The Latest Dhimmi News From Norway

Fjordman has translated this article from today’s Vårt Land. Following the translation is his commentary.

Editor Vebjørn Selbekk of the small Norwegian Christian newspaper Magazinet was scheduled to sign books at a bookshop in Oslo this Saturday. Now the book signing has been cancelled because the bookshop fears terror attacks.

Selbekk is topical with his book Truet av islamister (Threatened by Islamists) about the conflict that followed after the newspaper Magazinet reprinted Jyllands-Posten’s cartoons of Muhammad. But now there won’t be any book signing event, for security reasons. “I’m disappointed. This is prostration in front of forces we should not give in to,” Selbekk says.

Svein Andersen, the head of his publishing company Genesis, has during his 23 years in the trade never experienced anything like this. “The head of the bookshop said she was worried about the security of the employees and the customers, and that she unfortunately had to cancel the event. This is outrageous and frightening,” Andersen says, who thinks this is a blow to freedom of speech. “If Islamists are allowed to decide which books should be published in Norway, cookbooks with recipes for fillet of pork will be banned,” he says.

Comments by Fjordman

And why not? A person who visits kindergartens to read fairy tales experienced that, in stories by Asbjørnsen and Moe — the Norwegian equivalent of the Brothers Grimm — the word pig had been replaced with fox. When she discovered the same thing happening in another kindergarten, she wondered whether this was a new policy. In Sweden previously, the wording of several older books for children such as Pippi Longstocking has been changed to make them more “culturally sensitive.”

Bruce Bawer, the author of the recent book While Europe Slept, describes on his blog how Velbjørn Selbekk, the editor of Magazinet, had firmly resisted pressure by Muslim extremists who made death threats and by the Norwegian establishment. But then Norway’s Minister of Labor and Social Inclusion Bjarne Håkon Hanssen hastily called a press conference at a major government office building in Oslo. There Selbekk issued an abject apology for reprinting the cartoons. At his side, accepting his act of contrition and asking that all threats now be withdrawn, was Mohammed Hamdan, head of Norway’s Islamic Council, accompanied by a number of imams. It was a picture right out of a sharia courtroom, with the Muslim leader declaring Selbekk to be henceforth under his protection.
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In a Friday sermon on February 3, 2006, Sheikh Yousef Al-Qaradhawi, the spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, exhorted worshippers to show rage to the world in response the cartoons depicting Muhammad. The sermon was aired on TV. The day after, the Danish and Norwegian embassies in Syria were set ablaze by an angry mob. A few days later, a delegation led by Mr. Mohammed Hamdan of Norway’s Islamic Council and a senior pastor representing Oslo’s bishop then visited Qatar to meet Mr. Qaradhawi. The trip recieved support from the Norwegian government. Yousef Al-Qaradhawi then accepted the apology that Velbjørn Selbekk had issued on February 10.

Walid al-Kubaisi, a Muslim dissident living in Norway, warned that Yousef Al-Qaradhawi was more dangerous and influential than Osama bin Laden, and that the Muslim Brotherhood, whose founder, Hassan al-Banna, Qaradhawi followed when he was young, want the West to submit to sharia. Al-Qaradhawi has boasted that “Islam will Return to Europe as a conqueror.” It should be mentioned that both Norway and Denmark are members of NATO, and that destroying an embassy is pretty close to an act of war.

In contrast to the Selbekk case, Mullah Krekar, the former leader of the Islamic terror group Ansar al-Islam, still lives in Norway, even though he has pretty much openly threatened the country with terror attacks, has called Osama bin Laden “the jewel of Islam” and bragged that Islam will conquer Europe. He has written a book about himself, which was published by a man called William Nygaard, who was shot at and almost killed in the early 90s for having published the Norwegian translation of Salman Rushdie’s book The Satanic Verses. A Norwegian NGO called the Freedom of Expression Fund supported the translation and publication of Osama bin Laden’s speeches.

Later in 2006, Minister Bjarne Håkon Hanssen from the Labor Party called for increased immigration to Norway from Pakistan because this wuld be good for the Norwegian society. The majority of Muslims in Norway voted for the Labor Party in the 2005 general elections, which the left-wing coalition won by a very slim margin. 83 percent of Muslims voted for Leftist parties.

There have been calls for translating Norway’s national anthem to Urdu because this would be good for integration. Kristin Halvorsen, the leader of the Socialist Left party, began her election campaign in the Pakistani countryside, and praised all the “blood, sweat and tears Pakistanis in Norway have spent on building the country.” She is now Norway’s Minister of Finance. The deputy leader of the Socialist Left party has stated that he wants to abolish private property rights.

Samira Munir, Norwegian politician of Pakistani origins and champion of the rights of Muslim women, later found dead at a suburban railway station outside Oslo in November 2005, claimed that there was widespread cooperation between the Socialist parties and the Muslim communities. “The heads of families and the mosques would decide how entire groups of immigrants would vote. They made deals such as ‘How much money will we get if we get our people to vote for you?’“

Trond Giske, Minister of Culture and Church Affairs from the Labor Party, met with Mohammed Hamdan, the head of Norway’s Islamic Council, a few months after the cartoons incident and announced that government subsidies for the Islamic Council would be raised from 60,000 kroner a year to half a million. That’s more than a 700% increase in a single year. The government would also meet more frequently with the Islamic Council to “improve dialogue.” Its leader Hamdan smiled after having talked with Mr. Giske for about one hour. “We’re pretty pleased with the meeting. For us it’s important to improve contacts with the government so that we can get to know each other better.”

Mohammed Hamdan participated during a meeting with members of the Palestinian terrorist organization Hamas at Stortinget, the Norwegian parliament, in the summer of 2006. According to him, he was only an interpreter, but his brother Osama Hamdan is a member of parliament for Hamas in the Palestinian Territories.

Meanwhile in Oslo, the number of rape charges during the summer of 2006 was more than twice as high as the year before. Both the authorities and the media have failed to give any explanation for this unprecedented rape wave, although they reported in 2001 that two out of three rape charges involved immigrant perps. Unni Wikan, a professor of social anthropology at the University of Oslo, in 2001 said that “Norwegian women must take their share of responsibility for these rapes” because Muslim men found their manner of dress provocative. The professor’s conclusion was that “Norwegian women must realize that we live in a Multicultural society and adapt themselves to it.”

I think Norwegians are adapting quite well so far.