News from Norway

[Ariel]

Norwegian Imam Reported for Hate Speech After Praising Hitler, Attacking Jews

In the now-deleted posts that the imam later attributed to his frustration over attacks in Gaza, he wrote “Hitler let some Jews be so that the world would see how cruel this nation is and why it is necessary to kill them”.

An imam in the Norwegian city of Drammen has been reported for hate speech and incitement to criminal activity due to his posts on Facebook.

The man has served as a local imam in Drammen, which has the second-highest percentage of immigrants of any community in Norway, trailing only Oslo, since 2009 and has been a member of the Muslim organisation Minhaj-ul-Quran.

The report refers to several of the imam’s posts on Facebook, all of which contained harsh statements about Jews and Israel.

“Hitler let some Jews be so that the world would see how cruel this nation is and why it is necessary to kill them,” he wrote in one of the posts.

“Israel is the devil, and Hitler left behind some Jews so that the world could see that if they survived, humanity would be in danger because of them,” he wrote in another, as quoted by the newspaper Drammens Tidende, which reserved the right to minor errors as the posts were translated from Urdu.

The newspaper has confirmed that the Southeastern Police District is familiar with the reported matter.

According to the report, the man had some 2,900 Facebook friends and 1,150 followers.

The imam in question subsequently issued an apology for the Facebook posts.

“I will first and foremost apologise for my statements on Facebook. My statements and subsequent comments from others do not represent my views and what I stand for. I have spent much of my life working for equality, understanding, respect and tolerance. To me, these are values that are highly cherished,” he said.

https://sputniknews.com/europe/20210805 ... king-jews/

[Ariel]

Imam said..Jews should be killed, but after being suspended he said...he did'nt mean it.

Norwegian imam who has led interfaith dialogue said Jews should be killed

Director of moderate Muslim group’s outreach branch suspended after exposé reveals years of antisemitic statements published on Facebook

A Muslim imam in Norway who has led interfaith dialogue projects has been suspended after it was revealed that for years he has been posting antisemitic statements on Facebook, including on how Jews are dangerous and “should be killed.”

The Norway branch of Minhaj-ul-Quran, an international Muslim organization that is considered moderate and geared toward outreach, suspended Noor Ahmad Noor indefinitely on Monday following an exposé published last week by the Vartland newspaper on his antisemitic statements.

Noor had served for years as the branch’s director.

Police have launched an investigation into his remarks.

In one post from 2019, Noor wrote that Jews “put the world in danger” and it is “necessary to kill them.”

In a short statement to the Norwegian media, Noor said: “My posts were published in frustration over attacks in Gaza. Innocent children and women were killed. My criticism and frustration should have been directed at the regime. And not against a group of people. I apologize.”

As director of Minhaj-ul-Quran, he has participated in meetings and projects with top government officials, including cabinet ministers and Ivar Flaten, head of the Church Dialogue Center in Drammen, the Norwegian city where Noor lives.

Flaten initially defended Noor, speaking with the Vartland website, arguing dialogue occurs amid disagreements, but has since called the remarks “unacceptable, shocking.”

In a statement, Minhaj-ul-Quran wrote: “These are attitudes and values we have zero tolerance for as a religious community. This is contrary to what we have been working for for decades.”

[Ariel]

Police will investigate whether it was an act of terror, a spokesman said.

Multiple people killed in ‘Bow and Arrow’ attack in Kongsberg, Norway

A man using a bow and arrow to carry out attacks in the Norwegian town of Kongsberg on Wednesday killed several people and injured others, according to local police.

Local reports from Kongsberg, Norway say several people have been killed and injured after an attack by someone using bow and arrow.

A large area near Kongsburg and Nybura has reportedly been evacuated and cordoned off after the attacker allegedly shot multiple people with his bow and arrow in an open street.

The man who carried out the act has been arrested by the police, the police said at a press conference on Wednesday night.

According to police, the alleged archer acted alone.

When asked about a possible terrorist connection, Drammen Police Chief Øyvind Aas told reporters, “Time will tell.”

The police declined to comment on the number of casualties after in the incident in Kongsberg.

According to local reports, the Norwegian Elite Police Unit and military forces have been deployed in the aftermath of the bow and arrow attack.

UPDATE 17:25 EST: Five people have been killed and others have been injured in bow and arrow attacks in Norway, according to public broadcaster NRK.

[pr126]

My guess is that if the perpetrator was a white Christian, the police would not hesitate to reveal the identity of the archer.

Time will tell? Huh?

[pr126]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-58906165

A Danish man aged 37 has been arrested and questioned for hours overnight.

Police said they had previously been in contact with him over fears of radicalisation after he converted to Islam.

OK, when will the "mentally ill" diagnosis be revealed?

Of course, it has nothing to do with Islam.

[Ariel]

OK, when will the "mentally ill" diagnosis be revealed?

Of course, it has nothing to do with Islam.

Anyone who converts to islam is mentally ill to my idea. And for ones they admit this was an act of islamic terror. Even the BBC

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-5 ... terrorism.

The suspect, a 37-year-old Danish citizen named Espen Andersen Brathen, had converted to Islam and there were fears he had been radicalised.

However a motive has not yet been determined.

He is accused of killing four women and a man on Wednesday night in the southern town of Kongsberg.

In a press release on Thursday (in Norwegian), police said Brathen was due to appear in court on Friday at 09:00 local time (07:00 GMT).

A police lawyer told public broadcaster NRK he would be assessed by psychiatrists. During a press conference PST head Hans Sverre Sjovold said the suspect had been "in and out of the health system for some time".

Residents have been deeply shaken by the violence.

Flags were flown at half-mast on Thursday while flowers and other memorials were placed in Kongsberg's main square.

The victims were all aged between 50 and 70, regional police chief Ole Bredrup Saeverud told reporters at a Thursday morning news briefing.

[pr126]

However a motive has not yet been determined.

Translation: We dare not mention Islamic hate-crime.

Danish citizen named Espen Andersen Brathen. I am sure he adopted an Arabic name for himself, as is the custom. That will not be disclosed.

[antineoETC]

I see the perpetrator used to be a white man. I say "used to be" because he has now changed his race to "Muslim". Oops! I just made a racist comment by "targeting" the perpetrator's "Muslimness". Sorry, did I say "perpetrator"? I of course meant VICTIM who was acting in self defense in response to the rising tide of Islamophobia in Norway.

[Ariel]

Norway: Muslim migrant screaming ‘Allahu akbar’ and quoting Qur’an attacks people with knife, ‘motive unclear

The motive for the action is unclear.”

No, it isn’t. It couldn’t be plainer. But the capacity for denial and willful ignorance on the part of Western authorities is apparently limitless.

“He quoted the Qur’an during the attack: The perpetrator was previously convicted of a stabbing on an open street,” translated from “Siterte Koranen under angrepet: Gjerningsmannen tidligere dømt for knivangrep på åpen gate,” Nettavisen, November 9, 2021 (thanks to H.):

• BISLETT (Nettavisen): – PST was informed by the Oslo police district after the shooting. It is only natural after such an event. We follow the situation closely, says communications director in PST, Trond Hugubakken, to Nettavisen.
  
  The perpetrator was on Tuesday morning confirmed dead from injuries after the shooting episode at Bislett. The 33-year-old man was taken to Ullevål hospital after being hit by shots from the police.
  
  The man ended up in confrontation with the police after trying to attack people with a knife at Bislett in Oslo.
  
  – Quotes the Quran
  The online newspaper’s sources who have heard the video confirm that he quoted the Muslim creed during the attack. In addition, he shouted “allahu akhbar.”
  
  The dead man, who is a Russian citizen, has previously been convicted of a knife attack on an open street on the lower Gründerløkka in Oslo in June 2019.
  
  He was then sentenced to compulsory mental health care after he tried to kill one person, and threatened several others with a knife. The man himself claims that he does not remember what happened that morning.
  
  The police will not confirm the man’s identity, as relatives have not been notified.
  
  In 2018, the man was convicted of violence against a worker on a construction site. He also did not remember any of the incident, but regretted it and wanted treatment. He was then sentenced to community service.
  
  The man went to the Theater Academy in 2014/2015, but his education was interrupted due to unacceptable behavior.
  
  PST will not confirm to Nettavisen if they have listened to the audio recording where the man apparently quotes from the Koran.
  
  – PST has been informed about the case and we are in dialogue with the Oslo Police District about this case, says senior adviser in PST, Annett Aamodt, in a short statement to Nettavisen.
  
  – The motive for the action is unclear and it is too early to conclude. We are investigating the case broadly with several scenarios. The investigation will clarify this. We do not rule out any motives, but there is currently no information in the case that indicates that it is a terrorist incident, says police inspector Egil Jørgen Brekke at a press conference on Tuesday afternoon….

[antineoETC]

Don't worry Scandia. The uncontrolled Muslim immigration your leaders have given you is nothing new. You were always a mixed bag of Afghans, Arabs, Africans etc. I know this because the BBC says so:

[Ariel]

Israel slams Norway for labeling products from ‘areas occupied by Israel’

Decision will ‘adversely affect’ relations between the countries and Oslo’s role in advancing Palestinian-Israeli relations, says Foreign Ministry.

Israel’s Foreign Ministry sharply criticized Saturday night the Norwegian decision to label all good coming from over the so-called “Green Line,” saying it would “adversely affect” relations between the countries.
“This is a decision that will not contribute to the promotion of Israeli-Palestinian relations,” the ministry said in a statement. “It will adversely affect the bilateral relations between Israel and Norway and impact the relevance of Norway’s role in the advancement of Israeli-Palestinian relations.”

Oslo announced Friday that it only recognizes Israel within the pre-June 1967 borders, and therefore all imports from the Golan Heights, Judea and Samaria, and eastern Jerusalem would be marked differently.
In its statement, the government cited a 2019 ruling by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) that “the Food Information Regulation must be interpreted so that food from areas occupied by Israel must be labeled separately so that consumers are not misled by a lack of labeling about the origin of the products,” the government stated.
It mentioned specifically “wine, olive oil, fruit, vegetables and potatoes that come from the relevant areas.”

Although Norway is not a member of the EU and is not obligated by its court’s rulings, the statement mentioned that these specific foods are not included in the free trade agreement between Israel and European countries that includes the Scandinavian state.

Israel harshly criticized the ECJ ruling at the time as setting a “double standard” for the Jewish state when goods from dozens of other countries involved in territorial disputes were not included in the labeling decision.
Then-foreign minister Israel Katz said that it was “unacceptable both morally and in principle.” The former head of the Yesha (Judea and Samaria) Council, Yisrael Gantz, slammed it for “discriminat[ing] against Jews living and working in their homeland of thousands of years.”
Gantz also pointed out that “this decision will directly hurt the Arab population working at these factories, and manufacturing these products.”

Through Knesset laws, Israel declared its sovereignty over united Jerusalem immediately after the war, and over the Golan Heights in 1981. Other than the United States, most countries refuse to recognize the change in status, deeming the areas “occupied,” or at best “disputed,” territories.

Norway says its decision is “in line with” UN Security Council resolutions as well as “assessments” by the International Court of Justice in The Hague that “the Israeli settlements in the occupied territories [are] contrary to international law.”
In 2020, the Norwegian parliament voted down a similar bill to label products from settlements in Judea and Samaria.

https://worldisraelnews.com/israel-slam ... by-israel/

[Ariel]

"I saw a man arrive with a bag, he picked up a gun & started to shoot," journalist Olav Roenneberg said. One man is in custody now. He is from Iran.

Two killed and 11 injured in shooting at LGBTQ club London Pub in Norway before Pride

Police are investigating a terror link following the tragic incident in Oslo

Two people have been killed and eleven injured after a gunman, armed with two weapons, opened fire on an LGBTQ+ bar in Oslo, Norway in the early hours of Saturday morning, June 24, just hours ahead of Oslo's annual Pride event. The shooting took place at a popular spot for Norway's LGBTQ+ people, called London Pub, and amongst the injured are three people in critical condition.

Police described the scene at the bar, to CNN, as 'chaotic' with 'people running everywhere' as wounded people were on the ground both inside and outside the London Pub. Police are investigating a terror link after shots were also fired near the Herr Nilsen jazz club and a takeaway close by.

Police received multiple calls about the incident at 1:14am local time and were on the scene minutes later. Police apprehended the gunman who was taken to the police station and an investigation started into the tragic incident.

Eight people were hospitalised following the mass shooting, three of which are in critical condition, whilst 14 other people sustained minor injuries as a result of the incident.

Oslo Pride organizers have cancelled the Pride event scheduled to take place later on Saturday June 25 as a result of the overnight shooting.

Taking to Facebook, Oslo Pride wrote: "Oslo Pride has received clear advice and a recommendation from the police that the parade, Pride Park, and any other event in relation to Oslo Pride be cancelled. Oslo Pride therefore implores anyone who had planned to participate in or watch the parade, not to show up. All events in relation to Oslo Pride have been cancelled.

"We will follow the police’s recommendation and take care of each other. We are sending warm thoughts and love to next of kin, those who were wounded, and others affected. We will soon be proud and visible again, but today, we will share our Pride celebrations from home, says Inger Kristin Haugsevje, leader of Oslo Pride, and Inge Alexander Gjestvang, leader of FRI – the Norwegian Organisation for Sexual and Gender Diversity.

"Oslo Pride is communicating closely with the police and are following the situation, and will share information continuously."

London Pub shared a statement after the tragic shooting which called the attack on the LGBTQ+ pub "absolutely awful and pure evil."

The shooting at London Pub comes six years after 49 people were killed at LGBTQ+ venue Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, Florida on June 12 2016.

Omar Mateen, a 29-year-old man, shot at his victims in the Florida nightclub before a three-hour standoff led to him being shot by police. The Pulse Nightclub attack was deemed a terrorist attack by FBI investigators.

There are currently no other suspects in the Oslo shooting.

[antineoETC]

Two killed and 11 injured in shooting at LGBTQ club London Pub in Norway before Pride

Woke List of culprits in order of likelihood:

> Far Rightist
> Christian extremist of any denomination
> Zoroastrian
> Taoist
> Daoist
> Deist
> Tribal Shamanist
> Animist
> Druid
> Buddhist
> Bahaii
> Hindu

Er…...that seems to be about it

[Ariel]

The gunman was known to authorities

Norway’s PST intelligence service said on Saturday the suspect had been known to security services since 2015, and had only been questioned by agents in May. He had previously faced charges of drugs possession and carrying a knife, the MailOnline reported.

Roger Berg, the agency’s acting chief, told a news conference on Saturday that the suspect had “a long history of violence and threats” and the intelligence service was aware of “difficulties with his mental health.” The agency had flagged the suspect “in connection with concerns about his radicalization” and membership “in an Islamist extremist network.”

Berg called the attack “an extreme Islamist terror act” and warned that is remained “an unresolved terrorist situation.”

[pr126]

“difficulties with his mental health."

How convenient.

[antineoETC]

SPIKED Article: Oslo and the Islamist threat to gay life

Our woke elites cannot compute the Islamist extremist threat. It smashes their simpleminded identitarian narratives and victim hierarchies.

Spot on!

Spoiler! :

Oslo and the Islamist threat to gay life

A suspected Islamist terrorist shot up a gay bar on the eve of Pride. Where’s the anger?

So, have we all just moved on from the Oslo shooting? It’s been a few days since a suspected Islamist terrorist walked into a gay bar, a jazz club and pub on the eve of Oslo’s Pride march armed with a fully automatic weapon and opened fire, killing two people and wounding 21. But in the British media, at least, it seems to have come and gone without really troubling the news agenda or the opinion pages.

I know there’s a lot going on in the world at the moment, and I know half of the pundit class is still making its way back from Glastonbury, but at what point did a gunman killing people in cold blood for no other crime than being out and about and enjoying themselves become an ‘in other news’ kind of story? Have we really become that inured to this kind of barbarism? Is it just priced in now?

The suspected gunman, a 42-year-old Norwegian national, was known to the security services as a ‘suspected radicalised Islamist’. Given Oslo’s Pride march – which was promptly cancelled – was taking place the following day, and the killer opened fire in popular gay venue the London Pub, the authorities are trying to work out whether gay people were specifically targeted.

Time will tell. But the silence of the chattering classes about the Oslo shooting is unlikely to be down to a commitment to sober journalistic restraint while all the facts emerge. Had a few of the details been different, had this been a far-right thug rather than an Islamist thug, gunning down ‘degenerates’ on the eve of a Pride parade, the response across the media would have quite rightly been shock, disgust and fury.

For years now it has been clear that Islamist atrocities just do not bother our woke elites nearly as much as far-right atrocities – even though Islamist terrorism is an incomparably bigger threat. The Manchester Arena bombing was a landmark moment in this regard. Young girls, one as young as eight, were slain by an Islamist terrorist at a pop concert and all the great and good could muster was a vigil or two before promptly moving on.

Our collective moral compass appears to be severely screwed up. We talk endlessly these days about a far-right comeback that thankfully never materialises. Meanwhile, we are compelled to ignore the fascistic, homophobic, misogynistic and often black-clad movement that is staring us in the face, and has cost the lives of hundreds of Europeans and thousands more people across the world in recent years.

Our woke elites cannot compute the Islamist extremist threat. It smashes their simpleminded identitarian narratives and victim hierarchies. They seem to have convinced themselves that it is better to downplay Islamist terrorism than risk offending Muslims or sparking some anti-Muslim backlash – a position which manages both to demonise white Brits as a pogrom-in-waiting and conflate all Muslims with Islamist extremists in one fell swoop.

This reflex – to downplay Islamist terrorism, to change the subject, to shush and silence any discussion of it for fear of the furies that might be unleashed – is cowardly and morally repugnant at the best of times. But it is particularly stunning to see supposed warriors for oppressed minorities turn a blind eye to terrorist attacks that either target or otherwise claim the lives of those very minorities.

Remember the October 2020 Dresden attack? Of course you don’t. It barely caused a ripple over here. While woke commentators were busy banging on about statues or some such, an ISIS convert stabbed a gay couple, killing one of them, in what was later deemed by the German authorities to be a jihadist and homophobic killing. In June that same year, Libyan extremist Khairi Saadallah stabbed three gay men to death in a park in Reading, another UK atrocity that two years on no one seems to remember.

The only way some commentators are able to get angry about such massacres is by denying extreme Islamist ideology had much to do with them. In the wake of the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando in 2016, in which ISIS fanboy Omar Mateen killed 49 predominantly gay people, various commentators tried to insist that this was an act, primarily, of homopobic terrorism and downplayed the role of his avowed faith and ideology.

The Guardian’s Owen Jones infamously stormed off the set of Sky News in June 2016 during a discussion about the Pulse killings. He had objected to the attack being presented as ‘an attack on all of humanity’, rather than an anti-LGBT attack, and argued that Mateen would have only used his extreme Islamist ideas to ‘rationalise’ his hatred of gay people.

In the end, no evidence emerged to suggest that Mateen had purposefully targeted Pulse because it was a gay club. He had also scoped out other, non-LGBT venues, but found them too well protected. Mateen only settled on Pulse after a generic Google search for ‘Orlando nightclubs’. He also framed his attack explicitly as revenge for Iraq and Syria, and none of the survivors heard him utter any anti-gay slurs or say anything about gay people during the attack.

What all this points to is that identity politics is corroding our ability to take on the Islamist terror threat. Attacks like those in Oslo, Dresden and Reading are briefly mourned and then forgotten, by a commentariat that apparently fears a dreamt-up Islamophobic backlash more than it fears actual Islamist murder. Even then we mourn them as we would deadly natural disasters, as horrible but ultimately unavoidable tragedies.

And when people do get angry they tend to warp the nature of the threat. Murderous, gay-hating Islamists, for example, are presented as the product of allegedly rampant homophobia in Western society more broadly, rather than exponents of a particular religious extremism which, in the benighted nations it has been practised, leads to gay men being thrown from buildings and stoned to death.

Whatever we come to learn about the Oslo shooting, it remains an attack not just on gay people or Norwegian people, but also on our common humanity and the values of freedom and tolerance. At the same time, it reminds us that of all the political ideologies that might threaten gay life today, Islamist extremism is both among the most deadly and the most wilfully ignored.

[antineoETC]

FRONTPAGE ARTICLE: After the Oslo Bloodbath

Spoiler! :

On the night of Friday, June 24, a 42-year-old Muslim named Zaniar Matapour shot up the city’s largest gay bar, London Pub, and the tiny watering hole next door, Per På Hjørnet (Per on the Corner). He killed two and wounded twenty-one. But even though Matapour kicked off his evening of mayhem by shouting “Allahu akbar” and was later shown to belong to a radical Islamic clique, don’t think for a moment that his offense had anything to do with Islam. And even though he committed his dastardly deeds on the eve of Oslo’s scheduled Pride parade, a week after his buddy Arfan Bhatti, a convicted terrorist, posted a note on Facebook calling for the murder of gays, don’t dare suggest that the crime might have been rooted in Islam’s deadly view of homosexuality.

After all, as I reported here on June 27, no less eminent a figure than Masud Gharahkhani, the 39-year-old president of the Norwegian parliament who is (after the king) the country’s highest-ranking person - and who, like Matapour, came to Norway as a child refugee from Iran - was quick to deny that this was an Islamic act. “Hate is hate,” Gharahkhani told a reporter for VG, “and has nothing to do with religion or background.” (Why, then, did his parents flee Iran after it became an Islamic theocracy?)

Norway’s leading Muslim organizations agreed with Gharahkhani. The Islamic Council (IRN), which for years refused to take a position on punishing homosexuality with the death penalty, condemned the atrocity and denied any Islamic connection. Ditto Senaid Kobilica of the Muslim Dialogue Network (MDN). Ditto, too, Fahad Qureshi of IslamNet, who asserted, in total contravention of the Koran, that “Islam does not permit taking the life of an innocent person, no matter gay or straight.”

You had to go into the archives to discover just how hypocritical Qureshi’s statement was. He’s on the record as saying that all Muslims support the death penalty for gays. (For obvious strategic reasons, he’s since announced that gays who abstain from sex need not be executed.) As for Kobilica and IRN, get a load of what happened in 2009 when Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the world’s leading Islamic scholar, praised the Holocaust. Asked for a comment, IRN’s then Secretary General, Sultan Shoaib, referred reporters to Kobilica, who was then IRN’s head. Kobilica, in turn, passed the buck to the Islamic Association’s Basim Ghozlan, who declined to comment on Qaradawi’s remark because, he said, it was a “political statement.”

So the same Muslim leaders who now pretend to be appalled by two murders chose to stay mum on the Shoah.

More on Kobilica. A few months ago, he assured a reporter “that Muslims aren’t allowed to hate Jews. In fact we can’t be Muslims…without believing in the Torah and Bible as holy books.” Anyone familiar with another holy book - the aforementioned Koran, natch - knows very well that devout Muslims view themselves as having been divinely commanded to kill Jews and Christians. It’s called (ahem) jihad.

But it wasn’t the Muslim organizations whose crocodile tears took the cake. No, it was Bassel Hatoum, head of Queer World (Skeiv Verden), Norway’s major gay organization, who hit a home run. “To link this to Islam,” he said about the Oslo bloodbath, “is very wrong and fraudulent.” Gays, Muslims, and everyone else, he wrote, “stand together” as “one community.”

Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre made similar noises, adding that in the wake of Matapour’s actions all Norwegian Muslims were in danger - of reprisal, presumably. (Yes, the old “backlash” fiction.) Then there was hijab-clad Attia Mirza Mehmood, a Socialist Left member of Oslo’s City Council, who took the breathtakingly dishonest line that “we don’t yet know what the perpetrator’s motive was” and that gays and Muslims share the same enemies and should therefore be allies.

At least ordinary Muslims were honest. After the shootings, as Erling Marthisen reported at document.no, Muslims who were posting at Arabic-language websites in Sweden were busy “praising the terrorist” as a “hero,” describing the victims as “filth and rubbish,” and thanking Allah. There’s no reason to think Muslims in Norway weren’t celebrating, too.

So far, in short, nothing new. These days, throughout the Western world, the first instinct of people in authority after an act of manifest jihadist slaughter is to deny its Islamic roots and paint Muslims as peace-loving victims.

Yet this time something was different: a few establishment voices broke with the party line.

First, in a June 27 op-ed for Aftenposten, Ola Svenneby, head of the Norwegian Young Conservatives (Unge Høyre), noted wryly that the ten Muslim countries that punish homosexuality with death don’t do so “because they’ve misread the Koran.” It’s time, he concluded, for Norwegians to hold real discussions about the threat Islam poses to free and tolerant societies.

(Alas, the 25-year-old Svenneby is too young to recall that frank exchanges about Islam used to take place in Norway - notably on the TV2 series Holmgang, which was canceled in 2008 after an aggressive Muslim campaign against it. Three years later, the government and media used Anders Behring Breivik’s murder of 77 people to try to silence critics of Islam who, they cynically contended, were, in effect, Breivik’s accessories. Since then, robust conversations about Islam have been relegated mostly to a couple of much-maligned alternative websites.)

In response to Svenneby’s piece, Dih Yazan Al-Obaide, the Marxist leader of the gay Muslim organization Salam, wrote that he felt “unsafe,” “demonized,” “dehumanized,” and “viewed with suspicion” - no, not by Muslims like Matapour, but (ludicrously) by Svenneby and other members of right-of-center parties, who, if returned to power, he warned, might well force gays to undergo conversion therapy or even deport them. Svenneby got a thumbs-up, however, from Anne Holt, a crime novelist and former Minister of Justice who’s arguably Norway’s most famous lesbian. In a June 28 op-ed, Holt wrote that until now she’s kept mum about Islam and mass Muslim immigration (untrue: in several op-eds she’s called critics thereof racists and xenophobes) but that the London Pub shootings changed her mind. If Matapour really acted against gays “in Allah’s name,” declared Holt, she needs to break her silence and call for a “Big Conversation” about Islam.

(How odd that twenty-one years and Allah knows how many jihadist atrocities after 9/11, it took this event to alert Holt to the dangers of Islam! Still, better to have her on side than not. Or is she really all in? At the end of her op-ed, Holt actually stated that she might be wrong about the need for a “Big Conversation.” My interpretation? If the blowback from her friends is too strong, she’ll issue a mea culpa.)

Far more impressive than Holt was the 44-year-old Progress Party leader Sylvi Listhaug, who in a June 29 op-ed, came out strongly against Gharahkhani’s absurd “nothing to do with religion” line and Støre’s disgraceful focus on Muslims, not gays, as victims. The London Pub shootings, she insisted, were an act of hatred, and “the hatred comes from someplace and deep down we know where”; hence it’s high time to “begin seriously to demand that people who settle voluntarily in Norway respect our values of freedom.” Long since high time, I’d say.

I wasn’t surprised when Kjetil Rolness, one of the few marquee-name writers in Norway to dissent frequently from the lockstep consensus, also weighed in, writing in Aftenposten on July 2 that the problem isn’t that Muslims live by other values than secular Norwegians, but that their punishments for dissent from orthodoxy are so severe. Even VG columnist Shazia Majid - after railing about “Islamophobia,” asserting that Matapour’s motives remain unknown, and making the baffling suggestion that she and other Norwegian Muslims were being “scapegoated” - admitted on July 1 that it’s well past time for Norwegian society to take on the “homo-hate that flourishes in some immigrant communities.”

Perhaps best of all, on June 30, another Muslim, Qalbi Khan, a professor of dentistry at the University of Oslo, made essentially the same point in Aftenposten - and emphasized, to boot, the need for liberal Muslims to take the lead in challenging backward Islamic attitudes. Yes, there was much in his piece to quibble with - beginning with the notion that one can be liberal and Muslim. But he closed with a wonderful line suggesting that Islamophobia - i.e. fear of Islam - can be healthy and appropriate.

None of these people, alas, chose to give a tip of the hat to their gutsy fellow citizens, such as Rita Karlsen, Hege Storhaug, Hans Rustad, and Peder (Fjordman) Jensen, who’ve been reviled for years in Norway’s media, academy, and corridors of political power for speaking home truths about Islam. In the 1980s, New York intellectual diva Susan Sontag decided to stop applauding Communism, but described others who’d opposed it for decades as “premature anti-Communists.” Will Storhaug, Karlsen, and company - not to mention yours truly - come to be known as premature critics of Islam?

Well, if the Norwegian establishment develops enough backbone on Islam to turn this country around, I won’t mind much having to wear that label, if that’s the price to pay. But what are the real chances of that happening? On Sunday, my fellow Islam critic Nina Hjerpset-Østlie wrote on Facebook that “it seems a critical number of social commentators are ready for ‘The Big Conversation’ on Islam’s obvious and extensive problem in relation to sexual minorities.” I hope she’s right - and that, if so, the conversation will take in a lot more than the “sexual minorities” stuff. But it seems to me that the bulk of politicians, professors, and popular authors have had nothing to offer in response to the London Pub shootings but the usual cowardly pabulum, euphemism, and appeasement.

Moreover, three days after the Oslo police prevailed upon organizers to cancel the gay-pride parade - lest terrorists be handed a target-rich environment - came news that made any hope of a sea change in elite Norwegian attitudes seem like a pipe dream. Oslo’s City Council announced that it had green-lit plans by the Islamic Association - the Norwegian face of the Muslim Brotherhood and, in the view of the United Arab Emirates, a terrorist organization - to build an imposing new mosque in the heart of the city, complete with a “cultural center,” library, sports complex, and café. Could the authorities have given a clearer signal of their determination to capitulate to the enemy?

Finally, as if all of the above weren’t more than enough, a week after the London Pub shootings another terrorist act occurred in the same city. Lars Thorsen is head of a group called Stop the Islamization of Norway (SIAN) and is viewed by the Norwegian establishment in much the same way that Tommy Robinson is viewed by bien pensant Brits - in other words, as human garbage. On July 1, perhaps in an effort to pacify Muslims who were put off by the sudden wave of truth-telling about Islam that followed the London Pub shootings, Thorson was arrested for hanging a banner on a mosque and spraying three people with “self-defense spray.” The next day he and several colleagues burned a Koran on an Oslo street - after which, in a scene out of a movie, an angry driver forced their jeep off the road, causing it to flip on its roof. There was one serious injury; the driver was arrested on the spot, and another suspect was arrested on Sunday.

But the police officer in charge at the scene seemed to be less interested in discussing what looked like an attempted murder than in criticizing the Koran burning. “A lot of people,” he said, are outraged by actions like SIAN’s, and “we” - the police - “understand” their outrage. Such, alas, in the year 2022, is the utterly predictable reaction of Norwegian officials to a conflict between Norwegian patriots whose worst offense is destroying a Koran and Islamic jihadists who are prepared to kill as many Norwegians as they can.