enter certain parts of the heavily Muslim neighborhood of Rosengård in Malmö, Sweden, where sharia law has largely supplanted Swedish law, Jensen warned that there were already unsettling signs of similar developments in Oslo. As examples of stealth Islamization, she cited, among other things, the aggressive clamoring for the accommodation of hijab in the public square and demands for </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">halal</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> food in prisons. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The media and political establishment, of course, reacted with outrage. </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.aftenposten.no/nyheter/iriks/politikk/article2942062.ece">Pronouncing</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> it “quite simply untrue that any kind of Islamization of Norwegian society is underway,” Per Kristian Foss, a leading Conservative politician, compared Jensen&#8217;s attitude toward Islam to pre-World War II anti-Semitism. The editors of </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Aftenposten </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">agreed: in an </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.aftenposten.no/meninger/leder/article2942825.ece">editorial</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> headlined “Stealth Accusations,” they</span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;"> </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">accused her of “openly appeal[ing] to xenophobia and to the notion that minorities are taking power.” In the view of </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Aftenposten</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">&#8216;s editors, the very idea of stealth Islamization was manifestly absurd.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Cut to two years later. On July 22, 2011, Anders Behring Breivik killed 77 people – and members of the cultural elite quckly grabbed the opportunity to pile on to the Progress Party and others who&#8217;d warned against Islam, saying that they&#8217;d helped create the mass murderer. Pushed against the wall, Jensen nonetheless </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.tv2.no/nyheter/innenriks/siv-jensen-vil-fremdeles-snakke-om-snikislamisering-3561457.html">vowed</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> that she would continue to use the term “stealth Islamization.”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Fast forward two more years. The September elections resulted in a Conservative-Progress Party coalition government – and worldwide scare headlines proclaiming that a bigoted, racist, Islamophobic party was about to become a partner in Norway&#8217;s government. Consequently, the Progress Party&#8217;s second-in-command, Ketil Solvik-Olsen, sought to publicly </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.vg.no/nyheter/innenriks/norsk-politikk/artikkel.php?artid=10135127">distance</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> the party from the expression “stealth Islamization,” a term he described as “unfortunate.” When the party&#8217;s top man in Oslo, Christian Tybring-Gjedde, </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.aftenposten.no/nyheter/iriks/politikk/Tybring-Gjedde-mener-snikislamisering-er-et-godt-og-aktuelt-ord-7314538.html">insisted</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> on the term&#8217;s continuing usefulness (adding that he was opposed to </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">every </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">kind of Islamization, “stealth or not stealth”), he was </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.dagsavisen.no/nyemeninger/alle_meninger/cat1003/subcat1017/thread285605/">assailed</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> from almost every direction for using rhetoric that was “polarizing” and “anti-Muslim.” Among those who abhorred the term, it was </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.vg.no/nyheter/innenriks/valg-2013/artikkel.php?artid=10143778">reported</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, were leaders of the Christian People&#8217;s Party, the home of Norway&#8217;s religious right, who view Muslims as fellow “people of faith” deserving of their support and protection.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">During all these years, while these controversies over the term “stealth Islamization” raged, stealth Islamization itself has proceeded apace. Recently, the Agriculture Minister, Sylvi Listhaug, a member of the Progress Party, expressed concern about the increasing tendency of Norwegian public institutions, such as day-care centers and hospitals, to remove pork from their menus. “We&#8217;ve been eating pork i Norway for years,” she said. “It would be totally wrong to stop because Muslims have come to Norway.”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Enter, again, the sage editors of </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Aftenposten. </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">In an </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.aftenposten.no/meninger/leder/Listhaugs-forfeilede-kamp-for-svinekjott-7454129.html">editorial</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> the other day, they said that in places like prisons, pork was being given less priority “for practical reasons.” Which “practical reasons”? One might have expected that the editors would go on to acknowledge what those “reasons” were – especially given that immediately after mentioning the existence of those “practical reasons,” they asked directly: “What is this really about?”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Yet the ensuing text contained no mention whatsoever of Muslims or Islam. Rather, the editors insisted that what&#8217;s important in the face of mass immigration is not the role of pork in Norwegian culture but “universal human values” such as equal rights and freedom of speech. (Although after the Danish cartoon crisis, </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Aftenposten </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">was quick to insist on the importance of </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">limiting </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">free speech in order to avoid offending immigrants.) Also, the editors emphasized that everyday Norwegian traditions, including eating habits, “are in constant flux,” as exemplified by twenty-first-century Norwegians&#8217; enthusiasm for such non-Scandinavian fare as pizza and tacos. Plus, they added, health authorities say pork isn&#8217;t that good for you anyway. And why, the editors asked, is the anti-regulatory Progress Party sticking its nose into the formulation of prison and day-care-center menus, anyway?</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">That, then, according to the editors of Norway&#8217;s newspaper of record, is what this story is “really about”: universal values, changing tastes, health considerations, and freedom of choice. Now, surely they know that what it&#8217;s </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">really </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">“really about” is the Islamic teaching that pork is </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">haram – </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">and the Islamic compulsion to try to force infidels into living by Koranic restrictions as well. In short, stealth Islamization. And the editors of </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Aftenposten </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">must know that their readers know that, too. So what to make of this editorial? Exactly what is the editors&#8217; rationale here? How do their minds work? I mean, it&#8217;s not just that </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Aftenposten</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">&#8216;s editors avoided the Islamic elephant in the room (that&#8217;s something we&#8217;ve seen hundreds of times); the relatively fresh twist here here is that they&#8217;re declaring, in effect, that there&#8217;s an elephant in the room – and then offering a list of pretty much everything that </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">isn&#8217;t </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">the elephant in the room.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">I suggest that the answer may be this: that every editorial and op-ed like this in </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Aftenposten </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">is yet another effort in a long-term campaign not just to encourage the appeasement of Islamization but, beyond that, to create a society in which pretty much everybody appeases Islamization </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">all the while denying</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, to others and even to themselves, that they&#8217;re doing anything of the kind. A society, in other words, that has reached a stage of pure Orwellianism by fully internalizing the process of doublethink, which, just to remind you, was </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/o/orwell/george/o79n/chapter1.3.html">described</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> as follows in the third chapter of </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">1984:</i></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself. That was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word “doublethink” involved the use of doublethink.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Is there a single word of this passage that does not apply perfectly to what is going on in the </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Aftenposten </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">editorial? In the minds of that paper&#8217;s editors, the impulse to appease would seem to have become utterly reflexive – along with the ability to deny effectively, even to themselves, in precisely the way Orwell outlines, that they&#8217;re acting on such an impulse.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">No question about it: Orwell was the prophet of our times. But did he ever imagine that Orwellianism would begin to take serious root in the West not as an outgrowth of European fascism and Communism but as a cowardly response to the religion of Muhammed? </span></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-bawer/doublethink-in-norway/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>89</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Three Cheers for &#8216;Lilyhammer&#8217;</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-bawer/three-cheers-for-lilyhammer/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=three-cheers-for-lilyhammer</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-bawer/three-cheers-for-lilyhammer/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 04 Feb 2014 05:40:07 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Bawer]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[America]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Lilyhammer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Media]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Netflix]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Norway]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[politically correct]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=217887</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A frank, funny – and courageously critical – look at social-democratic Norway.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/lilyhammer-510cd1aa91eda.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-217888" alt="lilyhammer-510cd1aa91eda" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/lilyhammer-510cd1aa91eda.jpg" width="291" height="195" /></a>It&#8217;s only a slight exaggeration to say that half of the comedy you see on Norwegian TV is anodyne whimsy about Norwegian dialects and the other half is P.C. mockery of the U.S. and/or of that most pro-American of all Norwegian political parties, the classical-liberal Progress Party. The very funny Norwegian-produced series </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Lilyhammer, </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">then, most of whose humor derives from parody of Norwegian social democracy – historically an almost </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">verboten </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">comic target – as well as of the country&#8217;s manners and mores, is a remarkable departure. Our hero is New York mobster Frank Tagliano (played admirably by Steven van Zandt of </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">The Sopranos </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">and Bruce Springsteen&#8217;s E Street Band), who, after turning state&#8217;s evidence, asks the Witness Protection Program to relocate him in Lillehammer, Norway, because he remembers watching the 1994 Winter Olympics on TV and being impressed by the “clean air, fresh white snow, gorgeous broads&#8230;and best of all, nobody&#8217;s gonna be looking for me there.” The fact that most Norwegians actually can laugh at cutting satire at the expense of their own society was proven by the show&#8217;s massive domestic success: a fifth of the country&#8217;s population watched the first season when it debuted in early 2012. It also performed well internationally on Netflix, on which its second season is now available.  </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Frank&#8217;s life in Norway – where he goes by the name Giovanni (Johnny) Henriksen – amounts to a veritable introductory course in Norwegian culture and customs. He learns, for example, about </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">dugnad</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, the “voluntary” sanitary and maintenance work that people who (for example) work in apartment buildings are more or less compelled to do for the common good. He discovers that thanks to Norway&#8217;s anal-retentive driving laws, his New York license isn&#8217;t valid and that it&#8217;ll take two months of tests – driving a stick-shift, no less – for him to get a Norwegian one (“All I want to do is drive a car, not the space shuttle”). He experiences the nightmare that is NAV, the maddeningly remote, rule-ridden Norwegian welfare and job-placement system, where he&#8217;s condescended to and discouraged in his efforts to open a nightclub. He&#8217;s introduced to </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">hjemmebrent </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">(moonshine), which, thanks to the staggeringly high prices at the government liquor monopoly, is far more widespread a phenomenon in Norway than in the U.S. Concerned about nocturnal vandals who&#8217;ve spray-painted his nightclub&#8217;s door, he hears about the </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">natteraverne </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">(“night ravens”), who, to his dismay, turn out not to be vigilantes but, rather, a gaggle of docile do-gooders, one of them a small, frail elderly woman, who walk the streets at night looking for troublemakers to engage in “dialogue.” (“Juvenile delinquents,” he sneers at one of these altruists, “are shaking in their boots tonight with you and grandma on the loose.”) He even spends a few days in a Norwegian prison, which he finds surprisingly cushy (“I should have been arrested a lot sooner!”) and where he and other inmates – and guards – are taught to play the recorder by a hippie lady. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">In the second season, Frank continues his education in Norwegian culture. Expanding his empire, he buys the local </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">asylmottak, </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">or refugee center – where would-be immigrants, mostly from the Muslim world, live while awaiting the government&#8217;s decisions on their asylum applications. When his girlfriend gives birth to a twin daughter and son, he&#8217;s thrust into the company of a local </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">barnehage </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">(day-care center) manager, who, to Frank&#8217;s visible distaste, puts on a Marxism-inspired puppet show for infants and toddlers about an imaginary country called “Muriburiland,” a socialist utopia where, he sings, there&#8217;s perfect solidarity and no such thing as profit. When the liquor supply at Frank&#8217;s nightclub runs low, he discovers to his surprise that the guy who smuggles booze for him is </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">sykemeldt –</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> that, in other words, he&#8217;s gone on sick leave, that open-ended, well-nigh sacred official exemption from all responsibilities that is a cornerstone of Norwegian society. (“Are you crazy?” Frank counters, demanding that the guy get back to work. “There&#8217;s no Obamacare for a bootlegger!”) From beginning to end, </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Lilyhammer </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">is brilliantly observed, gratifyingly gutsy, and consistently on-target satire that captures the textures and rhythms of Norwegian life with unerring wit and insight.</span></p>
<p>Watching this series, one keeps expecting that at some point or other the authors are going to slip up, or give in, and present something from a P.C. perspective, a temptation which has proven to be the ruination of virtually every Norwegian cultural artefact of our time. But it never happens. At every turn, Frank&#8217;s own can-do, take-charge, individualistic American (and mafioso) assumptions about the way the world works are challenged by Norwegian passivity, fatalism, groupthink – not to mention the ubiquitous, by-the-book statism. But he challenges Norway back – urging his phlegmatic new friends to make something out of themselves, to stop having “dialogue” about problems and actually do something, to snap out of their docile stupor and refuse to take crap. When a wolf kills somebody&#8217;s pet sheep, he urges the locals to follow him into the woods to wreak revenge: “Why are we sitting around talking when we should be killing this f&#8212;ing thing?” When a friend&#8217;s twelve-year-old son, Jonas, is smacked around by another boy and Frank hears the kids&#8217; teacher urging “dialogue,” he takes Jonas aside and explains how to fill a mitten with rocks. And after a male Muslim classmate in his orientation course for immigrants refuses to shake the female teacher&#8217;s hand (that would be <i>haram</i>), no one reacts except Frank, who slams the guy against a men&#8217;s room wall and says: “Hey, towelhead, listen, you might wrap your women like mummies back in Taliban country, but here we treat our broads with respect. <i>Comprende?</i>” Frank&#8217;s worldview – his pro-Americanism, his fierce anti-Communism, his admiration for Ronald Reagan, his contempt for welfare spongers – emerges in comic contexts but, in what may be a first for Norwegian television (or any Norwegian media today), these attitudes are presented not as ridiculous or reprehensible but as thoroughly reasonable.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">For a viewer familiar with the Norwegian media, it can seem almost beyond belief that this show was created by two Norwegians, Anne Bjørnstad and Eilif Skodvin. (Most of the episodes are co-written by one or both of them, with van Zandt himself collaborating on the second-season scripts.) Repeatedly, they do things that go far beyond anything I&#8217;ve ever seen a Norwegian television show dare to do. Having a sympathetic character call a Muslim a “towelhead”? Inconceivable. (Frank&#8217;s comment when he sees Muslims out skating? “Al Qaeda on ice.”) No less edgy, in Norway, than the Islam material – which, among other things, offers American viewers a pretty clear picture of the degree to which that religion has made inroads into Scandinavian society – are the hints that at least some Norwegian men these days are, shall we say, more than a bit too</span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;"> </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">domesticated for their own good. When Frank&#8217;s girlfriend gets pregnant, the midwife turns out to be a rather wimpy male, while one of our protagonist&#8217;s new buddies is a pathetically browbeaten house hubby who&#8217;s taking several months of </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">pappaperm </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">(paternity leave) and whose disclosure that he&#8217;s had a vasectomy reveals that he is, indeed, both literally and figuratively castrated.   </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">It&#8217;s no mystery why so many Norwegians love this show. Frank does things that many of them would surely love to do, and expresses views that they may well share but that they&#8217;ve probably never articulated, except perhaps over family dinner. After all, when you&#8217;re anxious about ever-rising crime rates but are at the mercy of public officials (and not a few fellow citizens) who are more worried about offending criminals than protecting victims, what could appeal to you more than a program in which the hero, wearing the uniform of a bleeding-heart </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">natteraver</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">,</span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;"> </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">no less, beats up a street punk who&#8217;s hit an old lady and, in reply to the incredulous brat&#8217;s question – “What kind of night ravens are you?” – growls back: “The kind you don&#8217;t want to f&#8211;k with”? In a country where a large percentage of the people are sick of seeing their tax money thrown at sub-Saharan dictators and perturbed by the rise of Islam in their own backyard, what could be more gratifying than a show whose leading character, appalled by the draft text of a kid&#8217;s May 17 (Constitution Day) speech, which oozes the usual Norwegian socialist-missionary sentiments about the need to remember Africa&#8217;s poor, rewrites it into a critique of backward immigrants who come to Norway just to commit street crimes and go on the dole?</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Not that Frank, an immigrant himself, after all, is anti-immigrant </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">per se: </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">in one second-season episode, he meets a Somali man whose application for asylum in Norway has been rejected – but who, it turns out, is a terrific cook who would be a major asset to Frank&#8217;s nightclub. The show vividly contrasts the way in which this man is treated by the Norwegian immigration authorities – who, seemingly indifferent to questions of professional aptitude or excellence of character, don&#8217;t give a damn that he&#8217;s a decent, hardworking guy with a highly marketable skill who could contribute to Norway rather than sucking on its teat – with his treatment by Frank, who, upon meeting the man, recognizes immediately an opportunity to help someone else out while doing himself a good turn at the same time. Naturally, Frank finds a way to arrange for the Somali chef to stay in Norway and work for him – thus winning his instant affection and loyalty. The whole episode amounts to a beautiful fable about how much better things could be in Norway if the government approached immigration issues in a more commonsensically human and less robotically bureaucratic manner. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Of course, Frank isn&#8217;t just a true-blue individualistic American – he&#8217;s a gangster who&#8217;s used to greasing palms and breaking legs to get his way, and part of his frustration with Norway is that all too many of the functionaries he runs across just aren&#8217;t corrupt like their counterparts back in New York (although virtually all of them prove to be corruptible). But the most important thing about Frank&#8217;s status as a mafioso, for Norwegian viewers, is that it makes </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Lilyhammer </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">revolutionary in a very special way. Meaning what? Simply this: in Norway, as in other social-democratic countries, the lesson drawn from American gangster movies like </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">The Godfather </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">has long been that the U.S. is a country of cutthroat, kill-or-be-killed capitalism in which it&#8217;s impossible to be successful without being a crook. For Scandinavian social democrats, the very existence of the Mafia is viewed as definitive proof of the essentially corrupt nature of America (never mind that the Cosa Nostra is a Sicilian import); indeed, the don, the capo, is the American writ large. Repeatedly, and, it seems, deliberately, </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Lilyhammer</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> overturns this notion, suggesting that far more than America, </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Norway </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">is a country in which you have to operate outside the law if you want to make it big. As </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Lilyhammer </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">demonstrates, the barriers put up by the Norwegian system to aspiring entrepreneurs are many and formidable; for bar owners like Frank, the road is an especially tough one, not least because they&#8217;re obliged to buy liquor from the government at retail prices and are therefore stuck with minuscule profit margins – unless, of course, like Frank, they manage to arrange alternative means of acquiring alcoholic beverages in bulk.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">It took me a while to figure out precisely what was so touching for me about </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Lilyhammer.</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> It&#8217;s this: despite the reflexive anti-Americanism of the Norwegian media establishment, professoriate, political elite, state bureaucrats, NGO operatives, and certain public-sector types (such as that day-care utopianist), who warn routinely against the increasing introduction into Norway of </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">amerikanske tilstander </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">(American conditions), Norway, like many of its Western European neighbors, is in fact a highly Americanized society – and most ordinary Norwegians happen to like it that way. In one second-season episode, the day-care Commie rants in a familiar way about Americanization, to which a young sweet-faced pedagogue says, quite simply, “I like America.” It&#8217;s a strangely moving declaration, and it&#8217;s faithful to the reality of everyday Norwegian life. Norwegians </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">like </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">America. Most of the music, movies, and TV shows that make up their lives comes from America. From earliest childhood, they have an attachment to America whose intensity is beyond measuring. (I need only look to my four-year-old Norwegian nephew, whose entire world is currently centered on the movie </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Cars </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">and its sequels, spinoffs, and merchandising.) </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Lilyhammer</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> is a product of that attachment. And it&#8217;s more: though it becomes clear early in the series that the show is an homage to American crime drama (with plentiful, and wonderfully witty, allusions to </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">The Godfather, Goodfellas, </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">and other such films), one eventually realizes that in addition to being a brilliantly observed, gratifyingly gutsy, consistently on-target satire that captures the textures and rhythms of Norwegian life with unerring wit, it&#8217;s also a salute to America  – a grateful acknowledgment of the huge place that American cultural products have in Norwegian lives, and a thumbs-up to American optimism and ambition, to the American impatience with institutions and suspicion of government, and to the American respect for people who contribute to society and do things their own way. This series is, beyond question, the work of people who have done it their own way – and in doing so have at once paid a splendid tribute to America&#8217;s culture and made a splendid contribution to Norway&#8217;s. </span></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-bawer/three-cheers-for-lilyhammer/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>30</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Lying about Norway&#8217;s Progress Party</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-bawer/lying-about-norways-progress-party/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=lying-about-norways-progress-party</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-bawer/lying-about-norways-progress-party/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 27 Jan 2014 05:20:14 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Bawer]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[ambassador]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[appointment]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[George Tsunis]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[mccain]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Norway]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Progress Party]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Senate]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=217284</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Obama's insulting ambassadorial appointment to Norway. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/81955ab4-1d01-46c0-82e1-37b988a7a89d_tsunis.png"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-217285" alt="81955ab4-1d01-46c0-82e1-37b988a7a89d_tsunis" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/81955ab4-1d01-46c0-82e1-37b988a7a89d_tsunis-426x350.png" width="298" height="245" /></a>The date: January 16. The place: the Dirksen Senate Office Building in Washington, D.C. Members of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations are interviewing the three individuals who have been appointed by President Obama as his new ambassadors to Norway, Iceland, and Hungary. All three, in the opening statements and in their answers to questions, roll out Fun Facts about the countries to which they are to be posted. Some of these facts are read off of crib notes; others are obviously the result of recent cramming for this occasion. It very quickly becomes clear that, despite their palpably strenuous efforts to project expertise, none of these three appointees really knows anything about the countries that they are talking about. At times, indeed, they sound frighteningly reminiscent of that Miss South Carolina contestant in the Miss Teen USA pageant a few years back, who, when asked why many Americans can&#8217;t locate the U.S. on a world map, produced many of the right kinds of words but strung them together in a way that make no grammatical sense and conveyed nothing resembling a fact or opinion. Easily the worst of the three appointees facing the Senate committee is George Tsunis, the CEO of the company that owns the Hilton, Marriott, and Intercontinental hotel chains, and the prospective ambassador to Norway, a country in which, he admits, he has never set foot.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">To be sure, Tsunis&#8217;s appearance starts out promisingly enough. Senator Chuck Schumer of New York gives him an effusive introduction, describing him as a good friend who, out of his extraordinary patriotism, has agreed to serve his country in the role of ambassador, a position to which he is eminently suited and to which he will bring a range of extraordinary talents. Yet from the moment Tsunis opens his mouth he starts putting his foot in it. He refers to an unspecified “former president” of Norway – a position that does not, in fact, exist, since Norway is a kingdom, not a republic. In answer to one senator&#8217;s question, Tsunis starts spouting out data about Norway, but utterly fails to shape it into anything resembling a sensible answer to the actual question. At around the one-hour mark in </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.foreign.senate.gov/hearings/nomination-01-16-2014">this video</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, his questioner rescues him from his own incoherent babble, to which Tsunis replies: “Thank you for that save.” The “save,” however, proves to be in vain, because a few moments later, in answer to another question, Tsunis again begins to make absolutely no sense, and when he trails off with the enigmatic words “it&#8217;s important that we continue&#8230;interesting&#8230;,” his interlocutor is obliged to rescue him once again.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">But the best, or worst, it turns out, is yet to come. Now it is Senator John McCain&#8217;s turn to pose a question or two. “Mr. Tsunis, following last year&#8217;s parliamentary elections,” says McCain, “Norway&#8217;s Conservative Party now head a center-right coalition, as you know, that includes an anti-immigration party called the Progress Party. What do you think the appeal of the Progress Party was to Norwegian voters?” Tsunis, calling this “a seminal question” (“seminal” being in his view, apparently, a fancy word for “important”), explains that in “open,” “transparent,” and “democratic” societies like Norway “you get some fringe elements that have a microphone, that spew their hatred. And, although I will tell you Norway has been very quick to denounce them. We&#8217;re going to continue to work with Norway to make sure – ” At which point McCain interrupts Tsunis to point out that the Norwegian government has not denounced the Progress Party, because that party, far from being a “fringe” phenomenon, is, in fact – </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">as McCain mentioned in his question – </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">a part of the government. (Indeed, the head of the Progress Party, Siv Jensen, is Norway&#8217;s Finance Minister, and another party member is Minister of Justice.) In response to McCain&#8217;s correction, Tsunis says: “I stand corrected. The – uh, I stand corrected. I would like to leave my answer at…it’s a very, very open society and that most Norwegians, the overwhelming amount of Norwegians, and the overwhelming amount of people in parliament, don’t feel the same way.” After which McCain says, his words dripping with sarcasm: “I have no more questions for this incredibly highly qualified group of nominees.”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Yes, I know: subpar ambassadors, nominated to their posts solely because they have donated large sums of money to an incumbent&#8217;s election campaign, are an old story, and the practice is not confined to either party. But the kind of incompetence demonstrated by </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">tsuris –</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> sorry, Tsunis – seems particularly characteristic of this presidency, reflective of Obama&#8217;s by-now familiar readiness to insult and offend our staunchest allies while bowing and scraping to our enemies. But what Tsunis proved during that hearing was not just that he is incompetent but that he has no hesitation to demonize people about whom he knows nothing. He hears the words “anti-immigration” and, like a schoolchild venturing a total guess on  a multiple-choice test, spits back an answer that he presumably figures is likely to be in the right ballpark, to wit: “anti-immigration equals bad.” A more honest and responsible-minded candidate would have admitted that he didn&#8217;t know the first thing about the Progress Party. But not Tsunis, who chose instead to fake his way through the whole show, lying and guessing and making things up and talking out the clock with empty words. It&#8217;s not just incredibly ignorant; it&#8217;s disgracefully, inexcusably irresponsible.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">There&#8217;s yet another significant factor here, however. One imagines that Tsunis has spent at least a few hours in recent weeks reading material about Norway provided to him by the administration and being briefed by people who actually know something about the subject. It seems probable that the recent Norwegian elections, and the name of the Progress Party, have come up somewhere along the line, and that Tsunis, while somehow forgetting that the party is part of the current governing coalition, managed to remember that, in the eyes of his friends at the White House and State Department, it is basically a gang of hate-spewing bigots. And the fact is that while it is profoundly inappropriate, of course, for any American diplomat, let alone an ambassador to Norway, to publicly characterize the Progress Party in the kind of terms used by Tsunis, Tsunis&#8217;s answer to McCain&#8217;s question was actually an almost perfect summation of the received view of the Progress Party among the Democratic establishment in the United States.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Witness, for example, an </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/24/world/europe/anti-immigrant-party-norway.html?hp&amp;_r=0">article</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> that appeared in the </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">New York Times </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">on January 24, in which Steven Erlenger professed to explain what the Progress Party is all about and to account for its electoral success. The clear, if unspoken, premise of the article was that Norway&#8217;s socialist establishment is the embodiment of all good democratic values, while the Progress Party represents an at least quasi-fascist challenge thereto. Erlanger, to his credit, did provide a brief quotation or two from an actual Progress Party member, but his chief source of “information” about the party was Thomas Hylland Eriksen, a social anthropologist at the University of Oslo. What Erlenger did not tell his readers was that Hylland Eriksen not only is one of the Progress Party&#8217;s fiercest enemies but also, after the July 22, 2011, terrorist attacks by Anders Behring Breivik, was one of the leaders of a cynical, well-nigh totalitarian campaign to link Breivik&#8217;s acts to the Progress Party and to all domestic critics of Islam – and thereby crush the party and silence the critics.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Part of the record of this nefarious effort is contained in the </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Times</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">&#8216;s own archives: only six days after Breivik&#8217;s atrocities, the Gray Lady ran an </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/29/opinion/Gaarder-Eriksen.html">op-e</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">d, co-authored by Hylland Eriksen and notorious </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.aftenposten.no/meninger/kronikker/article1411153.ece">anti-Semitic</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> novelist Jostein Gaarder, in which they sought to convince American readers that Breivik was a product of the Progress Party and of various Islam critics, including yours truly. A month to the day after the terrorist acts, on August 22, 2011, Hylland Eriksen and three co-authors called in an </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Aftenposten </i><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.aftenposten.no/meninger/kronikker/article4205167.ece">op-ed</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> for tighter limits on free speech in Norway. “Certain hateful utterances,” they argued, “are legally and morally unacceptable&#8230;.Neither freedom of speech or the right to express oneself are absolute in any existing human society&#8230;.it is not a human right to express oneself in public.” Hylland Eriksen and his colleagues mocked “free speech absolutism,” rejected the United States (“the country in the world that goes the furthest in protecting the right to expression”) as a “role model,” complained that “the limits to hateful speech” had been “stretched very far” in Norway in recent years, and argued that this lack of speech restrictions had been a key factor in Breivik&#8217;s formation. In short, the undemocratic tendencies on the Norwegian political scene in recent years have not been headquartered in the Progress Party – they have been headquartered on the left, highly placed politicians, academics, journalists, and cultural figures who, in the wake of a national tragedy, did their best to crush freedom of speech and destroy their ideological adversaries.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The other day, then, when George Tsunis casually smeared the Progress Party in his testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, it was perhaps not entirely a product of ignorance. Bring up Norway in private conversation in progressive circles in the United States and it will not be long before you hear precisely the kind of defamatory language about the Progress Party that Tsunis served up during that hearing – and that Hylland Eriksen, before him, proffered in his mischievous </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Times </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">and </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Aftenposten </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">op-eds. Chatting about Norway with Democrats in the U.S., or reading about the subject in the </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">New York Times </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">or </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Washington Post, </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">you would never know that the Progress Party is actually the closest party in Norway to the U.S. political center; that it is by far the most pro-American and pro-Israeli of major Norwegian political parties; and that, yes, it is the only party in Norway that speaks in a remotely frank and responsible way about the dangers inherent in Islam. Yet, thanks in large part to credulous and left-leaning American reporters and editors who are prepared to believe anything that a Thomas Hylland Eriksen tells them, the Progress Party has been consistently disparaged and demeaned, libeled and lied about in the U.S. media and throughout the American left. In the final analysis, George Tsunis&#8217;s sorry display in Washington last week was only a footnote to this long, despicable record of slander.</span></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-bawer/lying-about-norways-progress-party/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>15</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Obama Million Dollar Bundler Nominated as Ambassador to Norway Has No Clue What its Form of Government Is</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/obama-500k-donor-nominated-as-ambassador-to-norway-has-no-clue-what-norways-form-of-government-is/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obama-500k-donor-nominated-as-ambassador-to-norway-has-no-clue-what-norways-form-of-government-is</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/obama-500k-donor-nominated-as-ambassador-to-norway-has-no-clue-what-norways-form-of-government-is/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 24 Jan 2014 17:26:44 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[ambassador]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Barack Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Corruption]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Norway]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=217228</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The next ambassador to Norway committed a jaw-dropping diplomatic blunder]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/obama-idiot.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-217231" alt="obama idiot" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/obama-idiot.jpg" width="450" height="348" /></a></p>
<p>That Sarah Palin sure was stupid. If McCain had won, I bet he would have abolished freedom of speech and would go around nominating morons as ambassadors to major countries based on how much money they gave him.</p>
<p>Fortunately Obama won and filmmakers who make movies he doesn&#8217;t like get locked up and Obama backers and bundlers get diplomatic positions to major countries, including Japan and the UK.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s okay if<a href="http://hotair.com/archives/2014/01/24/video-what-happens-when-presidents-make-big-donors-into-ambassadors/"> their entire knowledge of the country comes</a> from a <a href="http://www.thelocal.no/20140123/next-us-ambassador">5 second glace at Wikipedia</a>.</p>
<blockquote><p>“I have no more questions for this incredibly highly qualified group of nominees,” John McCain told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, but not before he had eviscerated Barack Obama’s selection as the next Ambassador to Norway.</p>
<p>As a bundler for Obama in 2012, Tsunis raised almost a million dollars for the campaign, and donated $300,000 to the Democratic Party.</p>
<p>The US&#8217;s next ambassador to Norway has committed a jaw-dropping diplomatic blunder before he even begins, describing politicians from the Progress Party, which has seven ministers, as &#8220;fringe elements&#8221; that &#8220;spew their hatred&#8221; in a US Senate hearing.</p>
<p>The blunder came after a faltering, incoherent performance from Tsunis, in which he made a reference to Norway&#8217;s &#8220;president&#8221;, apparently under the impression that the country is a republic rather than a constitutional monarchy.</p>
<p>That prompted McCain’s disbelieving answer: “The government has denounced them? The coalition government — they’re part of the coalition of the government.”</p>
<p>McCain, already flummoxed by the apparent inability of Obama’s choice to be ambassador to Hungary to list strategic U.S. interests there, closed his questioning with a bit of sarcasm: “I have no more questions for this incredibly highly qualified group of nominees.”</p></blockquote>
<p>I do. How much are they going to donate to Hillary to keep their jobs?</p>
<p><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/272_ZX7m1YA?feature=player_embedded" height="360" width="540" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/BcjIestFVOc?feature=player_detailpage" height="360" width="540" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/obama-500k-donor-nominated-as-ambassador-to-norway-has-no-clue-what-norways-form-of-government-is/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>20</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Breivik Tried to Undermine CounterJihad, Admits Nazi Goals</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/breivik-tried-to-undermine-counterjihad-admits-nazi-goals/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=breivik-tried-to-undermine-counterjihad-admits-nazi-goals</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/breivik-tried-to-undermine-counterjihad-admits-nazi-goals/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 14 Jan 2014 15:25:14 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Anders Behring Breivik]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[neo nazi]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Norway]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=215274</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[He says that he was using “the counterjihad” rhetoric to protect “ethno-nationalists” ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Anders-Breivik-1459719.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-215289" alt="Anders Breivik-1459719" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Anders-Breivik-1459719-450x299.jpg" width="450" height="299" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://gatesofvienna.net/2014/01/breivik-repudiates-the-counterjihad/">This won&#8217;t prevent the umpteenth New York Times</a> article counting how many times Breivik&#8217;s manifesto had Robert Spencer&#8217;s name in it, never mind that most of those instances came from a pasted document filled with quotes on terrorism from mainstream experts and elected officials, but it does fit in with his actual plan of action which involved mass murder and allying with Islamic terrorists to take over parts of Europe.</p>
<p>Despite Muslim complaints, Breivik&#8217;s attack had nothing to do with Islam.</p>
<p>Reading through the original parts of Breivik&#8217;s manifesto and then catching the rest of his performance, it&#8217;s obvious that his connection to reality is very loosely tethered. It would not surprise me a great deal if a year from now he announced that he was a Communist or converted to Islam.</p>
<blockquote><p>Anders Behring Breivik has sent a letter to international media that “Expo Idag” has read. He describes the letter as a first step in a “peace negotiation” with his political opponents. In the letter Anders Behring Breivik has partially changed his rhetoric from that used in his so-called “manifesto”. He says that he in the manifesto was using “the counterjihad” rhetoric to protect “ethno-nationalists” and instead prompt a media campaign against the anti-nationalistic counterjihad movement. He calls this strategy “double psychology”.</p></blockquote>
<p>The technical term is delusional. I&#8217;m not just using that as an insult.</p>
<p>Breivik always had delusions of potency and power. He retains them now even in jail. He imagines that there is a movement behind them and that he is capable of negotiating terms. He revises the past so that every development fits into his master plan.</p>
<blockquote><p>Anders Behring Breivik claims that he strives for a “clean Nordic ideal”. He means that the “Nordic race” is about to be eradicated and he wants there to be a Nazi party in Norway just like the party “Svenskarnas Parti” (The Swedes’ Party). He mentioned several infamous right-wing extremists in Norway that he wants to lead the party, among them Varg Vikernes and Erik Blucher.</p></blockquote>
<p>I suspect that Breivik&#8217;s fascist pals will turn out to have never heard of him or only know him from blog or forum comments.</p>
<blockquote><p>Breivik also says that his love for Israel is solely based on its future role as a place to deport “disloyal Jews”.</p></blockquote>
<p>That&#8217;s nice, considering that there are barely 1,000 Jews in Norway and they are self-deporting due to Islamic migration.</p>
<blockquote><p> Anders Behring Breivik also writes that he does not think that he will survive his time in prison, where he claims he is being tortured.</p></blockquote>
<p><a href="http://www.thejournal.ie/breivik-prison-conditions-complaint-778127-Jan2013/">Samples of some of these</a> tortures include&#8230;</p>
<blockquote><p> In November, the killer sent a 27-page letter to prison authorities with a list of complaints ranging from everyday annoyances, like cold coffee and a lack of butter, to more serious issues, such as censorship of his correspondence, body searches and being kept in isolation.</p>
<p>In the letter received by the Wall Street Journal, Breivik reportedly boasted that if he wanted to retaliate for his poor treatment, he knew how to build weapons out of items he was allowed in prison, such as his Sony PlayStation 2, long screws and plain sheets of paper.</p></blockquote>
<p>If he has a PS2, then I assume he also has a television and apparently the equipment to write a whole lot.</p>
<blockquote><p>The killer also claims to have written a book more than 1000 pages long, which he claims he is unable to send to a publisher, because he is being blocked by prison authorities.</p>
<p>In a letter received by the German newspaper Die Welt , Breivik expressed doubt that he would ever escape prison.  &#8220;I will not survive this sentence,&#8221; he wrote.</p></blockquote>
<p>Maybe he can figure out a survival method using only a PS2, a television, a laptop and cold coffee.</p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/breivik-tried-to-undermine-counterjihad-admits-nazi-goals/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>33</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Red Star over Scandinavia</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-bawer/red-star-over-scandinavia/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=red-star-over-scandinavia</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-bawer/red-star-over-scandinavia/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 31 Dec 2013 05:02:00 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Bawer]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[communists]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Nordic]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Norway]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[scandanavia]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=214241</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Communists in the Nordic news media, then and now.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/pl1.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-214246" alt="pl" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/pl1-354x350.jpg" width="283" height="280" /></a>The brightest light in the Norwegian media firmament – and one of the brightest, for that matter, in the European media generally – is the independent news and opinion website <a href="http://www.document.no/">document.no</a>, which celebrated its tenth anniversary this year. Founded by journalist Hans Rustad, it&#8217;s a consistently excellent site, addressing Islam, immigration, and related issues with thoroughgoing intelligence and responsibility. (Indeed, one can only wish that the country&#8217;s major newspapers were half as serious, and half as well written, as the typical piece on document.no.) Not unimportantly, it&#8217;s also an elegant site, which features reproductions of great paintings and recordings of classical music – the point presumably being to remind us exactly what we&#8217;re talking about when we talk about preserving our civilization in the face of barbarism.</p>
<p>The success of document.no has baffled and rankled Norway&#8217;s mainstream media, which have repeatedly depicted it as radical and Islamophobic. After the July 2011 atrocities in Oslo and Utøya, many prominent leftists took the opportunity to link document.no to the murderer, Anders Behring Breivik, who&#8217;d been an avid reader of the site and had posted a number of comments on it before carrying out the actions that would make him world-famous.</p>
<p>But document.no has endured, and thrived – and the media have been compelled to acknowledge, however grudgingly, its considerable influence. Recently, <i>Aftenposten,</i> Norway&#8217;s excuse for a newspaper of record, hosted a <a href="http://www.aftenposten.no/webtv/Rustad---Du-er-nodt-til-a-vare-kritisk-til-innvandring-7414046.html%20">video debate</a> between Rustad and Helge Øgrim, a veteran journalist who&#8217;s now editor of <i>Journalisten, </i>the official journal of the Norwegian journalists&#8217; union. The debate wasn&#8217;t about Islam or immigration but about document.no itself: is it a valuable source of reliable news and legitimate commentary, and thus a positive force in Norwegian society, or a dangerous mouthpiece for ugly, racist views? Øgrim, sitting right there next to Rustad, chose not to call it racist, but instead – taking a tack often employed by leftists when confronted with arguments they can&#8217;t answer – maintained that its focus was too narrow and its views too predictable, and that it was thus a boring experience.</p>
<p>The Rustad-Øgrim debate wasn&#8217;t just a conversation between two journalists; it was a confrontation between the new media and the old. Indeed, to look at Øgrim&#8217;s résumé is to get a glimpse of just what Norway&#8217;s old media really consists of – and, therefore, of just how much Rustad has been up against in his effort to report widely suppressed news developments and to publish alternative viewpoints. For Øgrim, as it happens, is the very personification of Norway&#8217;s old media. He&#8217;s been the editor-in-chief of <i>Dagbladet </i>and the U.S. correspondent for the major Norwegian wire service, NTB<i>.</i> Not irrelevantly, he also spent many years on the central committee of the AKP, a Maoist party that held an iron grip on much of the Norwegian elite during the last quarter of the twentieth century. The AKP, founded in 1973 and finally folded into the Rødt (Red) Party in 2007, was created by Stalinists who found the post-Stalin USSR insufficiently rigorous in its Communism.</p>
<p>Øgrim&#8217;s career is not atypical. To use a Norwegian expression that&#8217;s particularly apt in this case, Communism has run like a red thread through mainstream Norwegian journalism of the last half century. The first head of AKP, Sigurd Allern, later became Norway&#8217;s first professor of journalism, at the University of Oslo. (He still holds that position.) Other former heads of AKP include Pål Steigen, who has since held many high-level cultural offices, including a stint as an editor at Cappellen, a major publishing house; Kjersti Ericsson, who&#8217;s now a professor of criminology at the University of Oslo; and Hilde Haugsgjerd, who until recently was the editor-in-chief of <i>Aftenposten. </i>Øgrim himself, I might mention, is a member of an old-media dynasty that&#8217;s also a red-diaper dynasty: his father was the longtime program director of NRK television; his cousin Tron was a high-profile Communist journalist.</p>
<p>Norway isn&#8217;t alone in having its journalistic community dominated by Communists. The situation has long been much the same in Denmark, although much of the history of this phenomenon has been systematically covered up. The protagonist in this story is Bent Jensen, head of Denmark&#8217;s Center for Cold War Research, who has been <a href="http://www.b.dk/nationalt/pet-forhindrer-afsloering-af-kgb-folk?fb_action_ids=10152067357169242%20">fighting</a> an uphill battle to expose the degree to which Denmark, and especially Danish journalism, was infiltrated by Soviet agents during the Cold War. The history of Jensen&#8217;s struggle, in a nutshell, is this: in 2006, after a report by the Danish Security and Intelligence Service (PET) on Cold War Communist infiltration was deemed unsatisfactory, the Danish Parliament allocated money so that Jensen could research the subject independently and provide a fuller report; in 2009, Minister of Justice Brian Mikkelsen promised him unrestricted access to all the documents that the PET had been allowed to see. But the promises turned out to mean nothing. Jensen, who considers Soviet Communism to have been every bit as perfidious as Nazism and wants the world to understand why, has been stonewalled at every turn.</p>
<p>Why? Plainly, according to reports, high-up figures in the government don&#8217;t want him to be in a position to name names. PET head Jacob Scharf, a former Social Democratic youth official, and Justice Minister Morten Bødskov, also a Social Democrat, have been described as using their power to keep documents about still-living left-wing politicians and journalists out of Jensen&#8217;s hands. (Bødskov reportedly tried to keep Jensen, a serious and objective scholar, from being given this assignment in the first place.) PET claims that allowing Jensen to see certain materials would damage national security and harm PET&#8217;s collaboration with its NATO counterparts. It seems clear, however, that even more important than those considerations is the determination of leftists to cover up their own parties&#8217; strong Cold War ties to the USSR.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s known that among the PET&#8217;s archival items to which Jensen has been denied access is a list of left-wing journalists and politicians who were either KGB agents or naïve Soviet tools – and that among the names on that list is that of Torben Krogh, former editor-in-chief of the national newspaper <i>Information </i>who, reportedly, helped out the KGB by promoting Soviet views. News photographer Jacob Holdt, known for a photo series entitled “American Pictures” that was unflattering to the U.S., was also suspected by PET of working for the Soviets.</p>
<p>Among others whom PET had its eyes on during the Cold War was Jørgen Dragsdahl, a well-known far-left journalist who, PET concluded, was either an out-and-out KGB agent or some thing very close to that. When the national newspaper <i>Ekstra Bladet </i>reported on this in 1992, Dragsdahl sued and won. In a 2007 <a href="http://www.b.dk/nationalt/koldkrigsfejde-mellem-historie-professor-og-journalist-syder-paa-6.-aar%20">interview</a> with <i>Jyllands-Posten, </i>Bent Jensen stated that PET archives contained proof that Dragsdahl had been working for the KGB, and Dragsdahl sued again. He won, but Jensen appealed, and just two months ago – after a trial during which Dragdahl&#8217;s lawyer depicted Jensen as an “inquisitor” – the appeals court finally exonerated Jensen, ruling that he had “sufficient factual foundation for his statements.”</p>
<p>So much for Norway and Denmark. As for the other Scandinavian country, Sweden, meet Olof Frånstedt, who was <a href="http://www.b.dk/kultur/ny-bog-svenske-socialdemokrater-dyrkede-kontakter-til-sovjet-under-den-kolde-krig%20">head</a> of the Swedish intelligence service, Säpo, in the 1960s and 70s. He&#8217;s just published a book, <i>The Spy Hunter, </i>in which he writes about the Soviet ties of many leading Social Democrats. A major topic in his book is the so-called IB Affair. IB (Informations Bureauet) was a secret intelligence group which, operating with the support of Säpo, monitored the Soviet, Maoist, and Palestine connections of Sweden&#8217;s radical left. In 1973, however, journalists Peter Bratt and Jan Guillou – who is also one of the country&#8217;s most successful novelists – wrote articles revealing IB&#8217;s existence. A media scandal ensued – and what outraged the media was not that many high-ranking Swedes had Communist links, but that such a thing as IB existed at all. As a result of Bratt&#8217;s and Guillou&#8217;s efforts, IB was closed down. Only many years later, in 2009, did the newspaper <i>Expressen </i>reveal that Guillou himself had been a KGB agent, and had been paid by the Kremlin for writing Soviet-friendly articles.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s a measure of just how things work in Scandinavia that this revelation did little or no harm to Guillou&#8217;s reputation. As with Øgrim, and as with Dragsdahl, his career has been kept going thanks to a sympathetic media establishment that has chosen to let the sordid news of his treason slide out of public consciousness after only the most perfunctory coverage. Which, needless to say, is another way of stating that the far left, even all these years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, still runs the show in the Scandinavian media. And this, in turn, only underscores just how remarkable an accomplishment <a href="http://document.no" target="_blank">document.no</a> really is.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.   </b></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-bawer/red-star-over-scandinavia/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>13</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Christian Goodwill Toward the Jewish State</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/joseph-puder/christian-goodwill-toward-the-jewish-state/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=christian-goodwill-toward-the-jewish-state</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/joseph-puder/christian-goodwill-toward-the-jewish-state/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 16 Dec 2013 05:25:44 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Joseph Puder]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Amish]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[anabaptist]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Christians]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[mennonite]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Norway]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=213239</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A welcomed reprieve from the daily hatred leveled against Israel. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Amish-in-Israel.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-213240" alt="Amish in Israel" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Amish-in-Israel.jpg" width="260" height="173" /></a>It often seems as if the whole world is conspiring against the Jewish state, and with good reason. At the United Nations General Assembly, and UN associated agencies, Israel is either excluded or condemned more often than any other member state, including the most notorious dictatorships which trample on human rights, religious freedom, and democratic norms. On campuses in the European Union countries, the US, and elsewhere, BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) campaigns are waged against the Jewish state. Anti-Semitism in Europe is reaching new heights, and in the Muslim world, blind, violent hatred of Jews and Israel are on perpetual display.</p>
<p>But just when Jews in Israel and around the world begin to express their despair at how often evil is rewarded and good is punished, decent people of goodwill who can distinguish the difference arrive on the scene. In late November, 2013, a delegation of 31 Anabaptist and Amish Christians, dressed in their traditional attire, arrived in Israel to express their devotion to the Jewish state and to apologize to the Jewish people for Christianity’s persecution of Jews and for not having spoken up during the Holocaust. They arrived in Jerusalem from Idaho, Montana and Ohio, and met with Israeli Knesset members, rabbis, and Holocaust survivors.</p>
<p>Bishop Ben Girod of Idaho, founder of the Anabaptist Connections, who led the “repentance mission” of 45 Amish from the US and Switzerland in late 2010, was back again. On his arrival at Ben Gurion Airport, he stated that the group carried in their heart the desire to reconnect anew with the Jewish nation. The group consisted of Amish, Mennonite, and Hutterite sects from across North America.</p>
<p>Bishop Girod declared “We have discovered that in order for us to come to our destiny with the Lord, we need to <a href="http://israel21c.org/travel/were-marching-to-zion/">bless our Jewish brothers</a>. We have, in our history, a somewhat anti-Semitic attitude, and we have come here in the past to repent for that. Now we want to develop relationships with you. We want to draw close to you because we want the blessing of Abraham on our people.”</p>
<p>Girod began a whole new stream among the Amish and, unlike many in the sect who have traditionally considered the mention of “Israel” in the Bible as referring to the Church and to Christians, he acknowledges it as a reference to Jews. “To our <a href="http://israel21c.org/travel/were-marching-to-zion/">shame</a>,” Girod confessed, “we were silent during the Holocaust and we did not stand with the Jewish people in their hour of need.” Girod indicated that their first undertaking in Israel is to apologize to the Holocaust survivors, and to tell them how sorry they are…</p>
<p>Norway, the land which spawned the term “Quisling” during WWII, one that is synonymous with a traitor, is today one of the most hostile European states towards Israel. In October, 2009, Israel’s Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said at an Israeli cabinet meeting that, “Norway was <a href="http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/lieberman-norway-too-hostile-to-have-monitors-in-hebron-1.6836">too hostile</a> towards Israel to have monitors in Hebron.” Lieberman told the cabinet that of all his meetings at the UN General Assembly, the one with the Norwegians was the most difficult. “The Norwegians,” he said, “take a very hostile line against us.”</p>
<p>Then, in early December, 2013, a group of 40 Norwegian Christian leaders and clerks arrived in Israel ostensibly to apologize on Norway’s behalf for their role during the Holocaust, the 1993 Oslo Accords, as well as more recent events. In a special Knesset ceremony, the Norwegians delivered a speech expressing support for Israel and reservations about the Oslo Accords, which they claim ripped apart the land of Israel. The head of the delegation, Pastor Terje Ligerod, said, “We believe we are called as a nation to be an ally and to support Israel, and we as leaders want to work for change in our country and for repentance among the Christians in our country, we want to <a href="http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/174846">support Israel</a>.” They also declared that Israel belongs to the Jews, and intimated that they may form a new Christian political party that would pledge its support for Israel.</p>
<p>Representing 21 different Norwegian organizations, including Christian TV and newspapers, church groups, and representing all regions including the two major ethnic groups (Norwegians and Lapps or Sami), they presented their declaration which stated, in part, “Forgive us Israel as a Nation for the Oslo Agreement, dividing up Eretz, Israel. For the money from Norway that is ending up supporting terrorist organizations. For not moving the embassy from Tel Aviv to Israel’s eternal undivided capital, Jerusalem. For not standing up to defend Israel in a world with increasing hostility. For the anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist attitude from politicians and the media in Norway.”</p>
<p>Another section of the declaration read: “Forgive us Israel, as a Church, for not standing up more clearly to stop Norwegian anti-Israel political attitude. For the fact that great parts of the Church has rejected Israel’s role in God’s plan. For the lukewarmness towards the persecution that you have suffered. For the indifference towards you as God’s chosen people. And, for allowing replacement theology to spread in the churches.”</p>
<p>This was followed by: “Forgive us Israel, as a Nation, for the strong forces, and the loud voices that demands a boycott of Israel on all levels. For our constitution that hindered Jews to enter the Kingdom of Norway up to 1851. For sending Jews out of Norway into Nazi death camps during WWII, and for not allowing Jews into Norway after WWII.  For neglecting to give Israel credit/honor for its contribution towards the benefit of humanity. Without Israel’s efforts, our hospitals would not function as they do today; neither would our computers or cellphones. As a nation, we have made alliances with forces that want to destroy the nation of Israel. We want, as spiritual leaders in Norway, to break these alliances.”</p>
<p>Although advancing Israel’s position among Europeans seems like a losing proposition, it would be a mistake for friends of Israel to give up on Europe. There are elements in European societies, particularly those made up of fair-minded people, and those with biblical roots who, with some cultivation, might rally on behalf of the Jewish State. If elements of the Mennonite Church and some Norwegian Christians can change direction and express support for Israel, so could others across Europe and the US.  Dr. Zvi Shtauber, a retired Brigadier General in the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) put it this way, “Israel is a small country and we don’t have many resources. Yet we must invest heavily in expanding the <a href="http://www.jcpa.org/israel-europe/ier-shtauber-05.htm">dialogue</a> with Europe. We must spend more time on contacts with various groups including opinion leaders and students. We must consider Europe almost in the same category as the US.”</p>
<p>Stand With Us (SWU), a Los Angeles based non-profit organization engaged in Israel education, reported on November 29, 2013 that a French Court imposed a <a href="http://www.standwithus.com/news/article.asp?id=2088">$1,300 fine</a> on members of an anti-Israel group who called on a supermarket to boycott Israeli products.” SWU/UK subsequently arranged a conference in central London, at which 120 pro-Israel Christian, Muslim and Jewish students attended. Among the speakers were Israel’s ambassador to the UK Daniel Taub and British MP Louise Mensch. The daylong conference focused on effective advocacy for Israel, and the building of coalitions to get the message across.</p>
<p>In their eagerness to promote the Palestinians as the “victims du jour,” the BBC and other European and American media outlets have maligned Israel unfairly and in the process laid the groundwork for renewed anti-Semitism. This has helped to obscure the vast reservoir of Christian goodwill and support towards the Jewish State. The case of the Amish and Norwegian delegations visit to Israel suggest that hope is still a reality.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/joseph-puder/christian-goodwill-toward-the-jewish-state/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>49</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Insane Asylum Seekers</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-bawer/insane-asylum-seekers/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=insane-asylum-seekers</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-bawer/insane-asylum-seekers/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 06 Dec 2013 05:20:09 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Bawer]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[cuisine]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[food]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Middle East]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Norway]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=212498</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Food "racism" in Norway against refugees? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Worth-a-journey-148.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-212499" alt="Worth-a-journey-148" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Worth-a-journey-148-450x338.jpg" width="315" height="237" /></a>We hear relatively often these days about the large and growing Muslim communities in major European cities. Less frequently a subject of media attention in the U.S., however, is an equally significant phenomenon: the asylum centers that dot the landscape in many countries. In Norway alone, with a total population of only five million, there are a hundred or so such establishments around the country, some of them in largish cities, some in rural hamlets. In these centers reside individuals of foreign origin, mostly from the Muslim world, who are awaiting decisions about their applications for asylum. The places aren&#8217;t locked. (Those who humbly propose locking them are routinely depicted by the political and cultural elite as inhuman bigots.) Consequently, they serve for many of their residents as handy bases from which they can venture out and plunder the locals. They are, in other words, Ground Zeroes for criminality. It should also be pointed out that many, if not most, of the people living in them have no legitimate right to asylum at all.</p>
<p>On Wednesday, November 27, a group of men who live in the Hvalsmoen asylum center on the outskirts of Hønefoss, a town in the southeastern Norwegian municipality of Ringerike, staged a <a href="http://www.fyret.nu/2013/12/02/asylsokere-demonstrerte-mot-darlig-mat-far-stotte-av-auf/">protest</a> <a href="http://www.vg.no/nyheter/innenriks/artikkel.php?artid=10140643">against</a> what they considered lousy meals and small portions in the cafeteria. The protesters, who numbered somewhere between 25 and 30 and hail from Syria, Sudan, Iran, Morocco, Somalia, and the Palestinian territories, vandalized their blue food trays, scrawling “Hungry strik” (which isn&#8217;t correct in any language) and “Nei rasisme” on them (picture <a href="http://www.fyret.nu/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/sultestreiker_019__5202324a.jpg">here</a>), and marched into downtown Hønefoss, crying racism.</p>
<p>“We&#8217;re fleeing the war, not the food!” one asylum seeker complained – his point apparently being that the Norwegian government should provide them with the kind of Middle Eastern cuisine that they&#8217;re accustomed to. Another fellow maintained that some of his fellow residents are “doctors, engineers, and teachers” – <i>his </i>point apparently being that gentlemen of such accomplishment deserve far finer fare. “We know our rights!” he added. (<a href="http://www.fyret.nu/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/0031065846_5204783a.jpg">Here&#8217;s</a> a picture of some of the men in the asylum-center cafeteria. Just wondering: which one do <i>you </i>think is the doctor?)</p>
<p>When confronted with these complaints, the head of the Hvalsmoen plant, Tove Brorson, pointed that the asylum used to be a military facility, and that the cook was serving the men exactly the same food, in exactly the same size portions, that used to be presented to the soldiers. Brorson also rejected the charge that the food was bad. It&#8217;s ordinary Norwegian food, she said. “It&#8217;s not about bad food, but about culinary culture.”</p>
<p>The men&#8217;s complaints didn&#8217;t set well with many of the people of Ringerike, who, like other Norwegians, are already less than thrilled with the presence of these centers in their midst. (As <a href="http://www.ringblad.no/nyheter/article6960024.ece">reported</a> early last month, a number of residents of the center in Hønefoss have been caught stealing merchandise – mostly beer – from the nearest supermarket. I was curious to know whether these crimes have been punished at all, but Brorson did not reply to my e-mails.) Several readers who posted comments at the website of the <i>Romerikes Blad</i> newspaper suggested that if the men don&#8217;t like Norwegian food, they&#8217;re welcome to leave the country. “Send the  parasites home,” wrote one. “No,” replied another. “Throw them in the sea.” A reporter asked some of the asylum seekers if, in fact, they&#8217;d prefer to go back to where they&#8217;d come from. They answered with a firm no – though none of them, to judge from the account I read, showed the slightest hint of gratitude to Norway for taking them in. “Would <i>you </i>stay or go if there were a war here?” one of them shot back in reply to the reporter&#8217;s query. Another said, “I don&#8217;t like having to be in this cold country, but I&#8217;m wanted [yes, as in wanted by the cops] back home.”</p>
<p>On Thursday, the men <a href="http://www.ringblad.no/nyheter/article7012148.ece">claimed</a> to have won their fight for more and better food, pronouncing themselves satisfied with the dinner they were served that evening: three chicken thighs apiece, plus boiled potatoes and salad, and the opportunity to get seconds. “Everything is different today,” one of the men declared. “Nonsense,” said Brorson, pointing out that the dinner was exactly what had already been listed on the weekly menu. Meanwhile a girl from Tanzania and a man from Somalia attested that the food at the center was fine and always had been.</p>
<p>Although their neighbors in Hønefoss weren&#8217;t thrilled with the asylum seekers&#8217; protest, the demonstrators did receive outspoken <a href="http://www.ringblad.no/nyheter/article7017745.ece">support</a> from one local political leader – Jørn-Inge Frøshaug, the head of the regional chapter of the Workers&#8217; Youth League, the junior division of the Norwegian Labor Party. Frøshaug expressed anger at the people of Ringerike who&#8217;d been turned off by the food protest, calling their remarks “shocking and frightening” and accusing them of being “hateful.” They had displayed, in his view, a “fundamental attitude toward people in flight that is utterly reprehensible. I&#8217;m unbelievably disgusted.” He said he had a message for them: “Get a grip on yourselves!”</p>
<p>After all, asked Frøshaug, “what if it were nursing-home residents who were demonstrating against the food? I&#8217;m sure people here would&#8217;ve sung a different tune then. Or a child-care facility?” He attributed the Norwegians&#8217; reactions to fear and ignorance, and wondered aloud: “Why do some Norwegians need to denigrate asylum seekers who are fleeing war and persecution? Is it about a need to say &#8216;don&#8217;t come here and complain&#8217;? Given that complaining is maybe the most Norwegian thing there is, it seems to me like successful integration.”</p>
<p>Well, well. Frøshaug is just a kid, but he&#8217;s plainly been very well trained and seems to be well on the road to being a proper Scandinavian socialist leader. He already views the voters not as his potential employers, whose opinions he should respect and take seriously, but as his potential subjects, who should either fall into line and echo the official ideology or shut up and obey orders. His remark about “complaining” is especially telling: during the recent election campaign, when it was pretty clear for a long time that the socialists, who have been in power for eight years, were headed for defeat, some of them got exasperated enough on occasion to gripe that there were too many complainers out there who just didn&#8217;t appreciate everything that the Labor-led coalition had done for them.</p>
<p>On the contrary: far from being a country of complainers, Norway is a country where most of the people work hard, deal uncomplainingly with the harsh climate, accept with a quiet fatalism the curve balls that life throws them, grit their teeth as their government floods their land with imported practitioners of soft (and not-so-soft) jihad, and subsist, for the most part, on – yes – simple, hearty traditional dishes that are, apparently, not good enough for people who claim to be fleeing war and persecution in some of the poorest and most oppressed parts of the world. Frøshaug imagines old people at a Norwegian nursing home organizing a protest about the quality of their food – but anyone here could tell you that such a thing would be next to inconceivable. Norwegians, especially older Norwegians, would never think of doing such a thing.</p>
<p>By Friday the trouble at Hvalsmoen seemed to be over. But on Saturday morning came the <a href="http://www.ringblad.no/nyheter/article7015857.ece">news</a> that ten to fifteen residents had been involved a donnybrook. It had nothing to do with the food, apparently. Just one of those things – grown men throwing fists. The cops were called and put an end to it. Afterwards, the local police department tweeted: “The fight calmed down and both parties agreed to start the day by being friends&#8230;brotherly fellowship.” One can only hope that whoever tweeted that was being sarcastic.</p>
<p>So it goes. How depressing it is that while so many ordinary Norwegian citizens plainly have a very clear picture of what&#8217;s going on at these asylum centers – and of what it bodes for the future of their countries – their elected representatives seem not to grasp (or not to want to face the fact) that people who can be so arrogant, demanding, and belligerent even while their asylum applications are being scrutinized are probably not very likely to end up as peaceable, law-abiding, and productive citizens of Norway. Legitimate refugees don&#8217;t act this way; conquerors do.</p>
<p>For me, the most poignant reader comment on any of the news stories about this food flap was one that was posted by a young man who identified himself as Geir. “How did it get like this in Norway?” he asked. “I don&#8217;t get it. It wasn&#8217;t so bad when I was growing up in Oslo in the 1990s. What&#8217;s happening? It&#8217;s enough to make you go crazy.” Yes, it is. And what can make you go crazy even faster is that, thanks to the top-notch efforts of the schools and the media, somebody who grew up in Oslo in the 1990s can have reached adulthood without really understanding what&#8217;s been done to his country in his name.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-bawer/insane-asylum-seekers/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>35</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Victimized by Muslims? You Deserve It</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-bawer/victimized-by-muslims-you-deserve-it/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=victimized-by-muslims-you-deserve-it</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-bawer/victimized-by-muslims-you-deserve-it/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 06 Nov 2013 04:20:09 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Bawer]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Crime]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[deserve]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Muslim]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Norway]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Racism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[robbery]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=209751</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[What two Norwegian journalists concluded from their harrowing encounter with Islamic immigrants. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p dir="LTR"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Picture-4.png"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-209752" alt="Picture 4" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Picture-4-448x350.png" width="286" height="224" /></a>Late one night two years ago, only days before Christmas, two burglars wearing ski masks climbed through an open window into the Oslo home of Arild Opheim and Elin Ruhlin Gjuvsland. The noise they made woke Elin first. She saw a shadow through the bedroom door. Next thing she knew, the two intruders were on top of her and Arild, holding them down on the mattress and saying, in English, “Don&#8217;t look. Sleep. If look, we kill.”</p>
<p>The thugs tied up the couple – both of whom have worked for years as journalists and program hosts for NRK, the state TV and radio broadcasting system – and gathered up various items, including computers and telephones. Arild and Elin also handed over their bank cards and pin codes. The men were “very aggressive” – one of them struck Elin in the head with a blunt metal object. But they also attempted, as the couple <a href="http://www.dagbladet.no/2013/10/10/kultur/bok/litteratur/arild_opheim/elin_ruhlin_gjuvsland/29702131/" target="_blank">explained</a> last Friday on the TV talk show <em>Skavlan</em> and in a <em>Dagbladet</em> <a href="http://www.dagbladet.no/2013/11/01/kultur/kronikk/debatt/meninger/debattinnlegg/30099744/%20" target="_blank">op-ed</a>, to “win sympathy by telling their story.”</p>
<p>In a mixture of Spanish, Arabic, and broken English, they maintained that they “weren&#8217;t evil people” but were “in a desperate situation. They wanted to be able to reside and work and lead a normal life in Norway. But their asylum application had been rejected. Now they had no other choice than to rob us and to get money to return home.” In order to get back home “see their families,” they “needed 20,000 kroner” – about $4000. “They&#8217;d had a tough life, while Norwegians had it good.” Arild and Elin, said one of the crooks, deserved what they were getting.</p>
<p>(In fact, no rejected asylum seeker in Norway needs to rob anybody to get home. The Norwegian government pays all the expenses for such repatriation. And then some.)</p>
<p>Soon after the traumatic episode was over, both of the perpetrators were nabbed by cops. One of them, an 18-year-old Algerian who&#8217;d lived in Spain for several years, was sentenced to a year and seven months in jail and ordered to pay 60,169 kroner to Elin and 26,847 kroner to Arild. His confederate was arrested in Denmark and placed in a “youth prison,” from which he escaped; he&#8217;s now on the lam. As for Arild and Elin, the whole nightmarish experience made them, in their own words, “skittish and careful.” It caused them to think “ugly thoughts about immigrants.” Elin “couldn&#8217;t even stand hearing small children speaking Arabic.” Eventually they decided to write a book.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s now out, entitled <em><a href="http://www.kagge.no/?tmpl=butikk&amp;a=product_inline&amp;b_kid=1044807&amp;b_id=1208545" target="_blank">Uninvited Guests</a></em>. On Skavlan, they said that writing it was their salvation. For after that terrible night, you see, they were in peril – in peril of something far worse than just losing their lives. They were in peril, quite simply, of <em>viewing themselves, and being viewed by others, as racists</em>.</p>
<p>Racists! As Elin put it, she came dangerously close to buying the theory “that immigrants are just coming here to exploit us, that we have to make sure that there won&#8217;t want be too many of them, and that we&#8217;re going to be overpopulated with certain nationalities in fifty years.” She&#8217;d begun to worry that thanks to lax immigration policies, there was “going to be massive crime so that we&#8217;re not safe in our own city.” In short, she was on the brink: “I thought: &#8216;Damn it, is this going to turn me into a racist?&#8217;”</p>
<p>Pause for a moment and ponder that statement. “<em>I thought: &#8216;Damn it, is this going to turn me into a racist?</em>&#8216;” Note, especially, the implied definition of “racist” – namely, someone who has a realistic understanding of current criminal statistics, of reasonable demographic projections, and of the less-than-noble motivations of many “non-Western immigrants.”</p>
<p>But Arild and Elin&#8217;s story ends in victory. To be sure, Elin admits that she&#8217;s more scared now than before about her children&#8217;s everyday security. But, she affirms triumphantly, “we haven&#8217;t become racists.” <em>Au contraire</em>! Thanks to those men who climbed in their window, physically abused them, and threatened their lives, she and Arild have become first-class dhimmis. As they wrote in their op-ed, they now agree with what one of their uninvited guests told them:</p>
<blockquote><p>Yes, we are getting what we deserve&#8230;.We&#8217;re getting what we deserve because of Norway&#8217;s, and Europe&#8217;s, immigration policies. Because they&#8217;re too strict.</p></blockquote>
<p>Yep, you read that right: Europe&#8217;s immigration policies, which have transformed the continent in the blink of an eye, are “too strict.” Arild and Elin defend their thesis as follows:</p>
<blockquote><p>Why do people move? Why do emigration and immigration take place? It&#8217;s about dreams. They have a dream that life can be better in one way or another if they move – whether it&#8217;s from one neighborhood to another or from one continent to another.</p>
<p>Whether one moves from Norway to Spain because one is tired of the cold or whether one comes from North Africa to Europe in the hope of working a few years and saving money for a house in one&#8217;s homeland, it amounts to the same thing. It&#8217;s dreams that motivate us. It&#8217;s totally normal. We all have dreams of another and better life. Can there be anything criminal about that?</p></blockquote>
<p>Dreams! To put it briefly: a retired Norwegian couple who&#8217;ve worked hard all their lives and spent their savings to buy a co-op in Alicante – where they obey the law and contribute to the economy – are no different from Muslim “youths” who make their way to Norway with fake identity documents and set about bullying and tormenting the natives. They come , write Arild and Elin, “with a dream of a better life, for a period or permanently.” And what do Norwegians do?</p>
<blockquote><p>We stick them in an asylum center – which Progress Party politicians now want to lock up, like prisons. We treat dreamers as if they were thugs. And perhaps that makes it easier for them to actually become thugs? When we crush their dreams of residency and jobs, and force them into an illegal life on the street, perhaps we do get what we deserve when they turn to crime to survive. That was what the guys who robbed us said. Over time, we&#8217;ve come to understand what they meant.</p></blockquote>
<p>If they&#8217;re thugs, then, it&#8217;s <em>our</em> fault. They may rob or rape or kill us – but even as they&#8217;re doing so, we&#8217;re still the bad guys, and they&#8217;re still the real victims.</p>
<p>Such is the argument advanced by these two NRK journalists. It&#8217;s clear enough what happened here: Arild and Elin, in their urgent quest to avoid thinking of themselves as “racists,” grasped onto their intruder&#8217;s claim that he and his buddy would never have committed such an offense if their asylum applications hadn&#8217;t been rejected. This allows Arild and Elin to suggest that if only all asylum seekers were allowed in, such transgressions would be a thing of the past.</p>
<p>The tiny little problem with this proposition is that Arild and Elin&#8217;s rhetoric bears virtually no relationship to reality. Repeated horror stories coming from the asylum centers – where stabbings and riots are frequent occurrences – only serve to underscore the fact that we&#8217;re not speaking here about gentle souls driven to violence by cruel circumstance; rather, we&#8217;re speaking about a systematic, reckless endangerment of the Norwegian people by authorities who share Arild and Elin&#8217;s immunity to the facts about the people they&#8217;re importing into the country and planting, like bombs, in previously peacable rural villages. And the facts are very much on the side of those who argue for locked asylum centers and for sending rejected applicants back home at once.</p>
<p>In recent years, violent felonies by asylum seekers have become an outrageously disproportionate part of Norwegian life. One morning in 2004, on the same tram that my partner took to work every day at almost exactly that hour, a Somali man stabbed five people, killing one, 23-year-old Terje Mjåland (who, being deaf, may not have heard his fellow passengers&#8217; screams). Did he deserve it? Two years later, an asylum seeker from Algeria walked into the Oslo office of a remarkably kind, gentle doctor I knew, Stein Sjaastad, and stabbed him to death. Did he deserve it?</p>
<p>Arild and Elin have a proposal: “Why not open the borders and let them regulate themselves?” After all, they ask, what are international boundaries other than lines on a map that have been “constantly shifting all through history”? That being the case, how can we think we have the right “to refuse to let people cross the lines we have drawn around us?” Yes, they&#8217;re aware of Oslo&#8217;s current wave of robberies and burglaries (the overwhelming majority of which have been committed by “non-Western immigrants”), and they claim to understand the need to fight crime. But the most effective approach, they say, is to “fight the need to commit crime” by “helping the dreamers – illegal immigrants – who are standing helpless on the streets of Europe.” In other words, the solution to bloodthirsty lawlessness by non-Western immigrants is to bring in more of them. If Norwegians don&#8217;t do so, “we will only continue to get what we deserve.”</p>
<p>So ends Arild&#8217;s and Elin&#8217;s op-ed. Reading it online, I couldn&#8217;t wait to see the reader comments. Alas, at the bottom of the page I found this single sentence: “The comments section was clos ed on Saturday afternoon owing to several hateful and harassing posts.” Not only was it closed – the comments had been removed. Fortunately, the website <a href="http://document.no/" target="_blank">document.no</a> has <a href="https://www.document.no/2013/11/hatske-og-sjikanerende-innlegg-dom-selv/" target="_blank">reproduced</a> them. There are hundreds, maybe thousands. I read a few dozen. They&#8217;re not “hateful and harassing.” They&#8217;re the reactions of Norwegians who have their heads screwed on straight and who&#8217;ve had it with the likes of Arild and Elin, whom they describe, variously, as “naïve,” “warped and indoctrinated,” and fiercely determined “to be politically correct.”</p>
<p dir="LTR">Indeed. For my part, I&#8217;m grateful to Arild and Elin for providing this illuminating glimpse into the psychology of political correctness. They describe their burglars as desperate to get home. But it&#8217;s Arild and Elin who, after their awful experience, were desperate to get “back home” – back home, that is, to the comforting certainties of their PC ideology.</p>
<p>And they did. What a stirring triumph! Their ideology came smack up against reality – and yet they found a way to cling to it nonetheless.</p>
<p>I look forward to their commentary on the country&#8217;s latest atrocity. On Monday evening, a rejected asylum seeker from South Sudan <a href="http://www.nettavisen.no/nyheter/article3706388.ece?fb_comment_id=fbc_654828337894696_6880981_654839404560256" target="_blank">hijacked</a> a bus in western Norway and murdered three people. He was living in a nearby asylum center that had been in operation for just three months ago. If the Progress Party had had its way, the center would have been locked – but of course that would&#8217;ve been inhuman. If the locals had had their way, according to news reports, the center would never have been there in the first place: it was forced upon them by county officials, who considered their opposition xenophobic.</p>
<p>The murder victims were the bus driver, a Swedish passenger in his fifties, and a 19-year-old girl who was identified as <a href="http://www.vg.no/nyheter/innenriks/artikkel.php?artid=10144972" target="_blank">Margaret Molland Sanden,</a> a chemistry and biotechnology student at the College of Oslo and Akershus whose <a href="https://www.facebook.com/margaret.sanden?fref=browse_search" target="_blank">Facebook</a> page shows that she was a fan of Bob Dylan and of 24. Three unfortunate deaths, undoubtedly. But, after all, they got what they deserved. Right?</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-bawer/victimized-by-muslims-you-deserve-it/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>261</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Who&#8217;s the Real Iron Lady of Norway?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-bawer/whos-the-real-iron-lady-of-norway/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=whos-the-real-iron-lady-of-norway</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-bawer/whos-the-real-iron-lady-of-norway/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 31 Oct 2013 04:30:22 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Bawer]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Conservative]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Free-market]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Margaret Thatcher]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Norway]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Socialist]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=209088</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A battle of philosophies. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Erna-Solberg-and-Siv-Jens-010.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-209174" alt="Erna Solberg and Siv Jensen" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Erna-Solberg-and-Siv-Jens-010.jpg" width="255" height="193" /></a>As Norway&#8217;s non-socialist coalition government has been settling in, I&#8217;ve been poking around in <i>New Wind over Norway, </i>an assemblage of sixteen essays “about freedom and responsibility” edited by Hanne Nabintu Herland, a historian of religion, and written by some of the country&#8217;s more prominent non-socialist voices, including the heads of the two governing parties, Erna Solberg (Conservative) and Siv Jensen (Progress Party). Writing in <a href="http://www.aftenposten.no/meninger/kommentarer/Idbris-fra-hoyre-7225796.html#.Um8SEBCeZpM"><i>Aftenposten</i></a><i>, </i>Knut Olav Åmås – who after the installation of the  new government on October 16 left his job as that newspaper&#8217;s opinion editor to accept an appointment in the Ministry of Culture – described the book as “an expression of the ideological mobilization that has taken place on the right in recent years, especially around the think tank Civita and the journal Minerva, but also in Christian conservative circles.”</p>
<p>Ideological mobilization or not, it&#8217;s not every day one reads a Norwegian book in which (among much else) leftist groupthink is condemned, the EU is called “morally confused,” America&#8217;s “pluralistic melting pot” and “American values” are celebrated, and writers like Tocqueville, Hayek, John Stuart Mill – and even Ann Coulter and Mark Levin (!) – are quoted respectfully. How cheering to read a Norwegian author (Herland, in this case) who actually recognizes how absurd it is that many Norwegian cabinet ministers “have never had an ordinary job but nonethless direct policy in sectors they have little or no education in or practical knowledge of.” What a pleasure to see a professor from the University of Oslo casting a critical eye on the Norwegian political class&#8217;s obsession with minimizing economic differences – and, by extension, with encouraging sameness and uniformity across the board. How remarkable to find a Norwegian writer who dares to suggest that socialists view freedom as “the right to take part in the development of socialist society” and that they regard their ideological opponents as “obstacles on the road to utopia.”</p>
<p>The book is quite a smorgasbord. Position papers by the two party leaders – about which more presently – are followed by a series of “ideological reflections” in which <i>Minerva </i>editor Nils August Andresen wonders what Edmund Burke would make of today&#8217;s Europe, veteran Conservative politician Lars Roar Langslet calls for efforts to improve students&#8217; Norwegian language skills and preserve Norway&#8217;s artistic heritage, Asle Toje of the Nobel Institute sums up the post-Soviet history of European socialism, and Torbjørn Røe Isaksen, the new head of the Ministry of Education, contrast socialist utopianism with the need for pragmatism. “Politics,” he writes, “is where the world of ideas meets reality&#8230;.One ignores reality at one&#8217;s own risk.” (Such a proposition may seem self-evident, but not necessarily in the world of Scandinavian politics.) There&#8217;s a section on religion, consisting of a long, sweeping overview of Western Christianity by Herland and several shorter essays – it wouldn&#8217;t be too far off to call them sermons – in which theologians and pastors hail the enduring significance of Norway&#8217;s religious heritage.</p>
<p>Although there&#8217;s quite a degree of ideological variety here, there&#8217;s also plenty of overlap. In the political pieces, we&#8217;re told more than once about our debts to John Locke and Edmund Burke; in the sermons, we hear repeatedly about <i>laïcité </i>and about rendering under Caesar, etc. While there&#8217;s a good deal here that&#8217;s of genuine value, moreover, there&#8217;s more than a bit too much abstraction and generalization. And there&#8217;s a pronounced lack of bite, with some of the writers apparently reluctant to take on anybody by name. We&#8217;re reminded frequently that several of Herland&#8217;s contributors are politicians: Isakson, for example, in classic Conservative Party style, seems to try to have it both ways on immigration, reciting the tired mantra that Norway has been culturally enriched by its newcomers but adding that he wants tighter rules, and saying that integration “doesn&#8217;t work well enough, but much of it works well.” (Which, of course, can mean anything you want it to.) It&#8217;s the last part of the book – about the challenges posed by the influx of non-Westerners into Europe – that has some real edge. In a stirring philippic, Hege Storhaug deplores the death threats against Islam&#8217;s critics in Europe and the vituperation directed against them by politicians and the media. Hallgrim Berg denounces the lingering, toxic impact of Sixties radicalism on European democracy. And Iranian-Norwegian author Walid al-Kubaisi, in the book&#8217;s most personal (and only emotionally moving) essay, mounts a strong argument that Norwegian nationalism is not necessarily a bad thing.</p>
<p>Perhaps the most striking thing about Herland&#8217;s collection, however, is the contrast between the two opening essays by Solberg and Jensen, which reflect – and provide a vivid capsule lesson in – the contrast between the two parties that make up Norway&#8217;s governing coalition. Solberg, the Conservative leader, has barely finished clearing her throat before she&#8217;s telling us about her recent visit to a Ahmadiyya mosque, whose members, she writes, “experience peace because they&#8217;re Muslims, but&#8230;also find that it&#8217;s difficult to be accepted in society because they make some choices based on their faith, just by following the commandments they believe in.” Balderdash. In fact, Norway is a refuge for Ahmadiyya Muslims, who are oppressed, persecuted, beaten, and even executed throughout much of the Islamic world, where they&#8217;re considered infidels. But that reality doesn&#8217;t fit into the phony picture Solberg wants to paint of innocent Muslims being denied social acceptance by bigoted Norwegians.</p>
<p>That aside, exactly which Islamic “choices” and “commandments”  is Solberg standing up for here? Female subordination? Forced marriage? Female genital mutilation? The stoning to death of adulterers, apostates, gays? Solberg insists that Norwegians must “respect” Islamic belief – if they don&#8217;t, she maintains, Norway will fail in its “family policies” and in its integration efforts. What, exactly, is she trying to say here? What&#8217;s her logic? What is she calling for? She doesn&#8217;t explain anything. And she can&#8217;t, because it&#8217;s all just empty, feel-good, head-in-the-sand rhetoric – in other words, vintage Solberg. She&#8217;s always dealt with the challenge of Islam by turning the truth on its head – by turning inside-out the fact that Islamic family values are utterly <i>incompatible</i> with real integration and that if one seriously wishes to integrate Muslims into a free society, the first step is to dismiss entirely the idea of “respecting” the tenets of their faith. This is, one is reminded, the woman who, in 2004, as Minister of Integration, welcomed a Pakistani Muslim leader to Norway by bowing to him with one hand on her chest – a gesture which, as she plainly knew, betokened female submission.</p>
<p>While Solberg&#8217;s essay is painfully toothless, Jensen&#8217;s is a call to arms. In her second sentence, in italics, she declares that her party is engaged in a struggle for values. “People who flee the Islamist regime in Iran,” she pronounces, “do not flee to Norway to encounter that negative culture here, too. It&#8217;s that negative culture that they&#8217;re fleeing from!” Also: “People who come here and want religious freedom&#8230;must also tolerate the fact that along with their right to practice their religion comes the right to criticize religion. People with Christian beliefs have had to accept this, and people of other faiths must do so as well. That&#8217;s how it is here in this country, and that&#8217;s how it will stay.” Unlike Solberg, Jensen tackles head-on the Muslim leaders in Norway who spread conspiracies about Jews and who refuse to reject the death penalty for gays. Perusing her essay, you&#8217;d scarcely know she was talking about the same country as the bland, sanguine Solberg, for whom the only Islam-related problem in Norway, one would assume from her essay, is anti-Muslim prejudice. Jensen is, moreover, terrific on Israel, individualism, and the free market; she approvingly quotes Ronald Reagan&#8217;s observation, in his farewell speech, that “&#8217;We the People&#8217; are the driver; the government is the car.”</p>
<p>I happened to read this book at a time when I&#8217;ve also been making my way through the one-volume edition of Margaret Thatcher&#8217;s memoirs. It&#8217;s impossible not to notice that the contrast between Jensen and Solberg bears more than a passing resemblance to that between Thatcher and the timid Tory establishment in the period before she came to power. On one issue after another, Thatcher&#8217;s party colleagues were reluctant to assert first principles, loath to articulate a vision, content for their party to be a somewhat milder version of Labour – just as Norway&#8217;s Conservatives today basically stand, more or less, for socialism lite. While her fellow Tories supported <i>détente</i>, Thatcher, whose “gut instinct was that this was one of those soothing foreign terms which conceal an ugly reality that plain English would expose” (isn&#8217;t that a wonderful line?), felt that “too many people in the West had been lulled into believing that their way of life was secure, when it was in fact under mortal threat”; while in the wake of Enoch Powell&#8217;s sensational 1968 “Rivers of Blood” speech about the perils of immigration “it had been the mark of civilized high-mindedness among right-of-centre politicians to avoid speaking about immigration and race at all, and if that did not prove possible, then to do so in terms borrowed from the left of the political spectrum, relishing the &#8216;multi-cultural,&#8217; &#8216;multi-racial&#8217; nature of British society,” Thatcher refused to snobbishly dismiss the concerns of hard-working citizens whose lives were being transformed by radical sociocultural changes that didn&#8217;t affect upper-crust Tory suburbanites at all.</p>
<p>Most politicians in the Norwegian parties (other than the Progress Party) that are generally deemed non-socialists exhibit this same deplorable tendency to echo leftist and multicultural formulas – it&#8217;s this go-along, get-along attitude that has made them acceptable to the left. What has set the Progress Party apart from the beginning – and exposed it to the very same kind of patronizing criticism and ridicule, from both left <i>and</i> right, to which Thatcher was subjected throughout her career – is its stubborn, uncompromising belief in the same things Thatcher believed in: namely, individual freedom and the free market. Solberg and Jensen are both formidable women, and over the years both of them have been likened, sometimes by admirers and sometimes by detractors, to Lady Thatcher; but there&#8217;s no doubt in my mind which of these two leaders is Norway&#8217;s real Iron Lady.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-bawer/whos-the-real-iron-lady-of-norway/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>6</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Muslims Gang Rape 12-Year-Old Norwegian Girl, Get Community Service</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/muslims-gang-rape-12-year-old-norwegian-girl-get-community-service/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=muslims-gang-rape-12-year-old-norwegian-girl-get-community-service</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/muslims-gang-rape-12-year-old-norwegian-girl-get-community-service/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 18 Oct 2013 18:36:47 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Immigration Jihad]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Norway]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Rape Jihad]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=207883</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Norway is now officially Pakistan.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Sharia-zone-4X3.gif"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-207885" alt="Sharia-zone-4X3" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Sharia-zone-4X3.gif" width="375" height="281" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://blazingcatfur.blogspot.com/2013/10/muslim-immigrants-get-community-service.html">These types of Saudi sentences</a> <a href="http://themuslimissue.wordpress.com/2013/10/16/muslim-immigrants-get-community-service-for-gang-rape-of-12-year-old-in-norway/">seem to be going around</a>.</p>
<p>In June, the <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/6-muslims-sentenced-to-community-service-for-gang-rape-of-15-year-old-swedish-girl/">Muslim rapists of a 15-year-old girl </a>were sentenced to community service in Sweden.</p>
<p>Yesterday I discussed the case of a Muslim Anti-Israel activist who <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/muslim-activist-who-accused-israel-of-sex-crimes-raped-15-year-old-girl-1/">was sentenced to community service for the rape </a>of a 15-year-old Israeli girl.</p>
<p>And now we get the same thing in Norway, except this <a href="http://themuslimissue.wordpress.com/2013/10/16/muslim-immigrants-get-community-service-for-gang-rape-of-12-year-old-in-norway/">time it&#8217;s a 12-year-old Norwegian</a> girl.</p>
<blockquote><p>A 12 year old girl from Namsos, Norway, was gang raped twice by four Muslim immigrants aged 15 to 18. All four perpetrator confessed, and argued that the twelve year old victim consented. The victim was gang raped on an elementary school playground.</p>
<p>The thugs were convicted of aggravated rape, but prosecutor Kaja Strandjord only asked the court for community service for the perpetrators!</p>
<p>The four monsters were collectively ordered to pay a fine. Three of the perps were also given community service.</p>
<p>One of the perpetrators was also convicted of raping another thirteen year old victim. He was only ordered to pay a fine for that rape.</p></blockquote>
<p>What exactly is behind this pattern of First World countries acting like Saudi Arabia or Pakistan?</p>
<p>Obviously there&#8217;s an effort not to make waves and upset the Muslim settlers. There is, at the same time, a general contempt for their character by the authorities who expect nothing better of them, while insisting that they are oppressed and need understanding.</p>
<p>This is the familiar creepy liberal dichotomy of the Noble Savage.</p>
<p>And finally, when a crime becomes frequent enough, enforcement often drops and it becomes semi-legal since there&#8217;s no use fighting it.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.nrk.no/trondelag/tiltalt-for-overgrep-mot-12-aring-1.10916986">News stories on the subject out</a> of Norway provide some pattern for this insanity. Part of it is juvenile justice system that provides a free pass to anyone under 18. Europeans frequently criticize the US for trying juveniles as adults. But here are the consequences of their approach. One of the Muslim rapists claimed he did not understand that it was a crime. The others blamed the girl for seducing them.</p>
<blockquote><p>The defenders of the other rapists  asked for mildest possible punishment, believing the prosecutor&#8217;s claim of a high number of hours of community sentences are too strict in this matter.</p></blockquote>
<p>Norway is now officially Pakistan.</p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/muslims-gang-rape-12-year-old-norwegian-girl-get-community-service/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>147</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>The Billionaire and the Terrorist</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-bawer/the-billionaire-and-the-terrorist/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-billionaire-and-the-terrorist</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-bawer/the-billionaire-and-the-terrorist/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 02 Sep 2013 04:05:09 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Bawer]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Conservative]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Election]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Immigration]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Norway]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Progress Party]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=202569</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Two Norwegian celebrities cast their votes.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Picture-51.png"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-202853" alt="Picture 5" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Picture-51.png" width="224" height="184" /></a>On September 9, Norwegians will vote either to keep the government in the hands of a socialist coalition led by Labor Party Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg or to turn the reins over to non-socialists.</p>
<p>The campaign has drawn an unusual degree of international media attention. I wrote the other day about <i>Time </i>Magazine&#8217;s report, with its shameless leftist slant. But though <i>Time </i>was particularly egregious, some other foreign media haven&#8217;t been much better, depicting Stoltenberg &amp; co. as a veritable Round Table of heroic knights (and ladies) and demonizing the classical-liberal Progress Party as a pack of fascists who, if handed power, will poison everything they touch.</p>
<p>Last week, for example, the Norwegian media gave prominent coverage to a hysterical warning by Richard Horton, editor of the <i>Lancet, </i>the British medical journal, that a socialist loss on September 9 might cause a world health crisis. Under the valiant Stoltenberg, you see, tiny Norway has become a &#8220;global health&#8230;superpower,&#8221; spreading largesse all over the planet and, in particular, donating more dough to the GAVI Alliance, an international health organization run by former Norwegian Labor Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland, than any other nation except Britain and France. Horton&#8217;s article was a timely reminder that in recent years, while Norwegian hospitals have been forced to get by with increasingly antiquated equipment and Norwegians with serious health problems have been compelled to wait on line for months or even years to get urgently necessary tests and treatments, Labor Party leaders have been using taxpayer money to turn themselves into global players.</p>
<p>Horton wasn&#8217;t the only public figure, however, to weigh in on the election last week. As it happens, two of Norway&#8217;s most famous men also publicly declared their sympathies.</p>
<p>One of them was ninety-year-old Olav Thon, a real-estate developer and hotel magnate who is Norway&#8217;s second richest citizen and biggest taxpayer. A self-made man, he&#8217;s admired by many Norwegians for his down-to-earth image: his 2008 biography was titled <i>Billionaire in an Anorak, </i>reflecting the fact that his characteristic attire is not only modest but just this side of hobo. Thon maintains a flat in one of his hotels in downtown Oslo, and I&#8217;ve lost track of how many times I&#8217;ve seen him walking home down an icy sidewalk, laden with bags of groceries, the snow blowing in his face, a cheap-looking skicap pulled down over his head.</p>
<p>But he&#8217;s not just a charming old fellow who believes in self-sufficiency and refuses to put on airs. He&#8217;s a patriot who cares about his country&#8217;s well-being &#8212; and a canny businessman who knows how economies work. In a nation where almost everyone who&#8217;s given a soapbox is a cheerleader for the socialist status quo, Thon is an outspoken critic of socialism who once called Norway &#8220;the last Soviet state.&#8221; A couple of months ago he commented publicly on the armies of drug dealers, gypsy beggars, and Nigerian prostitutes that dominate central Oslo, describing the spectacle as &#8221;an exceptionally bad advertisement for Norway,&#8221; and complaining that his own efforts to turn the neighborhood around (and alleviate the capital&#8217;s housing crisis) have been squelched by city fathers who are more interested in preserving rundown old buildings than in revitalizing an urban area on the skids. It was a classic confrontation between the kind of left-wing thinking that destroyed Detroit and the kind of good sense that has made other cities thrive.</p>
<p>Last Tuesday, Thon ran a full-page ad in several national and local newspapers announcing that he&#8217;ll be voting for the Progress Party. It wasn&#8217;t a bombastic manifesto and it didn&#8217;t read as if he&#8217;d gotten one of his people to write it for him. No, it was brief, plainspoken, to the point &#8211; and clearly from the heart. In seven bullet points, he expressed support for the Progress Party&#8217;s desire to dismantle government bureaucracies, to introduce a &#8220;sustainable immigration policy,&#8221; and to encourage personal initiative rather than reliance on welfare.</p>
<p>The ad made headlines: it&#8217;s not every day a Norwegian in the public eye admits to voting for the Progress Party. Do so, and you&#8217;ll be branded a far-right bigot. (Voting Communist is OK; voting for the Progress Party, whose heroes are Reagan and Thatcher, is not.) Not that it came as a terribly huge surprise: last October Thon declared on TV that the socialist government had failed, that he&#8217;d like to see the Progress Party finally get a chance to show its stuff, and that he felt sorry for all the young people in Norway who &#8211; taking advantage of the Labor Party&#8217;s generous welfare entitlements &#8211; spend their lives on the dole instead of working, because, he said, they&#8217;ll never know what it feels like to see a dream fulfilled. (You don&#8217;t hear this kind of language too often in the Norwegian media.)</p>
<p>Thon&#8217;s announcement ruffled a lot of establishment feathers. In response to a threatened boycott of his hotels by farmers, Thon said it was unfortunate that in a democratic country one has to be prepared for reprisals if one makes public the fact that one isn&#8217;t<i> </i>voting for Communists. The Rødt (Communist) Party answered Thon&#8217;s ad with its own ad in the Communist daily <i>Klassekampen, </i>in which four Thon hotel chambermaids tell Thon that &#8221;our sweat has made you rich.&#8221; And a close friend of Stoltenberg&#8217;s launched a personal attack on Thon, calling him &#8221;selfish&#8221; for supporting the Progress Party. (The socialists routinely represent the choice between statism and freedom as one between solidarity and selfishness.) Thon took the attack philosophically, saying that this kind of dictatorial bullying will only intensify voter antipathy for the socialists.</p>
<p>There&#8217;s only so much you can do to ruin a billionaire, but it&#8217;s easy to punish an ordinary public employee who dares to criticize the current Norwegian regime. In a country where it&#8217;s almost impossible to be fired from any job (especially with the government), a cop who&#8217;s also an active Progress Party member called Stoltenberg a creep on Facebook and (according to media reports on Sunday) was summarily dismissed from the police force on the grounds that he failed &#8221;to show loyalty to his <i>foresatte&#8221;</i> &#8211; the latter being a word that&#8217;s usually used to refer to a child&#8217;s guardians.</p>
<p>The other famous man who announced his political preferences last week was Mullah Krekar &#8211; Norway&#8217;s most celebrated resident terrorist and chief symbol of Muslim victimhood for the more misguided members of the nation&#8217;s cultural elite. Since coming to Norway as a refugee in 1991, Krekar has openly acknowledged that he&#8217;s at war with Western civilization, declared his admiration for Osama bin Laden, been named an active Al-Qaeda supporter by the UN, written his own autobiography, and warned that people will pay with their lives if he&#8217;s expelled from Norway. At present, he&#8217;s serving a five-year prison sentence for threatening to kill Conservative Party leader Erna Solberg. But since Norwegian law is concerned more with shielding terrorists than with protecting potential terror targets, efforts to ship him back to Iraq have consistently failed. (Last year, amid reports that he&#8217;d soon be returning to Iraq of his own volition, I bid him <i>adieu </i>here. But he stayed.)</p>
<p>The other day, from his cell, Krekar wrote a letter to Norwegian Muslims in which he began by rejecting the claim that it&#8217;s un-Islamic for Muslims to participate in elections in non-Muslim countries. On the contrary, he insisted that Muslim voters are obligated under the Koran (specifically, verse 38 of sura 74) to cast their ballots for &#8221;whatever is least harmful for Islam and Muslims.&#8221; Reminding his co-religionists that what matters is &#8221;the teachings of Islam and the aspiration to restore Islamic rule and Sharia sovereignty,&#8221; he expressed the belief that the Muslim <i>umma, </i>which for the last century and a half has been suffering as a result of civilizational conflict, will in the next 25 years &#8220;produce something new for humanity.&#8221; And given that Muslims in Norway aren&#8217;t yet so numerous or so much in agreement that they can manage to form a party or to make common demands upon the politicians, he maintained that it&#8217;s best  &#8212; for now &#8212; &#8221;to vote for Labor, the Socialist Left, and the Red Party.&#8221; Why? Well, partly because Stoltenberg, unlike the non-socialists, isn&#8217;t &#8221;a blind follower&#8221; of U.S. foreign policy. And partly because &#8220;the left-wing parties come closer to Muslims&#8217; views.&#8221;</p>
<p>Like Thon&#8217;s support of the Progress Party, Krekar&#8217;s thumbs-up for the left didn&#8217;t come as much of a surprise. Krekar, noted <i>VG, </i>wouldn&#8217;t still be living in Norway if it weren&#8217;t for the socialists&#8217; asylum policies; as the Progress Party&#8217;s Per Sandberg put it, Krekar understands &#8221;that a vote for the Labor Party is a vote to keep him in Norway,&#8221; because the socialists &#8221;will never forcibly return him [to Iraq].&#8221; Meanwhile, one of Krekar&#8217;s lawyers told TV2 that many Muslim voters will indubitably heed his advice when they head to the polls, because &#8220;Krekar is an authority in his community and enjoys great respect.&#8221;</p>
<p>Officially, the Labor Party distanced itself from Krekar&#8217;s endorsement; yet it knows there&#8217;s plenty of potential Labor votes in the Muslim community and hasn&#8217;t been shy about soliciting them. Last week, for example, aspiring young Labor politician Eskil Pedersen, the openly gay former head of the Workers&#8217; Youth League (the Party&#8217;s junior varsity team, as it were), gave a speech at a mosque in which he urged Muslims to exercise their franchise. Pedersen is, it should be noted, the latest in an ever-growing list of openly gay Norwegian politicians to cheerfully encourage adherents of Islam &#8211; a religion that, of course, calls for the execution of gays &#8211; to do their utmost to bend the country to their will.</p>
<p>Anyway, there you have it. The choice facing Norwegian voters on September 9 was already a clear one. But the personal statements of Olav Thon and Mullah Krekar &#8211; and the reactions thereto &#8211; have, I think it&#8217;s fair to say, helped to illuminate the whole business in an exceedingly useful way.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-bawer/the-billionaire-and-the-terrorist/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>17</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Socialists on the Campaign Trail</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-bawer/socialists-on-the-campaign-trail/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=socialists-on-the-campaign-trail</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-bawer/socialists-on-the-campaign-trail/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 15 Aug 2013 04:12:45 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Bawer]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Conservative]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Election]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Immigration]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[labor]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Media]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Norway]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Socialist]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=200647</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[It's election season in Norway.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/14.si_.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-200679" alt="14.si" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/14.si_-450x333.jpg" width="270" height="200" /></a>It&#8217;s election time in Norway, and one way to get through the endless round of speeches and debates is to view it all as a refresher course in Scandinavian socialist thought. In a debate last Monday, Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg of the Labor Party – whose “red-green” (socialist/environmentalist) coalition government, now in its eighth year, is expected to lose in the September 9 election to its “blue” (nominally non-socialist) opponents, led by the relatively business-friendly but chronically socialism-enabling Conservatives – seemed less exercised about his country&#8217;s disastrous immigration policies, soaring crime rates (which are largely a result of those immigration policies), and long health-care waiting lists than about  the “growing differences” in Norwegian society.</p>
<p>He didn&#8217;t mean the kinds of differences that he and his fellow socialists hail as “diversity.” (See “disastrous immigration policies,” above.) No, he meant <i>economic </i>differences. You see, the <i>real </i>challenge is making sure people don&#8217;t get too<i> </i>rich – and any amount of trampling on individual liberties is permissible when the goal is economic parity. This is socialist thinking in a nutshell, and it brought to mind Margaret Thatcher&#8217;s famous <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdR7WW3XR9c">reply</a> to an opposition MP who lamented the widening gap between rich and poor: “He would rather the poor were poorer, provided the rich were less rich! That way you will never create the wealth for better social services!”</p>
<p>Thatcher&#8217;s lesson has yet to be learned by Jens and his fellow Scandinavian socialist technocrats, who are preoccupied with leveling everything out even as they strive to expand the welfare state <i>ad infinitum</i>. Their dream society, one gathers, would resemble the picture cosmologists paint of the universe at the end of time: cold and dead, with all matter evenly distributed down to the last atom. Pure entropy! What they ignore is that heterogeneity – economic and otherwise – helps breed the imagination, energy, and ambition that fuel a society&#8217;s economic growth.</p>
<p>Yes, thanks to oil wealth, and probably thanks also to Norwegians&#8217; native honesty and self-discipline, Norway has a strong economy at present; but mediocrity and conformity are all too often rewarded here, and entrepreneurship, innovation, and excellence punished. Only the Progress Party – long despised by the cultural elite (including its purported allies in the “blue” opposition) but now boasting the second-largest number of seats in Parliament – sings the praises of individual initiative, individual creativity, and individual rights. (Not to mention that it&#8217;s the only party that faces the facts about Islamic immigration.)</p>
<p>During the current campaign, Jens engaged in a cheesy stunt: he drove a cab in Oslo for a few hours, picking up passengers and making conversation. A video of this escapade has just been released as a <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBXV-LXzeig%20">Labor Party ad</a>. The chief aim, clearly, is to make Jens (a stiff technocrat whose parents were both Labor politicians) seem more down-to-earth – i.e., less <i>different</i>. The stunt was likely inspired by memories of the time, in 1973, when then King Olav rode an Oslo tram – thus winning the hearts of all Norway, where affection for the monarchy coexists with a distaste for explicit signs of class difference. (See <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Jante">Jante Law</a>.) But instead of successfully selling the idea of Jens as Regular Guy, the cab stunt – hatched by an ad agency – only reinforced his utter lack of the common touch. It also seemed to reflect a total unawareness that for most Oslo residents, taxis bring to mind two things, neither of which leads to warm thoughts about the Labor Party: (1) exorbitant fares (probably the world&#8217;s highest) and (2) Muslim drivers who rape passengers and spy on non-sharia-observant members of their community.</p>
<p>(Nor, surely, did the Labor folks realize their ad would prompt innumerable jokes to the effect that – for example – Jens is steering the nation in the wrong direction, that he&#8217;s taken everybody for a ride for eight years, that it&#8217;s time for him to hand over the wheel to his opponents, that it&#8217;s good to see him preparing for a new career, and that he&#8217;s finally acquired, at age 54, some private-sector experience.)</p>
<p>The point of the stunt, Jens claimed, was to hear voters&#8217; opinions. Why, then, is the ad disabled for comments and ratings on You Tube? Then there&#8217;s the not insignificant fact that Jens – whose bureaucracy-loving, regulation-happy party led the way in requiring extensive (and expensive) training, tests, and paperwork for even the least demanding of occupations – doesn&#8217;t have a license to drive a cab. And since (as he admitted) he hadn&#8217;t been behind a wheel in years, his driver&#8217;s license is no longer valid, either. His exemption from these rules only underscores his distance from ordinary citizens – and the hollowness of his ardent rhetoric about equality. As if all this weren&#8217;t enough to sink Jens&#8217;s stunt, it turned out that several of his passengers had been hired by a casting agency. The whole thing, in short, was a charade – and thus perfectly emblematic of the mendacity, and the consummate elite disconnection from most voters&#8217; real lives, concerns, and values, that underlie so much of the socialists&#8217; program, not least their immigration policy.</p>
<p>The Norwegian political system is so thoroughly based upon social-democratic premises that it always feels somewhat surprising – and is always refreshing – to hear Siv Jensen, head of the Progress Party and perhaps the closest thing in Europe today to Margaret Thatcher, speak out against those premises. On August 8, under the auspices of Litteraturhuset in Oslo, she gave a speech spelling out the commonsensical – but, in the Norwegian political arena, all but alien – ideas that form her party&#8217;s ideological foundation. It was, essentially, a half-hour course in Libertarianism 101 – a course that many young (and not-so-young) Norwegians, marinated in socialist ideals since they were in day care, desperately need to be exposed to.</p>
<p>“Individuals are more important than the system,” Siv said, describing her party (truthfully) as the only one in Norway that actually <i>criticizes</i> the system. Liberalism, she explained (referring to traditional American-style liberal democracy, as opposed to Scandinavian-style social democracy), is about “respect for the individual&#8217;s right to make decisions about his or her own life.” While other parties fight for power to make decisions on behalf of the people, she said, the Progress Party fights for the power of individuals to make decisions for themselves. Unleashing a blizzard of wildly un-PC references, she quoted Thatcher, Reagan, Hayek, Bastiat, Milton Friedman, and <i>Atlas Shrugged </i>(“my favorite book”); she spoke about returning power from the state to individuals and about encouraging competition, school choice, hospital choice, and lower taxes. What her party is about, she emphasized, is “<i>respect </i>for the fact that people are different.” Hearing such talk in a Norwegian political forum is as rare and beautiful as the sight of a blooming flower on an icy winter morning along the fjords.</p>
<p>At the other end of the Norwegian political spectrum is the Red Party, which calls for the nationalization of big, evil corporations and the fleecing of billionaires. Its leader&#8217;s <a href="https://www.facebook.com/b.moxnes">Facebook page</a> proudly proclaims: “We care about what counts, not what can be counted.” (Perhaps he doesn&#8217;t realize that Facebook is a big, evil corporation owned by a billionaire.) That leader, Bjørnar Moxnes, is young (born in 1981), attractive, well-spoken, charismatic – and a passionately committed Commie who, as part of his effort to stoke envy and hatred of the well-to-do, leads guided bus tours of the “super-rich” parts of west Oslo. (Last month <i>Aftenposten </i><a href="https://www.facebook.com/b.moxnes">revealed</a> that he himself lives in a $3 million beachside villa owned by his parents.) On August 12, in a speech at Litteraturhuset spelling out <i>his </i>party&#8217;s ideology, Moxnes articulated views that, while a smidge or two to the left of the political center here, are – unlike Siv Jensen&#8217;s enthusiasm for liberty and the free market – considered thoroughly mainstream, and respectable, within the Norwegian cultural elite.</p>
<p>The ingenious thing about Moxnes&#8217;s speech was the way he managed to turn the words <i>freedom, democracy, </i>and even <i>individualism </i>around to make them synonymous with socialist values. For example, he argued that “it is the individual who has the right to schools, to health care, to a pension&#8230;.And no society has done more for the liberation of the individual&#8230;than&#8230;the welfare state.” He took the obligatory swipe at the U.S., sneering that “the land of the free” isn&#8217;t really free, because it has no government-designated summer-vacation period and no right to paternity leave. Also, while acknowledging that the USSR and Mao&#8217;s China were “frightening” in certain respects, he suggested that both systems “had their strengths.”</p>
<p>Moxnes&#8217;s views would hardly be worth mentioning if the Red Party&#8217;s influence were measured only by its overall level of voter support, which is in the low single digits. But in the corridors of power, that figure is far higher. Fully 70% of the staffers at <i>Dagsavisen, </i>one of the four top national dailies, vote Red. A recent poll of Norwegian journalists showed that if they alone picked the Parliament, the Progress Party, which currently has 41 out of 169 seats, would have none, and the Reds, who have none, would have seven. (And those surveyed included local sportswriters and the like; you can bet your bottom dollar that the big-name, Oslo-based political reporters and columnists, including those at NRK, the all-powerful state-owned TV and radio broadcaster, lean even further to the left.)</p>
<p>I&#8217;ve long felt that if Norwegians were provided with more objective news coverage – and, especially, if the relentless stream of savagely dishonest anti-Progress Party propaganda dried up –  that party would take control of Parliament handily and Siv Jensen would become prime minister. A Progress Party official told friends the other day that when he talks to most Norwegians, their views line up very neatly with the Progress Party&#8217;s – but <i>they don&#8217;t realize it</i>, because the party&#8217;s powerful opponents in the media and in all<i> </i>the other parties have so systematically misrepresented its positions, many of them going so far as to compare it routinely to the Nazi Party or to Mussolini&#8217;s fascists. Lies, lies, and more lies: in such a way do the socialist elites retain their hold on power in a country where the ideological gulf between them and the decent, responsible-minded, and freedom-loving people they rule can seem as wide as the sea.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-bawer/socialists-on-the-campaign-trail/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>10</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>My Life as a Public Enemy</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/fjordman/my-life-as-a-public-enemy/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=my-life-as-a-public-enemy</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/fjordman/my-life-as-a-public-enemy/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 26 Jun 2013 04:15:17 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Fjordman]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Anders Behring Breivik]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[blog]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Fjordman]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Immigration]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Multiculturalism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Norway]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=194293</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Norway's national witch hunt against a dissenting voice. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/fjordman.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-194624" alt="fjordman" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/fjordman.jpg" width="239" height="179" /></a>I am currently completing a book about the Anders Behring Breivik case and how I got dragged into it against my will. The working title is <i>Witness to Madness</i>, with the subtitle<i> How I Became Public Enemy Number Two</i>. I was considering dropping the reference to being a “public enemy,” as it might be seen as hyperbole. Yet after the reactions I’ve received since the beginning of June 2013, this title actually seems warranted.</p>
<p>On Friday June 14, I announced on my Twitter account, in Norwegian, that I’d just been awarded a grant of 75,000 kroner to support the completion of my upcoming book about the Breivik case. This grant came from <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritt_Ord_%28organization%29#Fjordman_controversy">Fritt Ord</a>, which is Norway’s largest and most well-funded free speech organization by far.</p>
<p>I was quite happy to receive it, as it had not at all been certain that I would get it. The decision was bound to cause some controversy, given how controversial I am in Norway, but the mass media reactions once again exceeded anything I had truly expected. A full week after my tweet, the debate had still not died down. A Member of <a href="http://www.nrk.no/ytring/belonning-til-ekstremismen-1.11081545">Parliament</a> representing the ruling government coalition blasted the decision and me personally on the state broadcaster NRK. The crux of the debate is: Does freedom of speech apply even to truly loathsome creeps like Fjordman?</p>
<p>The controversy was mentioned in the other Scandinavian countries, too, for instance on Denmark’s public broadcaster <a href="http://www.dr.dk/Nyheder/Udland/2013/06/15/150959.htm">DR</a>, as well as in national newspapers in Sweden such as <a href="http://www.aftonbladet.se/kultur/article16966021.ab"><i>Aftonbladet</i></a> and <a href="http://www.expressen.se/nyheter/fjordman-skriver-bok-om-breivik/"><i>Expressen</i></a>.</p>
<p>The good news is that quite a few individuals have taken a principled stand in favor of free speech. The support that meant the most to me personally was that of the long-time publisher <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Nygaard#Failed_assassination">William Nygaard</a>. He was the Norwegian publisher of Salman Rushdie’s novel <i>The Satanic Verses</i> and was nearly killed outside his own home in Oslo in 1993. In other words, this is a man who has personally paid a price for doing what he does, and who probably also genuinely disagrees with many of the things that I write, but who nevertheless supports free speech as a matter of principle. He is also not alone in doing this, which is encouraging.</p>
<p>However, the reactions were a very mixed bag, sometimes bordering on the hysterical. Fritt Ord has previously supported the publishing of books by Communists who supported the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia, yet in my all but unique case, the chair of their board, the former Supreme Court Justice Georg Fredrik Rieber-Mohn, found it necessary to distance himself from me in public while at the same time giving me a grant.</p>
<p>Rieber-Mohn stated to the press that this was one of the most difficult decisions Fritt Ord has ever made, considering my allegedly “extreme” viewpoints, but they saw the value in letting me present my side of the story as well. He further stated that it would be of great value for society to have a debate about what Mr. Peder Jensen stands for, so “<a href="http://morgenbladet.no/samfunn/2013/ekstrem_tildeling">that</a> one gets him out into open terrain and that everybody who wants to attack him has the opportunity to do so.” That’s very thoughtful and considerate of Mr. Rieber-Mohn, who in statements to the mass media has repeatedly labeled my ideas and opinions as “<a href="http://www.dagbladet.no/2013/06/14/kultur/bok/litteratur/fjordman/innenriks/27711954/"><i>avskyelige</i></a>,” that is, abominable or loathsome.</p>
<p>Fjordman became a sort of all-purpose bogeyman in Norway, post-Breivik. A man named <a href="http://www.getthepartystarted.co/right-wing-extremism-in-norway-on-fjordman/">Daniel Kalvø</a> in June 2013 published an essay in English comparing me to a cancerous tumor. I’ve previously been compared to toxic waste or a plague epidemic, among many, many other colorful designations.</p>
<p>At the liberal conservative periodical <i>Minerva</i>, the writer Eirik Vatnøy has previously indicated that he is in favor of free speech. <a href="http://www.minervanett.no/den-farlige-retorikken/">Vatnøy</a> thinks that my essays should be taught in high school alongside Adolf Hitler’s autobiography <i>Mein Kampf</i>, so that young people learn to recognize evil when they see it.</p>
<p>The popular author Ingvar Ambjørnsen found it provocative that I had applied for a grant from Fritt Ord at all, but he <a href="http://www.dagsavisen.no/nyemeninger/alle_meninger/cat1003/subcat1018/thread273803/#post_273803">recalled</a> that <a href="http://www.aftenposten.no/kultur/litteratur/article1201314.ece">in 2006</a> they had supported the publishing of a Norwegian translation of the speeches of Osama bin Laden, so supporting me should presumably be OK, too. Yes, that Bin Laden, who led the terrorist network al-Qaida, responsible for the murder of thousands of people around the world in dozens of terror attacks, of which the ones in the USA on September 11, 2001 are simply the deadliest and most spectacular.</p>
<p>Eirik Vatnøy and Ingvar Ambjørnsen thus support freedom of speech even for incredibly evil people such as Adolf Hitler, Osama bin Laden or me. Which is good, I suppose.</p>
<p>As it turned out, the book by Osama bin Laden which Fritt Ord supported in 2006 did not cause too much controversy. When Fritt Ord decided to give financial support in a similar manner to my book in June 2013, all hell broke loose. This must presumably mean that I am more controversial in Norway than Osama bin Laden.</p>
<p>Several newspapers dedicated editorials specifically to the controversy surrounding my yet-unpublished book. The left-wing daily <i>Dagsavisen</i> declared that this support to publish a book by me was “<a href="http://www.dagsavisen.no/nyemeninger/alle_meninger/cat1000/subcat1029/thread277527/#post_277527">dangerous</a>.” Dangerous in what way, and to whom? The editorial reminded the readers that this was not the first time Fritt Ord had given support to persons with “radical views.” I initially thought they meant the Muslim terrorist Osama bin Laden, but the newspaper was referring to the Christian philosopher and author Nina Karin Monsen, who has criticized gay marriage.</p>
<p>It should be mentioned in this regard that <i>Dagsavisen</i> received more than <a href="http://www.journalisten.no/node/38455">41 million</a> kroner in direct press support in 2012 alone, sponsored by all of the country’s tax payers whether they want to or not. It’s one of the main reasons why the paper exists today. I’ve paid for this myself for years, against my will. Yet when a private organization decides to award a political opponent 75 thousand kroner in a one-time grant – 0.0018 times as much as they get from the state annually – they complain.</p>
<p>Rune Berglund <a href="http://www.antirasistisk-senter.no/sponsing-av-ekstremisme.5242643-98689.html">Steen</a> of the Norwegian Centre against Racism, which has received millions in state funding for many years and still does, was openly <a href="http://www.vg.no/nyheter/innenriks/22-juli/artikkel.php?artid=10104462">critical</a> of this decision by a privately funded organization to give me a grant, although that same organization has supported the Centre against Racism a number of times, too. The Centre got 75,000 kroner in support from Fritt Ord for various “anti-racist” projects in the month of <a href="http://www.fritt-ord.no/no/tildeling/mer/bevilgninger_i_mai_2013_sknader_om_kr_100_000_eller_mindre/">May 2013</a> alone, which is exactly as much as I got in June 2013. And this came on top of their millions in state support.</p>
<p>On June 18, 2013, the major national daily VG in Norway published a <a href="http://www.vg.no/nyheter/meninger/artikkel.php?artid=10111205">special editorial</a> entitled “VG believe: Our democracy can withstand Fjordman.” This opinion piece was unsigned, but the paper’s CEO and editor-in-chief is Torry Pedersen, and its political editor is Hanne Skartveit. The newspaper claimed that I do not share the fundamental values of our civilization but instead spread unfounded “hate” against Muslims. In essence, they virtually branded me a public enemy. Nevertheless, in the end the paper came out in favor of the decision by a private foundation to support the publishing of my book. VG gave this justification for their thinking:</p>
<p>“Our main argument in favor of supporting the monetary grant from Fritt Ord is that it illustrates the strength of the Norwegian democracy. A man who clearly despises our society and our values is applying for money to be able to continue denigrating this society. This money he will get, because we as a society are confident that we can meet this hate speech in an open terrain. Our democracy can withstand Fjordman, precisely because we have the strength to beat back hate speech and anti-human attitudes. With words as weapons.”</p>
<p>Please note that at the time this was published, my book wasn’t even fully written yet, let alone published, something which I had told the press. My intention is to have the manuscript for <i>Witness to Madness</i> completed by the end of this summer and hopefully have the book in circulation by late 2013, if that is practically possible.</p>
<p>Moreover, it was also known that I no longer live in Norway since I had to flee the country after being partly blamed for the terror attacks of July 22, 2011 carried out by Anders Behring Breivik, a person I have never once met. I have also not been a member of any political party throughout my adult life. So what this editorial in newspaper VG actually said is that the Norwegian democracy is strong enough to withstand a book that has not yet been published, written by a single individual with no criminal record who no longer lives in Norway. I suppose that’s good. Norwegian democracy must be really, really strong to withstand that kind of pressure.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/fjordman/my-life-as-a-public-enemy/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>97</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Muslim Riots and Leftist Willful Blindness</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/fjordman/muslim-riots-and-left-wing-nonsense/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=muslim-riots-and-left-wing-nonsense</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/fjordman/muslim-riots-and-left-wing-nonsense/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 10 Jun 2013 04:23:54 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Fjordman]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Immigration]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Muslim]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Norway]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[riots]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Stockholm]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Sweden]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=192534</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The train wreck of mass Islamic immigration in Europe -- and the mass denial about it.  ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Stockholm-riots-Sweden-008.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-192536" alt="Stockholm riots Sweden" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Stockholm-riots-Sweden-008.jpg" width="288" height="191" /></a>The <a href="http://www.thelocal.se/48130/">May 2013 riots</a> in certain immigrant-dominated suburbs of Stockholm raised eyebrows abroad. While I found them disturbing I cannot say that I was totally surprised by them. I’ve consistently <a href="http://fjordman.blogspot.com/2005/05/is-swedish-democracy-collapsing.html">warned agains</a>t such a likely outcome under this pen name for what is now nearly a decade.</p>
<p>The political elites not just in Sweden but also in neighboring Denmark, Finland and Norway watched nervously as the events unfolded. Clearly, major riots by immigrants no longer take place just in slightly more distant Paris or London, but now also in the largest city in the Nordic region. The problems are getting closer.</p>
<p>As usual, the comments from Denmark have tended to be the most sensible ones, with the newspaper <a href="http://jyllands-posten.dk/opinion/leder/ECE5518762/den-svenske-loegn/"><i>Jyllands-Posten</i></a> publishing an editorial about “<a href="http://gatesofvienna.net/2013/05/the-swedish-lie/">The Swedish Lie</a>”. The ethnologist Karl-Olov Arnsberg and the journalist Gunnar Sandelin in their book <i>Invandring och mörkläggning</i> (“Immigration and Cover-up”) describe sensitive facts about immigration which are hardly ever mentioned in the mainstream media in Sweden. Swedish mass media are quite possibly the most repressive, censored and totalitarian of any Western country, which is why some dissidents choose to write under pseudonyms such as “Julia Caesar” for websites abroad.</p>
<p>In Norway, the former soldier Aslak Fløgstad Nore is a journalist and author of <a href="http://www.aschehougagency.no/Authors/Aschehoug/Aschehoug-Fiction/Nore-Aslak-A-Norwegian-Spy">spy novels</a> who has for some unknown reason been hailed as a brave intellectual, telling truths others don’t dare to tell. One of his idols is Sweden’s <a href="http://www.dagbladet.no/2012/07/01/kultur/litteratur/bok/aslak_nore/krim/22381006/">Jan Guillou</a>, a far-Left activist and writer with pro-Islamic sympathies who, apart from being an author of spy thrillers, was paid multiple times by the KGB for providing them with sensitive information.</p>
<p>In addition to being an editor at Gyldendal, one of the largest publishing houses in Norway, Nore is a regular columnist at <i>VG</i>, the country’s largest national newspaper. On May 26 2013, Nore published a commentary in <a href="http://pluss.vg.no/2013/05/26/1236/1rxWku3"><i>VG</i></a> on the “enigmatic” Swedes after Stockholm had been rocked by a full week of riots on a scale unprecedented in modern Scandinavian history.</p>
<p>What were his views on the causes of these riots? Well, for one thing Nore assured us that they had little to do with Islam, despite the fact that even <a href="http://www.dagbladet.no/2013/05/20/nyheter/husby/stockholm/opptoyer/27267831/">left-wing</a> newspapers show video clips where shouts of “Allahu akbar”! may be heard from residents of these heavily Muslim-dominated suburbs when Swedish police officers are attacked.</p>
<p>Instead, Mr. Nore blamed the obligatory “racism” of the white natives, especially alleged police racism, for partly triggering the riots. Finally, he blamed the “Swedish class society” for these problems. Yes, really. Nore defines himself as a member of the political <a href="http://www.aftenposten.no/kultur/litteratur/article3287436.ece">Left</a> and is a Social Democrat, but his above-mentioned analysis is straightforward Marxism at its core. His father Kjartan Fløgstad is an established author influenced by Marxist ideology. <a href="http://pluss.vg.no/2013/05/26/1236/1rxWku3">Nore</a> didn’t foresee similar riots coming to Norway, although he admitted that the percentage of immigrants is actually higher in Oslo than it is in Stockholm.</p>
<p>Just to enlighten the ignorant Mr. Nore: Oslo has previously experienced major riots involving Muslim immigrants plus their left-wing extremist allies. I know, because I was there. In the very heart of the country’s capital city on January 8, 2009, a peaceful demonstration in support of Israel gathered in front of the Parliament (Stortinget). This triggered sizeable and very violent counter-demonstrations, broken windows and stone-throwing plus the mandatory shouts of “Allahu akbar!” Eventually, the police had to use large amounts of tear gas at the very doorsteps of the nation’s Parliament to disperse the thugs. Some Muslims afterwards walked around central Oslo looking for people they thought might be Jewish, so they could beat them up.</p>
<p>In the daily <i>Aftenposten</i>, their regular commentator Inger Anne Olsen, who <a href="http://www.aftenposten.no/meninger/kommentarer/Forsvar-for-en-rabiat-muslim-6755030.html">has earlier</a> stated in the same newspaper that hardline Muslims should of course have the right to work to overthrow our society and institute sharia laws, <a href="http://www.aftenposten.no/meninger/kommentarer/Svenske-tilstander-i-norske-gater-7211041.html">believed that</a> Oslo could experience similar riots in the future. She was happy, though, that unlike the police in Sweden (and virtually every other European country apart from Britain), the police in Norway are normally unarmed and therefore appear less threatening and provocative to criminal gangs. Her recommendation for how to avoid future riots was to engage in tough urban planning and build more housing districts.</p>
<p>Oslo is at the moment one of the fastest-growing cities in Europe, largely due to mass immigration. Some migrants come from European countries such as Poland, but a large proportion of them come from dysfunctional and economically backward non-Western nations. The ruling political and media elites take it for granted that this will continue indefinitely and that there is nothing the natives can or should do about it. Wave after wave of non-European immigrants will continue to pour across the weakly-controlled borders. They will not only be allowed to settle temporarily but will normally gain citizenship after a while and then continue fetching spouses and family members from their original homelands.</p>
<p>Oslo is the capital city of a country that straddles the Arctic Circle and gained its full independence in the early twentieth century when it had no colonies, yet Oslo already today contains more ethnic groups than there are member states of the United Nations. Questioning whether this is good or necessary is totally unacceptable in polite society, and could lose you not just your social standing but your job as well. Not only are the natives expected to continue funding their own colonization and ethnic dispossession; they are expected to actively celebrate their national destruction as a great and wonderful thing. This is true all over Western Europe.</p>
<p>Even after the riots in Sweden, few establishment commentators or parties asked whether one should perhaps reduce or – God forbid – stop immigration from the cultures that were largely responsible for these riots. It was taken for granted that immigration should continue as before. A new borderless world is being presented as the inevitable result of the flow of history, virtually beyond human control, just like a classless Communist world was once (falsely) viewed as “inevitable.” The remaining question is how much more money law-abiding white natives should give to these “socially disadvantaged youths” who are causing crime and burning cars or schools.</p>
<p>The political and media elites import Third World peoples en masse. When they start acting like Third World peoples, the ruling elites are always surprised and point fingers at the (rapidly dwindling) white majority population for supposedly causing this with their alleged “racism and social discrimination.” Their solution is nearly always to give more money to those who cause riot and mayhem, paid for by law-abiding citizens.</p>
<p>Libe Rieber-Mohn of the Labour Party, the Deputy Mayor of Oslo, was concerned that riots similar to those in Stockholm could happen at some point in the future in Oslo also due to “<a href="http://www.dagbladet.no/2013/05/27/nyheter/innenriks/politikk/arbeiderpartiet/opptoyer/27378589/">class</a> differences.” No mention of cultural differences, which might have been closer to the truth.</p>
<p>Norway has considerable wealth if the form of oil and natural gas offshore, in the North Sea and elsewhere. Yet several well-researched reports have been published over the years indicating that non-Western immigration is so extremely costly when all aspects are considered that it may take all of Norway’s oil wealth to fund it.</p>
<p>I once confronted John Olav Egeland, a political commentator in the left-wing daily <i>Dagbladet</i>, on Twitter and asked him whether his newspaper would apologize for having falsely claimed for decades that this mass immigration is “good for the economy,” a lie which has cost the country untold billions in unnecessary expenses. His answer was no. His newspaper viciously demonized individuals such as MP Øystein Hedstrøm from the Progress Party when they tried in the 1990s to raise the issue of how much immigration costs.</p>
<p>In a particularly ridiculous essay, the columnist Aslak Nore declared in November 2010 that “smart” immigrants from Pakistan, Turkey and Chechnya will be “<a href="http://aslak.vgb.no/2010/11/28/den-nye-oljen/">the new oil</a>” after Norway’s oil wells run dry. He seemed to imply that there is something wrong with the brains of the natives, since these are inadequate and need to be replaced by non-European ones. Of course, if you look into the taboo subject of genetic intelligence measured in mean IQ, saying that Pakistanis or Turks have “smarter” brains than northern Europeans is utter nonsense.</p>
<p>If that were the case, then why are they incapable of producing innovative economies? Furthermore, you can look at technological achievements, or the fact that a tiny Nordic country like Norway has produced more Nobel Prize winners than the entire Islamic world combined, including large countries such as Pakistan and Turkey.</p>
<p>In the spring of 2013, the business daily<i> Finansavisen </i>in Norway published a series of articles detailing just how costly the ongoing mass immigration is in simple monetary terms. In Denmark, the historian and author Morten Uhrskov Jensen published the 2012 book <a href="http://www.saxo.com/dk/indvandringens-pris_morten-uhrskov-jensen_haeftet_9788771370072"><i>Indvandringens pris</i></a> (“The Price of Immigration”) which shows the exact same pattern. It’s not just about Muslim immigration, although that is an extreme case due to the increased threat of terrorism and other issues, but essentially all mass immigration from backward non-European societies to developed Western countries. We see the same pattern with Mexicans in the USA, for instance. Plainly stated, Third World immigration is followed by Third World problems, rising crime and welfare costs combined with reduced competitiveness.</p>
<p>Aslak Nore thus uses the largest national newspaper in his country to publish utter nonsense without any basis in fact, coupled with Marxist-inspired gibberish about “class structure” and “racism.” It is for this reason that I once called him the Paris Hilton of Norwegian intellectual life. I kind of regret that comment in hindsight, as it’s a little unfair to Paris Hilton. She’s not that stupid.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/fjordman/muslim-riots-and-left-wing-nonsense/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>47</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Norway Loses $713,000 on Every Muslim Immigrant</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/norway-loses-713000-on-every-muslim-immigrant/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=norway-loses-713000-on-every-muslim-immigrant</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/norway-loses-713000-on-every-muslim-immigrant/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sat, 25 May 2013 15:41:13 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Immigration Jihad]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Immigration Policy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Norway]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=189477</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The government has spent as much on getting 33 000 non-western immigrants into work or studies within six years as the state's total spending on day care, school, education and research for the entire population]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/norway-islam.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-189478" alt="norway islam" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/norway-islam-444x350.jpg" width="444" height="350" /></a></p>
<p>What is the price of diversity? Aside from all the violence,it&#8217;s $713,740.30 per immigrant</p>
<blockquote><p>The newspaper has previously revealed that Norway loses 4.1 million kroner ($713,740.30) for each non-western immigrant coming into the country and that immigration has cost 70 billion kroner ($12,185,810,000) in seven years. On Wednesday the newspaper determined that the government spends 2 million kroner ($348,110) per newly arrived non-Western immigrant they get to work or study.</p></blockquote>
<p>And what is the Norwegian government getting for all its money?</p>
<blockquote><p>Nevertheless, according to figures from Statistics Norway (SSB) fewer and fewer start work or studies. Only half of the participants who completed the program in 2010 are doing something useful after two years of training in Norwegian, social studies and other subjects.</p></blockquote>
<p>Why should they bother when a generous welfare state awaits?</p>
<blockquote><p>Including social benefits and course fees, the state has spent a total of 56 billion kroner ($9,747,080,000) on training of 56 000 immigrants from 2004 to 2010.</p></blockquote>
<p>It would have been cheaper to pay them to go home.</p>
<blockquote><p>This also means that the government has spent 23 billion kroner ($5,743,815,000 on 23 000 people that are not doing something useful.</p>
<p>For comparison, the Ministry of Education&#8217;s budget this year of 55 billion ($9,574,565,000) before loan transactions. This means that the government has spent as much on getting 33 000 non-western immigrants into work or studies within six years as the state&#8217;s total spending on day care, school, education and research for the entire population of the state budget for 2013.&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p>Diversity. It&#8217;s bloody expensive.</p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/norway-loses-713000-on-every-muslim-immigrant/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>73</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Top Norwegian Prof: Critics of Mass Immigration Mentally Ill</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/fjordman/top-norwegian-prof-critics-of-mass-immigration-mentally-ill/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=top-norwegian-prof-critics-of-mass-immigration-mentally-ill</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/fjordman/top-norwegian-prof-critics-of-mass-immigration-mentally-ill/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 21 May 2013 04:05:05 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Fjordman]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Immigration]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[mass]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[mental illness]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Muslim]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Norway]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Per Fugelli]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=190114</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Suggests "curing" with anti-psychotic drugs in the drinking water. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/ubaydullah_1031805i.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-190155" alt="ubaydullah_1031805i" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/ubaydullah_1031805i-450x350.jpg" width="270" height="210" /></a>Per Fugelli is a physician, originally from Stavanger in western Norway, who has for years been a Professor of Social Medicine at the University of Oslo. He also enjoys a high media profile. Fritt Ord, Norway’s most important and well-funded free speech organization, decided to give the Freedom of Expression Prize for 2013, their highest distinction, to Fugelli “<a href="http://www.fritt-ord.no/en/hjem/mer/fritt_ords_pris_for_2013_gar_til_per_fugelli/">for</a> having given a voice to cancer patients.” He has been open about his struggle against this horrible disease and made a positive contribution in that regard, but in many other cases he’s been more preoccupied with harassing, threatening or bullying others who dare to use their freedom of speech.</p>
<p>Another person who has previously won the same award is <a href="http://www.fritt-ord.no/no/priser/category/fritt_ords_pris/">William Nygaard</a>, the Norwegian publisher of Salman Rushdie’s novel <i>The Satanic Verses</i>, who<i> </i>on the morning of 11 October 1993 was shot three times and nearly killed outside of his own home in Oslo. The percentage of Muslims in Norway at that point probably did not much exceed 1%. It was even less in Japan, where the translator of the same novel was murdered. Merely one percent or less of Islamic culture can thus be enough to get people killed for criticizing Islam. This should serve as a reminder of just how toxic Islam truly can be to any free society.</p>
<p>After it was announced in 2013 that he would receive this prestigious award for free speech, one newspaper asked Per Fugelli about who he would like to be stuck in an elevator with. He replied the politician Christian Tybring-Gjedde, so he could “<a href="http://www.dagsavisen.no/tema/navn-i-nyhetene/fugelli-ypper-til-brak/">beat him</a> up.” A funny and tolerant guy, Professor Fugelli. Tybring-Gjedde is an MP and a notable member of the right-wing Progress Party (Fremskrittspartiet). His party advocates lower taxes and is critical of certain aspects of mass immigration, although some of their voters feel that the party has gone soft over these issues after its current head Siv Jensen took over from long-time party leader Carl I. Hagen.</p>
<p>The left-wing activist Eivind Trædal published a major essay in the newspaper <i>Dagbladet </i>entitled “<a href="http://www.dagbladet.no/2011/11/28/kultur/debatt/kronikk/innvandring/trakassering/19194014/">junk people</a>” in which he singled out a number of named individuals for attacks, among them Tybring-Gjedde, the author Bruce Bawer, and me, for spreading “hate” against Islam and thereby creating a climate of hate which allegedly fostered Breivik.</p>
<p>Tybring-Gjedde had to take sick leave for a while in <a href="http://www.nrk.no/nyheter/norge/1.7903981">late 2011</a> due to repeated death threats against him. Members of the ruling Labour Party, including Eskil Pedersen, the leader of Labour’s youth league AUF, had accused individuals from the rival Progress Party of laying the groundwork for Anders Behring Breivik’s massacre by “<a href="http://www.nrk.no/nyheter/norge/1.7886748">misusing</a>“ freedom of speech to say negative things about mass immigration or Islamization.</p>
<p>Pedersen and a few others survived the Utøya massacre by escaping the island in a ferry, originally a military landing craft, which had room for many more people. This triggered critical remarks from some of the other survivors, among them Bjørn <a href="http://www.vg.no/nyheter/innenriks/22-juli/artikkel.php?artid=10065090">Ihler</a>. Eskil Pedersen believed that the country was under attack and did <a href="http://www.adressa.no/nyheter/terrorangrepet/article1670192.ece">not trust</a> any member of the police after he had escaped. He has stated that he thought this was a coup d’état involving the police and the armed forces, and claims that other AUF members thought the same.</p>
<p>Breivik did in fact show up at Utøya wearing a fake police uniform. Nevertheless, it is somewhat odd for the leader of the country’s largest political youth organization to say openly that he thought it was a coup d’état by the police against a youth summer camp. What is most thought-provoking, though, is that the same Eskil Pedersen just a few months earlier had tried to use the police to shut up people he happened to disagree with.</p>
<p>In May 2011 he pressed criminal charges against a Member of Parliament, Christian <a href="http://politisk.tv2.no/nyheter/auf-leder-nekter-a-si-unnskyld-til-tybring-gjedde/">Tybring-Gjedde</a> from the rival Progress Party, for “racism.” The case was soon dismissed. Tybring-Gjedde had stated that in the Grorud Valley in Oslo, which has one of the densest concentrations of immigrants in the country, blond girls have to dye their hair dark to avoid harassment, children are threatened with violence if they have pig meat in their lunch box and native boys risk being physically assaulted by immigrants who think they don’t get enough time on the local football team. These are merely truthful statements. In fact, reality is often much worse than this.</p>
<p>The reaction of Eskil Pedersen and others of his ilk to hearing that the natives no longer feel safe in parts of their own country due to the immigration policies supported by the ruling elites is to try to silence political opponents who speak truthfully about this. This betrays a totalitarian impulse.</p>
<p>After Breivik, Per Fugelli was among those who were most aggressive in blaming the Progress Party and its leader <a href="http://www.aftenposten.no/meninger/kronikker/Bygger-fiendebilder-6665503.html">Siv Jensen</a> indirectly, if not directly, for Breivik’s massacre, since they spread totally unfounded “<a href="http://www.dagbladet.no/2011/08/05/kultur/debatt/kronikk/fugelli/innvandring/17565158/">Islamophobia</a>” by pointing out problems related to Islamic culture and Muslim immigration. He has more than once made questionable associations with Nazi Germany against those who criticize Multiculturalism.</p>
<p>In May 2013, on the day when he was about to formally receive his Freedom of Expression Prize, Fugelli stated that people who worry about such things as crime related to Gypsy gangs or certain types of organized crime need <a href="http://www.dagsavisen.no/samfunn/ta-ansvar-ta-til-motmale/">a sedative</a> for their baseless “anxiety.” Professor Fugelli, a medical professional, recommended that politicians should take a Valium pill before they speak about issues related to immigration.</p>
<p>Obviously, once could assume that this was intended as some kind of joke on the good professor’s part. If it is, however, it’s not a terribly funny one, given that certain repressive regimes have considered those who oppose their ideology as “insane” individuals in desperate need of forced medical or psychiatric treatment. Just ask brave dissidents from the Soviet Union such as Vladimir Bukovsky.</p>
<p>It’s also not the first or only time that Mr. Fugelli has indicated, jokingly or otherwise, that individuals who disagree with his views should be treated medically for their alleged delusions, with or without their consent.</p>
<p>During the Multicultural craze of the 1990s, the Norwegian novelist Torgrim Eggen in an essay entitled “The psychotic racism” warned against the possibility of “race wars in the streets” as a result of mass immigration. This essay was available on the Internet as late as in 2007 and 2008 when I linked to it from <a href="http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/3576"><i>The Brussels Journal</i></a>, but it has since then conveniently gone missing. The solution to these problems was not to limit mass immigration but to limit criticism of it. According to Eggen, xenophobia and opposition to mass immigration should be viewed as a mental illness, and the solution to xenophobia “is that you should distribute medication to those who are seriously affected. I have discussed this with a professor of Social Medicine, Dr. Per Fugelli, and he liked the idea.” Fugelli had apparently suggested putting anti-psychotic drugs in the city’s drinking water.</p>
<p>This may sound too extreme to be meant seriously, but Fugelli has continued to chastise all those who are critical of mass immigration. Eggen warned that arguments about how ordinary people are concerned over mass immigration shouldn’t be accepted, because this could lead to Fascism: “One should be on one’s guard against people, especially politicians, who invoke xenophobia on behalf of others. And if certain people begin their reasoning with phrases such as ‘ordinary people feel that,’ one shouldn’t argue at all, one should hit [them].”</p>
<p>In May 2013 Fugelli was a participant on <i>Dagsnytt Atten</i>, one of the most important daily news magazines and debate forums on the state broadcaster NRK. In addition to radio, it is also broadcasted on TV. On May 13, 2013, when he had been specifically invited to talk about his free speech award, during a conversation with Anders Heger, an influential publisher in the publishing house Cappelen Damm, Fugelli indicated that those who want to deport foreign gypsies should themselves be arrested and thrown in jail.</p>
<p>The issue was not about killing or abusing anybody, but merely whether to send back newly-arrived foreign organized beggars who cause problems. Per Fugelli thus advocated that those who disagree with his views on how to deal with foreign beggars should be thrown in jail. He said this in plain words on the country’s largest media outlet when he was there specifically to talk about freedom of speech.</p>
<p>So the person who had recently won one of the country’s most prestigious free speech awards has publicly advocated that those who use their free speech in a manner which he disagrees with should be beaten up, medicated or thrown in jail.</p>
<p>In the autumn of 2011, the author Torgrim Eggen complained in the national newspaper <a href="http://www.vg.no/nyheter/meninger/artikkel.php?artid=10039602"><i>VG</i></a> that some people make rude or threatening comments about others, whose political views they happen not to share themselves. It’s nice that he is concerned about this issue, of course, but he forgot to say anything about whether or not we should hit people who point out the negative results of mass immigration.</p>
<p>In the spring of 2013, the journalists Kjell Erik Eilertsen and Ole Asbjørn Ness from the medium-sized business paper <i>Finansavisen</i>, owned by businessman Trygve Hegnar, <a href="http://www.hegnar.no/okonomi/article727633.ece">interviewed</a> young people of ethnic Norwegian background about how it’s really like for them to grow up in the Grorud Valley in inner-city Oslo. They told a tale of constant, daily humiliations and abuse, until many native families simply move away from the area.</p>
<p>The article met with <a href="http://www.rights.no/2013/05/enorm-respons-pa-innvandringens-bakside/">a storm</a> of reactions on two of the major dissident <a href="http://www.document.no/2013/04/nederlaget/">websites</a> in Norway and was translated <a href="http://gatesofvienna.net/2013/05/everything-you-have-learned-in-school-is-wrong/">to English</a> at the website Gates of Vienna, which the weekly newspaper <i>Morgenbladet</i> has charmingly defined as the “<a href="http://morgenbladet.no/leder/2012/fellesskapets_grenser">Gates</a> of Hell.” Yet the story largely met with silence from bigger media outlets. The state broadcaster NRK was at the same time busy inventing a positive and charming Multicultural version of this area.</p>
<p>My initial thought when reading about this was the deafening silence of “nice” people like Per Fugelli, or <a href="http://www.pi-news.net/category/gutmenschen/"><i>Gutmenschen</i></a> as the Germans call them. What is their reaction to this? Virtually nothing; they just turn their backs to these problems caused by their own policies and pretend they don’t exist. I am sure these abused young natives, who tell horrifying tales of being robbed, beaten up or called “white infidel whore” on a regular basis in what once was their country, would have been delighted to receive some backing from a self-appointed brave “humanitarian” such as Mr. Fugelli. Sadly, they received none.</p>
<p>Perhaps if they asked him, Professor Fugelli would explain to them that the assaults and abuse they experience are all imaginary and can be cured with some anti-psychotic drugs. And if that didn’t work, maybe he would smear them with “Nazi” accusations or threaten to beat them up. Per Fugelli represents the dark and hypocritical face of humanitarian Norway.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/fjordman/top-norwegian-prof-critics-of-mass-immigration-mentally-ill/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>13</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Norwegians: Outsiders in Their Own Country</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-bawer/norwegians-outsiders-in-their-own-country/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=norwegians-outsiders-in-their-own-country</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-bawer/norwegians-outsiders-in-their-own-country/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 06 May 2013 04:10:38 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Bawer]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Europe]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Immigration]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Norway]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Oslo]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[violence]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=188370</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[More and more European teenagers feel like oppressed minorities in their own communities. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/image-624-panoV9-cslo.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-188412" alt="FRANCE-POLITICS-ISLAM-WOMEN-RIGHTS" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/image-624-panoV9-cslo.jpg" width="290" height="198" /></a>It just keeps coming, the propaganda. A new wave every day. Poured out by ideologues determined to flood the truth – to drown it out – in wave after wave of lies.</span></p>
<p>“Norway isn&#8217;t becoming less Norwegian because it&#8217;s changing,” a  man named Salimi cheerfully reassured <a href="http://www.aftenposten.no/nyheter/iriks/--Norge-blir-ikke-mindre-norsk-av-a-forandre-seg-7186404.html%20"><i>Aftenposten</i></a><i> </i>the other day. Salimi – who came to Norway 37 years ago and was in on the founding of SOS Racism, the Anti-Racist Center, and various other enterprises and activities, including a well-known annual food festival in Oslo – described today&#8217;s Norway with enthusiasm as a place where immigrants and natives are gradually and peacefully adapting to one another, each embracing the new and mysterious aspects of each other&#8217;s cultures. Although “extremist Islam and Islamophobia” represent threats to these marvelous developments, noble and well-meaning Muslims, Christians, and Jews, working together on the basis of “shared universal values,” are striving with increasing success to forge a harmonious multicultural society founded on mutual respect and acceptance.</p>
<p>Blah, blah, blah.</p>
<p>Every now and then, to be sure, one of the major national newspapers will proffer a brief glimpse of reality. But more often, you have to look elsewhere for it. On April 27, it was the business newspaper <i>Finansavisen, </i>of all publications, that served up a tonic dose of the truth. Reading the <a href="http://www.hegnar.no/okonomi/article727633.ece">headline</a>, “Life as a Minority,” readers might have expected the usual sob-sister fantasy about how tough it is to be a Muslim in Scandinavia. But this article was something different. It was a searing portrait of the New Normal in Groruddalen, a huge stretch of East Oslo, where the “minority” in question is Norwegian.</p>
<p>The article was based on interviews by <i>Finansavisen</i>&#8216;s reporters, Kjell Erik Eilertsen and Ole Asbjørn Ness, with two teenagers, both ethnic Norwegians. Andreas (a pseudonym) is 16; Marius Sørvik is 19. In grade school, both boys&#8217; heads were stuffed with pretty words about intercultural understanding. Repeatedly, they were encouraged to be sensitive to their classmates with foreign backgrounds. Andreas: “All the teachers said it, the principal said it, that if you come into conflict with them, I was supposed to understand what a bad life they&#8217;d had, that they came from countries where there had been war. I thought he was kidding. It was the grandparents who had immigrated from Pakistan. If I hit someone, would nobody yell at me because my grandfather was in the Resistance? But I believed in it.”</p>
<p>Eventually, however, both boys realized that, as Marius puts it, “everything you&#8217;ve learned in school is wrong.” For Marius that day came in seventh grade, when seven or eight Somali boys jumped him on a tennis court and beat him to a pulp, knocking his teeth out. Afterwards Marius tried to hold his head up, but he could only take the constant fear for so long. He suffered a heart attack. The producers of <i>Our Valley, </i>an NRK documentary series about life in Groruddalen, interviewed him, but decided not to include him in the program, explaining that his “views” didn&#8217;t fit into their “concept.” (The series, as Eilertsen and Ness observe, is “government-financed propaganda” designed to cover up the reality of Groruddalen. Naturally, “views” such as Marius&#8217;s aren&#8217;t welcome.)</p>
<p>As for Andreas, it was his well-intentioned but deplorably naïve mother who decided to raise him in Groruddalen, so he&#8217;d “get to know the new Norway, to get acquainted with many different cultures.” That he did – mostly through schoolyard beatings. (“They&#8217;re a gang. They&#8217;re always a gang. They&#8217;re dogs. They hunt in packs.”) He was hit, but wasn&#8217;t permitted to hit back. At first he responded to the bullying by trying to fit in with the thugs – deliberately making simple grammatical mistakes, limiting his vocabulary, and behaving submissively. He even made a Muslim friend – who started trying to convert him. When Andreas resisted, and persisted in his resistance, his friend threatened to kill him. Seeing no other way of protecting himself, Andreas joined an ethnic Norwegian motorcycle club. “If I hadn&#8217;t known them, he&#8217;d have killed me,” Andreas says.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s a battle – and, as Marius points out, the battle isn&#8217;t a fair one. A Norwegian kid who finds himself in conflict with, say, a Pakistani kid, isn&#8217;t likely to have anyone on his side, whereas the Pakistani kid will have a whole clan of brothers, cousins, and uncles ready to turn violent on his behalf. Integration, Marius suggests, is a lie: none of these people wants to become Norwegian: “Norwegian is synonymous with weakness.” Nor can Norwegian kids count on support from their teachers or principals – <i>they&#8217;re</i> terrified, too, and they do everything they can to accommodate the Muslim kids to avoid trouble. Moreover, while Norwegian boys learn early on to keep their hands off Muslim girls, Muslim boys hit on Norwegian girls with impunity; indeed, “Norwegian girls prefer them&#8230;.they&#8217;re tough, and they have money even though they don&#8217;t have jobs.”</p>
<p>One way to avoid the constant warfare, of course, is to surrender: Marius alone knows five people who have converted to Islam.</p>
<p>Since “Life as a Minority” wasn&#8217;t published online, and since few people outside the business community read <i>Finansavisen, </i>the article might have come and gone without gaining widespread notice. But excerpts posted by bloggers attracted so much attention that <i>Finansavisen </i>ended up putting the whole text online last Friday. It goes without saying that readers weren&#8217;t drawn to the article because it told them anything new; on the contrary, they were drawn to it because they so rarely see the raw, fundamental truths of their own current lives reflected in the mainstream media – at least not without oodles of euphemism and herculean efforts to achieve “balance” and avoid “offense.”</p>
<p>Not everybody in Norway, to be sure, lives in the midst of the kind of hell that Andreas and Marius do. Certainly the people who call the shots in the media, producing pap like <i>Our Valley, </i>don&#8217;t reside in the neighborhoods, like Groruddalen, that they&#8217;re determined to idealize. They live in pleasant west Oslo districts, where they rub shoulders with their fellow makers of opinion – politicians, academics, and others who share their ardent devotion to multiculturalism but who, like them, don&#8217;t have to live with its consequences.</p>
<p>These multicultural elites may be cowards and reprobates, but they aren&#8217;t total fools. They have a pretty good idea of how challenging everyday life can be like for Norwegians, especially teenage males, in places like Groruddalen. They&#8217;ve seen the statistics demonstrating that while Muslims are settling in such areas in huge numbers, infidels are fleeing in droves. But, quite simply, they <i>don&#8217;t</i> <i>care</i> – not enough to change their stripes, anyway. After all, those aren&#8217;t <i>their </i>kids having their teeth knocked out of their heads and being made to feel like outsiders in their own country. (<i>Their </i>kids go to safe schools where they feel firmly in the majority.) The country&#8217;s leftist elites have a responsibility to kids like Andreas and Marius; but that responsibility is infinitely less important to them, alas, than their determination to keep alive their own beloved multicultural ideology. Never mind that it&#8217;s precisely that ideology that&#8217;s responsible for the nightmare that is Andreas&#8217;s and Marius&#8217;s world.</p>
<p>That&#8217;s the reprehensible bottom line here: to preserve the Big Lie of a magnificently multicultural Norway, the Norwegian elite is willing to fiercely deny the defining truths of such kids&#8217; lives. And in service to this cause, the mainstream media are a powerful weapon. The newspapers&#8217; readiness to echo official claims about immigrants and Islam is only enhanced by their eagerness to continue receiving official subsidies (<i>Finansavisen</i>, it should be noted, is one of the few sizable Norwegian newspapers that <i>don&#8217;t </i>get government handouts). And then there&#8217;s state-run NRK, which uses license fees squeezed out of the parents of young people like Andreas and Marius to create programs smearing the likes of them as liars and bigots, while depicting the savages who torment them as the innocent, virtuous objects of nativist prejudice.</p>
<p>Andreas says his grandfather was a member of the Resistance – a brave band of brothers who risked their lives to deliver Norway from the Nazi invaders. Can you imagine what that man would think if he could see what has happened to the nation he served – and to his grandson, who no longer even feels that that nation is his own?</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-bawer/norwegians-outsiders-in-their-own-country/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>86</slash:comments>
		</item>
	</channel>
</rss>

<!-- Performance optimized by W3 Total Cache. Learn more: http://www.w3-edge.com/wordpress-plugins/

Object Caching 1407/1499 objects using disk
Content Delivery Network via cdn.frontpagemag.com

 Served from: www.frontpagemag.com @ 2014-12-31 13:07:50 by W3 Total Cache -->