But what I think is worthy of note is how much the Norwegian establishment - the academics, the politicians, the media - turned toward the Islamic position in recent years, and embraced their anti-semitism under the thin guise of anti-Zionism.
Note recent headlines in the Norweigen media, especially via their version of the New York Times:
Aftenposten: ‘Rich Jews Threaten Obama’
Nice. And here's a Jerusalem Post interview with Bruce Bawer, described as an American literary critic, writer and poet and a sharp critic of European anti-Semitism and radical Islam:
What is contemporary Norwegian anti- Semitism? What is propagating post-Holocaust hatred of Israel and Jews in Norway?
It’s a phenomenon of a sort that I never encountered in all my years in the US, and that I once thought had been banished to the dustbin of history. It’s most virulent among the cultural elite – the academics, intellectuals, writers, journalists, politicians, and technocrats.
They’re overwhelmingly on the left, and intensely hostile to the West, to capitalism, to the US and to Israel. Before the fall of the USSR, an extraordinary percentage of them were Communists. They have replaced their affinity to the Soviet Union with sympathy for the great totalitarian ideology of our time: Islamism. Thus they romanticize Palestinians and despise Israel.
Part of the motivation for this anti-Semitism is the influx into Norway in recent decades of masses of Muslims from Pakistan, Iraq, Somalia and elsewhere. Multiculturalism has taught Norway’s cultural elite to take an uncritical, even obsequious, posture toward every aspect of Muslim culture and belief. When Muslim leaders rant against Israel and the Jews, the reflexive response of the multiculturalist elite is to join them in their rantings. This is called solidarity.
Norwegian history also plays a role in all this. Anti-Semitism has a long, deeply-rooted history here....
Perhaps the academic left in Norway is the worst. Alan Dershowitz writes of his recent experiences in the WSJ:
I recently completed a tour of Norwegian universities, where I spoke about international law as applied to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But the tour nearly never happened.
Its sponsor, a Norwegian pro-Israel group, offered to have me lecture without any charge to the three major universities. Norwegian universities generally jump at any opportunity to invite lecturers from elsewhere.
My hosts expected, therefore, that their offer to have me present a different academic perspective on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would be eagerly accepted. I have written half a dozen books on the subject presenting a centrist view in support of the two-state solution. But the universities refused.
The dean of the law faculty at Bergen University said he would be "honored" to have me present a lecture "on the O.J. Simpson case," as long as I was willing to promise not to mention Israel. An administrator at the Trondheim school said that Israel was too "controversial."
The University of Oslo simply said "no" without offering an excuse. That led one journalist to wonder whether the Norwegian universities believe that I am "not entirely house-trained."
Only once before have I been prevented from lecturing at universities in a country. The other country was Apartheid South Africa...
t was then that I realized why all this happened. At all of the Norwegian universities, there have been efforts to enact academic and cultural boycotts of Jewish Israeli academics. This boycott is directed against Israel's "occupation" of Palestinian land—but the occupation that the boycott supporters have in mind is not of the West Bank but rather of Israel itself. Here is the first line of their petition: "Since 1948 the state of Israel has occupied Palestinian land . . ."
The administrations of the universities have refused to go along with this form of collective punishment of all Israeli academics, so the formal demand for a boycott failed. But in practice it exists. Jewish pro-Israel speakers are subject to a de facto boycott.
The first boycott signatory was Trond Adresen, a professor at Trondheim. About Jews, he has written: "There is something immensely self-satisfied and self-centered at the tribal mentality that is so prevalent among Jews. . . . [They] as a whole, are characterized by this mentality. . . . It is no less legitimate to say such a thing about Jews in 2008-2009 than it was to make the same point about the Germans around 1938."
And the politicians? Even worse:
This line of talk—directed at Jews, not Israel—is apparently acceptable among many in Norway's elite. Consider former Prime Minister Kare Willock's reaction to President Obama's selection of Rahm Emanuel as his first chief of staff: "It does not look too promising, he has chosen a chief of staff who is Jewish." Mr. Willock didn't know anything about Mr. Emanuel's views—he based his criticism on the sole fact that Mr. Emanuel is a Jew. Perhaps unsurprisingly, fewer than 1,000 Jews live in Norway today.
And even that many is a surprise:
Last month’s publication of a study ordered by the Oslo municipality on racism and anti-Semitism among students of the 8th through 10th grades in the town’s schools came as a shock. The study found that 33 percent of the Jewish students regularly experience bullying at school. ...
It would be hard to find similarly extreme data anywhere else in Western Europe....
So what did all of the Norwegian elite's solidarity with Islam - down to their acceptance of, and parroting, of a cruel and vicious Nazi-style antisemitism - result in?
Bodies of dead children floating in the sea off a summer vacation isle.
It is probably too late for Norway to escape its fate, and perhaps they don't even deserve to. But for the wise - what few remain - their is a lesson to be learned about the effectiveness of selling out your morals in order to hop on the pro-Islam, anti-Israeli bandwagon. Ever hear of the scorpion and the frog?
You reap what you sow.
ReplyDeletejerseynut said this "Norwegian history also plays a role in all this. Anti-Semitism has a long, deeply-rooted history here...."
ReplyDeletecome on now jerseynut lets don't forget the years from 800 AD through 1800. A period when all of western Europe was having dealings with the jews. You are not telling the complete story jerseynut.
Some fair criticisms.
ReplyDeleteTrue that I worked under the assumption that the attackers were Islamic fundamentalists. At the current time, that appears to have not been the case, despite the fact that at least one radical Islamic group (nsar al-Jihad al-Alami, aka "Assistants of the Global Jihad") could not wait to take credit for the bloodshed.
But I stand by my description of Norwegian society as viciously anti-semetic; and as this post displays, Norway's media, their politicians, and their academics don't even make any attempt to hide it - in fact, they roll in it like hogs in the mud. But a society that rolls in filth and deems itself virtuous (an issue that often seems to come up with socialistic governments) will more than occasionally cough of men like Anders Behring Breivik.
And as far as the few hundred years where Jews were actually "welcome" in Europe...well, I hope "anonymous" is being sarcastic. During the occasional ravages of the Black Death, Jews were usually the first one blamed, and either driven out of their homes sans possessions (if they were lucky) or killed in a vain attempt to satiate the plague gods. Let's not forget the burning of Jews during the Spanish Inquisition (and the Cordova massacre before that). In the First Crusade (1096) flourishing Jewish communities on the Rhine and the Danube were utterly destroyed. In the Second Crusade (1147) the Jews in France were subject to frequent massacres. The Jews were also subjected to attacks by the Shepherds' Crusades of 1251 and 1320. The Crusades were followed by expulsions, including in, 1290, the banishing of all English Jews; in 1396, 100,000 Jews were expelled from France; and, in 1421 thousands were expelled from Austria.
Up until the late 1800's Jews living in the so-called "papel states" were forced into ghettos, and Czarist Russia constantly subjected them to pograms.
So while it seems as if the Jews may have had historically a few decades of peace here and there over the last few milleniums in Europe, they seem to have been brief respites between the full-on hates. We'll likely look back to 1950-2000, roughly, as being a similar period in European history.
"Dealings", I suppose. But here's your full story, like it or not....