The Norwegian Government Surrenders to Muslims

The noted blogger Fjordman is filing this report via Gates of Vienna. For a complete Fjordman blogography, see The Fjordman Files. There is also a multi-index listing here.


This weekend, Norway became first Western country to announce its recognition of the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority government. Norway was home to the original back-channel talks between left-wing Israeli politicians and the PLO which created the ill-fated Oslo Peace Process of the 1990s, and also awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to PLO-leader Yasser Arafat.

The decision to fund the Hamas-led government was accompanied by cheers from the media, including newspaper Aftenposten which praised this as a “wise” move. Aftenposten in 2006 published an essay by Jostein Gaarder, author of the bestselling book “Sophie’s World,” which called the Ten Commandments “amusing stone tablets” and said that Israel has “raped world recognition and will have no peace before it lays down its arms.” The essay was denounced as anti-Semitic by many observers, but also received significant support.

During the Cartoon Jihad in 2006, Bruce Bawer, the author of the book While Europe Slept, described how Velbjørn Selbekk, the editor of the tiny newspaper Magazinet, had firmly resisted pressure by Muslims who made death threats. But then Norway’s Minister of Labor and Social Inclusion Bjarne Håkon Hanssen hastily called a press conference at a government office building in Oslo. There Selbekk issued an abject apology for reprinting the Danish 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 At his side, accepting his act of contrition and asking that all threats now be withdrawn, was Mohammed Hamdan, head of Norway’s Islamic Council, accompanied by a number of imams. As Bawer commented, it was a picture right out of a sharia courtroom, with the Muslim leader declaring Selbekk to be henceforth under his protection.

In a Friday sermon on February 3, 2006, 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 following day, the Danish and Norwegian embassies in Syria were set ablaze by an angry mob. A few days later, a delegation led by Mohammed Hamdan of Norway’s Islamic Council and a senior pastor representing Oslo’s bishop visited Qatar to meet Mr. Qaradhawi. The trip recieved support from the Norwegian government. Qaradhawi 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 had followed when he was young, wants the West to submit to sharia. Kubaisi reacted strongly to the statement by Mr. Hamdan that he would now give Mr. Selbekk protection:

It frightens me that he presents himself as an authority that can grant or revoke protection. Does this mean that [Minister] Bjarne Håkon Hanssen thinks that the next time I feel threatened because of something I have written, I should contact the Islamic Council, not the police? Sadly, the government, in their eagerness to end the current troubles, have made the authoritarian forces stronger.

Kubaisi feared that Islamists would from now on just burn something every time they felt offended about anything, and expect to get their will.
- - - - - - - - - -
The status given to non-Muslim dhimmis who accept Islamic rule is technically referred to as “protected.” During the Cartoon Jihad, the left-wing government demonstrated in public that Norwegian authorities did not control the security of their citizens, and thus had to accept Muslim intervention to secure Norwegians’ safety. This amounted to the acceptance of Islamic rule according to sharia laws, a view which was subsequently strengthened by payments to Muslims both at home and abroad. Undoubtedly these payments were viewed by Muslims as jizya, the “protection money” non-Muslims are required to pay in willing submission (Koran, 9:29), as a sign of their inferior status vis-à-vis Islam.

Yusuf al-Qaradawi has boasted that “Islam will Return to Europe as a Conqueror.” The spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood was thus indirectly responsible for the attack on the Norwegian embassy; technically the attack could be interpeted as an act of war.

Hamas is by many viewed as the Palestinian branch of the MB. They even write this in their own charter. This means that the Norwegian government is now funding an organization that has caused physical attacks against their country. Admittedly, even the USA and Israel are doing so, too, but it is still embarrassing and worrying that Norway is part of this bribe scheme.

In the fall of 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. Eighty-three percent of Muslims voted for Leftist parties.

There have even 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 2005 in the Pakistani countryside, praising 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 party has announced that he wants to abolish private property rights. It is stated in the party’s programme that the United States constitutes the greatest threat to world peace. However, their calls to boycott Israel have had no affect on consumer attitudes.

Trond Giske, Minister of Culture and Church Affairs from the Labor Party, met with Mohammed Hamdan, the then head of Norway’s Islamic Council, a few months after the Cartoon Jihad and announced that government subsidies for the Islamic Council would be raised from sixty thousand kroner a year to half a million. That’s more than a seven hundred percent 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. Since the Norwegian government decided in March 2007 to continue sponsoring the Hamas-led government, this can hardly be viewed as anything but a total surrender to Islamic rule.

Muslims can spot a good dhimmi when they see one. In Bergen, Norway’s second largest city, Labor Party politician Jerad Abdelmajid threatened that Muslims would take their Friday prayers in Torgallmenningen, Bergen’s central public square. This threat occurred because Muslims would be temporarily without a mosque after March 31. Thus, if the authorities didn’t provide them with a interim mosque until the new one was finished, they would disrupt the community with public prayer meetings.

In contrast to the Selbekk case, Mullah Krekar, the former leader of the Islamic terror group Ansar al-Islam, still continues to be permitted to live 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.

Krekar has written a book about himself, which was published William Nygaard – a man who was dhimmified when he was shot and almost killed in the early 90s for having published the Norwegian translation of Salman Rushdie’s book The Satanic Verses.

It was recently confirmed that the posts I wrote on my blog two years ago about Muslim rapes were indeed accurate. I continue to maintain that the Norwegian Minister of Justice — if not the entire centre-right government — should have resigned in 2005, when this scandal came to light.

In September 2001, the newspaper Aftenposten published statistics from the city of Oslo showing that two thirds of those charged with rape in Norway’s capital were immigrants with a non-western background. This means that a majority of rapes in Oslo are committed by Muslim men. In addition, the total number of rape cases continues to rise.

The numbers published in 2001 were publicly discussed in at least two of Norway’s three largest newspapers: Aftenposten and Dagbladet. A leading member of the Liberal Party (Venstre), Odd Einar Dørum, demanded all the numbers be put on the table: “A scumbag is a scumbag, regardless of skin color.” A few weeks later, Mr. Dørum became Minister of Justice, a position he retained for the next four years. However, any mention of these statistics disappeared.

Last year, 2006, the number of rapes in the Norwegian capital Oslo was six times higher (per capita) than they were in New York City. Such statistics are likely to worsen, as New York City has become tougher on crime, and Oslo continues to silence any discussion of the imploding issue of safety for women in their city.

Dr. Jens Tomas Anfindsen, one of two editors of the bilingual website Honest Thinking, in 2007 revealed that there was a police report from 2005 that confirmed the trends from 2001. He talked to former Minister Dørum, who denied that the government had hushed it down. Yet as Mr Anfindsen pointed out, the report was met with total silence from both the political elites and the media that year.

Why?

In 2005, when the country was about to have national elections, I wrote that the country’s Minister of Justice knew that the huge spike in rapes was intimately linked to immigration. He denounced this cultural degradation before being elected, but once in power, this official did absolutely nothing about the problem. In fact, he refused to acknowledge that it even existed during his four years in office.

Normally this would have led to calls for his resignation, or that of the entire government of PM Bondevik. When this didn’t happen, I suspect it was because both the media and the left-wing opposition parties championed Multiculturalism and wanted to keep a lid on “delicate issues” related to immigration. In addition, the left-wing parties currently in office actively courted the Muslim vote – no doubt a decisive factor in their narrow victory that year.

Statistics showing that immigrants, especially from Muslim countries such as Iraq and Somalia, were behind two thirds of the rapes in Oslo were published again by newspaper Aftenposten in 2007. It is good that these numbers were finally published. Muslim violence in Western countries includes far more than just rape. The fact that it is actually being discussed in Norway, rather than silenced, is a positive turn of events. This willingness to address the real problems makes Norway one of the better countries when it comes to public dialogue.

However, why did newspapers Aftenposten and Dagbladet as well as other media, refuse to cite the police report in 2005? This omission may have decided the outcome of the elections. Yes, they did publish the reports in 2001 and 2007, but what motivated them to let the subject drop completely in 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005 or 2006. After all, the numbers of rapes grew to unprecedented heights year after year.

Is it a coincidence that they finally published the numbers again after I had written several articles denouncing their silence , and that Honest Thinking had just written about it as well? I don’t know the answers, but I’m entitled to ask them to explain their silence. And if our media withholds such information from us, what other kinds of information are they withholding?

It would be unfair to say that there is no opposition to these insane policies. Erna Solberg, the leader of Høyre, Norway’s conservative (with a very small “c”) party, is a dedicated Multiculturalist who has proposed the establishment of an officially sanctioned sharia council in Norway. However, a new book by a former member of Parliament for Høyre, Hallgrim Berg, warns against Islamic plans to turn Europe into Eurabia. He discusses the growing anti-Americanism in Europe and maintains the United States is the only power in the world capable of securing freedom.

In 2005 the police issued a mobile security alarm to leader of the right-wing Progress Party, Carl I. Hagen. Hagen had criticized Islam, and could see no similarity with the concept of morality and justice found in Christianity. He also said that if Israel loses in the Middle East, Europe will succumb to Islam next. He thinks that Christians should support Israel and oppose Islamic inroads into Europe. In an unprecedented step, a group of Muslim ambassadors to Norway blasted Carl I. Hagen in a letter. Other politicians quickly caved in and condemned Hagen, including then-Prime Minister Kjell Magne Bondevik of the Christian Democrats.

In 2007, the Progress Party, which is one of the most pro-Israeli and pro-American parties in Western Europe, is on the brink of replacing the Labor Party as the largest party in the country. Ordinary citizens have beomce disillusioned with Multiculturalism and Muslim immigration. However, as elsewhere in Europe, the established political, cultural and media elites are firmly behind these wrong-headed policies.

In 2001, Unni Wikan, a professor of social anthropology at the University of Oslo, told Dagbladet 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.”

Meanwhile, Trond Giske, Minister of Culture and Church Affairs and the same man who provided Norway’s Islamic Council with a seven hundred percent increase in funds after the Cartoon Jihad, announced that 2008 would be an official Diversity Year, dedicated to celebrating Multiculturalism and “cultural diversity” in all sectors of society.

The more the state ideology fails, the more the state promotes its doomed tenets in public propaganda campaigns. China’s Chairman Mao would have been proud of Norwegian authorities.

I’m not, but then I am an ignorant Islamophobe.