It’s Time To Go.
Gates of Vienna has moved to a new address:
Not everything over there is fully functional yet, and the internal links still point to this blog, and will for the indefinite future. So all the old material will be left here for archival purposes, with comments turned off.
Gotta get down to it
Blogger is cuttin’ us down
Shoulda been done long ago
The following op-ed by Hanne Nabintu Herland concerns the Norwegian government’s persistent soft spot for the Palestinians. It was originally published in Aftenposten, Norway’s largest newspaper, on January 15th, 2013, and has been translated by the author.
Naïve Checkbook Diplomacy
by Hanne Nabintu Herland
Torgeir Larsen, a junior minister for the Norwegian Labor Party, admits in Norway’s largest newspaper Aftenposten on December 28, 2012, that Norwegian authorities closed their eyes to the realities of the Middle East. Too often they thought they were in the service of stability, but later found out that was not the case.
Regardless, this acknowledgement of Norwegian naïveté must lead to tangible changes in foreign policy in order to be of real value.
The junior minister asked me what I meant by my leading article on December the 20th (“In bed with the enemy”) in which I stated that Norwegian checkbook diplomacy is de facto supportive of terrorist organizations that display significant intolerance towards Christians, Jews, gays or other minorities who are not considered “sufficiently Islamic”.
Let’s take a look at the statistics: Norway is one of the smallest countries in the world, and one of the largest contributors to the Palestinian Authority (PA) and others, with annual donations of over 700 Million NOK. Especially since the current left-wing Labor government took office in 2005, the donations have exploded. What are these sums spent on?
Recently the remuneration for suicide bombers was tripled. The Hamas terrorist who killed 30 Israelis in 2002 by now receives 20,000 NOK a month, according to The Times of Israel last September the 9th. Those who have carried out the worst attacks against innocent civilians receive the highest pay.
Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center figures from 2005 show that Palestinians have conducted 25,770 terrorist attacks, 147 suicide attacks leading to 1,100 dead Israelis and 7,500 wounded between 2000 and 2005. Fatah conducted 214 acts of terrorism in 2003-2004 alone, according to 2005 Terrorism Review.
Gross corruption charges have for a long time been directed at the PLO, which already by 1993 was the richest terrorist organization in the world, according to the British National Criminal Intelligence Service, having assets of ten billion dollars and an annual income of approximately two billion dollars. The Daily Telegraph reported in 1999 that the PLO had secretly invested over 50 billion dollars around the world. Still, Norway has continuously broken bread with these people.
The Norwegian taxpayers’ money has amongst other things financed a number of visits from the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, Fatah, not to forget the PLO, coming to Oslo. Not to mention the intense activities of Norway’s previous Foreign Minister, Jonas Gahr-Store, as he has travelled extensively between different Islamist groups in the Middle East, having secret meetings in 2007 with Hamas’ leader, Khaled Meshaal, which shocked the West. Having publicly denied these meetings, the Norwegian TV station, TV2 forced him to admit to lying about this in 2010, an incident which is referred to in Aftenposten.
The PA Minister Faisal Husseini said to Al-Safir in 2001 that “Our eyes will continue to aspire to the strategic goal, namely, to Palestine from the river [Jordan] to the sea. Whatever we get now cannot make us forget this supreme truth.” And Hamas’ message from the internet: “We are a nation that drinks blood, and we know that no blood is better than the Jews’.” In this perspective it is interesting to note that the pluralist liberal democracy of Israel is the only country in the Middle East where gays are protected legally, having annual gay pride parades and religious liberty, and where Christian minorities are growing and the nation enjoys a free press and an active public debate. But these we do not support in Norway.
As recently as 1996, Yasser Arafat stated in Stockholm — three years after his Nobel Peace Prize — that the Palestinian plan still was to annihilate Israel, establish a pure Palestinian state and make the Middle East so horrible that the Jewish minority could not stand to live there anymore, according to Arutz-7.Arafat said this three years after having received the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo in 1993.The PLO’s decision on genocide against the Jews had still not been removed from its charter. As we all know, one of the reasons for Oslo II 1995 was that Arafat was to denounce terrorism and remove from the PLO’s charter the quest for Jewish genocide.
The current Norwegian Labor government has been far too gullibly influenced by Palestinian propaganda. Hoping to become an internationally renowned peace mediator and content seeing the effects of our checkbook diplomacy, we have closed our eyes to what we actually finance. No wonder our role as a peace mediator in the Middle East seems to be over.
Hanne Nabintu Herland is a Norwegian historian of comparative religions and a bestselling author.
In other news, the latest figures from Angola indicate that at least 250,000 Chinese nationals have migrated to the country. The Angolan government says that work permits were issued for the Chinese to assist with development projects.
To see the headlines and the articles, open the full news post.
Thanks to Andy Bostom, C. Cantoni, DS, EG, Insubria, JD, KGS, Mary Abdelmassih, Paul Green, Steen, Vlad Tepes, and all the other tipsters who sent these in.
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As a follow-up to Tuesday’s post about the majority-minority public schools in Oslo, the following brief account reports the latest statistics on the cultural enrichment of schools in Austria. Vienna is the most fully enriched location, and seems to be in roughly the same situation as Oslo.
Many thanks to Hermes for the translation from Unzensuriert.at:
Austria — The number of German-speaking primary school students has declined dramatically
The number of pupils with a first language other than German has doubled from 1995 to 2011. This is what the recently-issued “National Report on Education” shows. During this time, the percentage of “monolingual German” children at primary schools dropped from 88% to 76%.
The doubling in the number of multilingual students is evident in virtually all provinces in Austria. In Carinthia, Lower Austria, Salzburg, Tyrol and Vorarlberg, the rise is a little lower, in Upper Austria is a bit higher, and in Burgenland it remained on average. The Styrian province is the only outlier, where the number of children with a different native language has tripled from about 5,000 to 16,000.
Barely any students with German as mother tongue in Vienna
The nationwide statistics conceals the dramatic developments in Vienna, because German is hardly spoken in the primary schools of the federal capital. The district in Vienna where this is most blatantly visible is Margareten, where the proportion of immigrant children has risen to 89 % — that is, 924 out of 1038 children have as their mother tongue something other than German. The districts Rudolf Fünfhaus and Ottakring have a proportion of 80%, Brigittenau 79% and Meidling at least 70%.
For a complete listing of previous enrichment news, see The Cultural Enrichment Archives.
Note: The following post accompanies Takuan Seiyo’s latest piece. Both are being kept “sticky” until tonight. Scroll down for other posts that have appeared since Wednesday.
Certain posts at Gates of Vienna, among them those by Takuan Seiyo, tend to attract the attention and comments of people who are preoccupied with the Jews. They frequently refer to “Holohoax” in World War Two, often supplementing their scornful references with obscenities or derogatory epithets.
I generally delete such comments without publishing them. One of them came in this morning, the second or third such screed submitted on Takuan Seiyo’s latest post. Before I deleted it, I sent it to Takuan, just to show him what was coming in. He suggested that I go ahead and post it, followed by his response.
So here’s the comment by “Anonymous” [typos in the original]:
Some interesting points, a lot of waffle and some errors. Your stated view that the WW2 ‘Holocaust’ resulted in the old 6 million dead Jews is well past its sell-by date. Top class, modern historians now regard that figure as grotesquely disproportionate. The Red Cross AND the German Government counted less than 150,000 for ALL deaths in ALL camps other than those behind Russian lines. It’s now commonly called the HOLOHOAX. It is one of the most successful internationsal businesses of all time.
A response from Takuan Seiyo:
You have the temerity to post this kind of Nazi apologist garbage in a comments thread of an article by a writer whose gentile grandparents had been murdered in a concentration camp and whose gentile mother spent two years in a labor-extermination camp, was a state witness in the post-war trial of its commandant, and relayed her wartime experiences to this writer directly. Moreover, a writer who was born and grew up one hour by car from Auschwitz and three kilometers from the plant where the firm Hoch und Tiefbau AG had built the crematoria for that camp. In which, alone, 2.5 million people were murdered, 1 million of them Jews. And that’s according to the testimony its commandant Rudolf Hoess, based on data from SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann.
Moreover, you desecrate the memory of Witold Pilecki plus other Polish officer escapees from Auschwitz who produced written reports, e.g. Jerzy Tabeau and Kazimierz Piechowski — all of them of impeccable “white” credentials way beyond what you and other White Nat lunatics may ever aspire to. I am omitting here reports by Jewish escapees, for example the Vrba-Wetzler report, as well as the fate of the Jewish part of my family during the war, so as to skirt the whole specious Joooos-tainted-it aspect of your comment.
It’s true that legitimate modern-day attempts to calculate the number of the Holocausts’ victims produce a range of numbers. The lowest for Auschwitz, for instance (by the Polish historian Franciszek Piper), cites 1.1 million victims, in contrast to the 2.5 million estimate — interesting, however, that even in that much-reduced number the Jewish victims component remains the same 1 million as in the bigger total-victim figures. The highest figure cited for Auschwitz is 4 million.
The lowest legitimate estimate of victims of the Jewish Holocaust cites 5.1 million instead of the accepted meme “6 million”. There is room for different methodologies and re-evaluations; there are difficulties, including the fact that much of the physical plant was erased by the Germans. For instance, the Belzec Extermination Camp, where 600,000 Jews were murdered plus some 2,000 Poles in punishment for sheltering or aiding Jews, was entirely plowed under by its German operators before they fled the advancing Soviet Army.
By the way — Belzec too had many direct witnesses from non-Jewish sources, including the famous Jan Karski who snuck in and out, and this writer’s mother who saw freight trains packed with people sardine-style, some of them acquaintances and one a family member, leaving for Belzec, and those “passengers” never returning, with the Polish train conductors telling Polish and Ukrainians bystanders at the station that what they had seen just from the gates of Belzec was Hell on Earth.
Also by the way — here too there are legitimate differences of interpretation, assessment of evidence etc. The lowest valid estimate of Belzec victims is not 600,000 but 500,000.
To erase by a stroke of the pen the best-documented event in history in order to produce the 150,000 number you cite is an act of supreme evil. Please do Gates of Vienna readers a favor and post elsewhere.
I will deal in a later chapter with the issue of White Nats’ desperate massaging of Holocaust history as an attempt to wrest Western history from what, to them, should have been the losers, in order to place the skein of narrative back in the hands of what ought to have been the winners, that is, “white people.” They don’t quite get that WW2 is a story of the ultimate triumph of Western Civilization and of Whites, and that there is no need at all to lie or fall prey to wishful delusions. The losers who wrested the skein of history are not “the Jews” or “the coloreds” but white Marxists-Socialist professors in the 1960s. What they lost is their faith in the infallibility of Marxist dialectics, in view of how prosperous and content the Western proletariat had become.
That quite a few key figures among them were Jews is another matter — but that has nothing to do with historical facts of the Holocaust which, by then, had been firmly documented, catalogued and established for what all but a few Nazis in hiding thought would be all time.
Yet, here we go again.
— Takuan Seiyo
Note: Takuan’s post (which was originally published last night) is to remain at the top for a while, so I made it “sticky”. However, much has happened since it went up, including the Blogger outage. Scroll down for a report on that.
See also: Two forthrightly anti-Semitic Islamic leaders in Norway, Judicial coddling in Germany, and Part 3 of the Imran Firasat interview.
More new posts will be added below this one. Oh, and don’t mess around with JIM.
The essay below is the conclusion of the ninth part in a series by Takuan Seiyo. See the list at the bottom of this post for links to the previous installments.
Left: Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Dance at Le Moulin de la Galette, 1876
Right: George Grosz, Metropolis, 1916/17
The Bee and the Lamb
Part 9 (continued)
By Takuan Seiyo
A Whole New Road to Serfdom
That Which is Not Seen (continued)
For over 60 years, White mea-culpists have had a firm grip in all fields of cultural mind imprinting: education high and low; paper media, then electronic, then digital media; all forms of entertainment, the plastic arts and music high and low, and religious instruction and worship too. Their main endeavor has been to enforce their compulsory (e.g. K-12) and discretionary (e.g. television) self-flaying on account of long-ago Slavery, Colonialism, Imperialism, Male Supremacism, Racism, Antisemitism, and so on.
It’s the evils of the Iberian Inquisition — which were evil — but not the evils of the Japanese equivalent in which, in the 40 years up to 1597, 50,000 Christians were publicly crucified, burned or beheaded. Nor the evils of the worldwide Islamic Inquisition which — not in the 16th century but now, in the 21st, condemns Muslim apostates to barbaric execution. It’s America’s destruction of the snail darter but not Mussulmanism’s destruction of the Bamyan Buddhas or its proposed destruction of the Sphinx and the Pyramids, let alone its obliteration of all the pre-Rome cradles of Christianity but for remaining ruins in the Middle East and dust of the desert in North Africa.
It’s the evils of feudalism and industrial workers’ exploitation in Europe and America, but not the strict Confucian evils of Northeast Asia. There, a member of the ruling class in China had, essentially, a free hand with anyone of the lower classes, a Japanese samurai could test his sword by cutting down an insolent peasant, and farmers were so squeezed by their fief holders that they habitually sold their daughters to bordellos for the few coins it provided for next season’s seed.
Feminism, Socialism and anti-Antisemitism should have arisen in Saudi Arabia or Yemen, Algeria or Peshawar, for good reasons. Instead, aggressive White androphobes of all genders which I can no longer count are decimating the philogynous and egalitarian West. Equality psychos are tearing down the most egalitarian society that ever existed (except for initial communist experiments, before they turned bloody). American Jews, at the apex of the greatest fortune and philosemitic tolerance their long diaspora has ever bestowed on their kind, are busy supporting all the ideologies and policies that demolish their safe harbor and build up their Muslim, Black and Third World enemies. They will come to rue their tacit assumption that better the antisemite you don’t know than the few hundred imputed and real ones catalogued at ADL.
One would be hard put to find a nation not based on the invasion of another people’s territory and their mass slaughter. Yet poisoned American madmen proclaim “No Thanks for Thanksgiving” as though the Indians themselves did not fight endless genocidal wars from Peru to Canada, with torture, ritual murder or slavery for the captives and, at times, cannibalism too.
Leftoid masochists and the Christian meek call for returning Hawaii to the Hawaiians and capitulating before a massive Mexican reconquista of one-third of America. The self-defined “Feminist-Tauist-NeoPagan-Post-Structuralist-Deconstructionist-Socialist” useful idiot Gillian Schutte begins her New Year 2013 Dear White People by “wholeheartedly apologizing for what my ancestors did to the people of South Africa and inviting you to do the same.”
Yet the Magyars don’t seem to feel much guilt over the Illyrians, Pannonians, Sarmatians and Celts whose land and lives they took in the 9th century, to form Hungary. The rightful Etruscan landowners are not bearing angry placards in front of the Vatican. The Japanese are not planning to relinquish Hokkaido to its original owners, the Ainu. The tall, white and fair-haired Chachapoyas of the Andean forest have, alas, no remnants left to sue the Incas for genocide in a Peruvian court of law. The Aztecs, whether in Jalisco or Los Angeles, don’t agonize over having taken what would become Mexico City from its original Culhuacan owners, with lots of grisly details. Yet for 38 years Neil Young has been reminding adoring audiences about “Cortez the Killer”, discreetly omitting Tlacaelel the killer and the killer people whom Cortez killed.
Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (1996) is a book by Daniel Goldhagen presenting the thesis that the German nation as such was composed of willing executioners of the Jews because of a unique “eliminationist antisemitism” in the German people, with long historical roots. However, even that great moral abyss of Western civilization — the Holocausts — stands out more in its industrialized and organizational features than it does either in the quality of its hatefulness or its relative or even absolute volumes. And Holocausts they were, for in addition to the nearly 6 million Jews, the Germans also murdered over 21 million civilian Slavs, and that’s counting Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania, Belarus and Czechoslovakia alone.
In absolute numbers, the total number of World War II non-German civilian victims of Nazi Germany is smaller than the 50 million victims of the Bolsheviks in Russia, or Mao’s 70 million in China, or the Mughal-Muslim genocide of Hindus — the latter have their own Holocaust Day on August 14.
In relative numbers, in just one year, 1994, the Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda, killed off a total of one million, in a population of 7 million. 75% of the Tutsi population was erased. Is it more humane to go by a stroke of a blunt machete than by a whiff of Zyklon B?
The Khmer Rouge murdered at least 2 million Cambodians between 1975 and 1979: one quarter of the population, by a conservative count. Is it more humane to die by wallops from a Cambodian pickaxe handle than by a bullet from a German Mauser?
Inscription on the back (in German): “Ukraine 1942, Jewish Aktion, Ivangorod.”
There is a special horror attached to the Third Reich, because those were 20 th century Europeans, Christians, and in many ways the smartest, most civilized people on Earth. But the Holocausts do not prove that Whites are worse than other people, just that they are no better. The history of the Third Reich also proves that with the right formula of economic blowup, misery and humiliation, sparked by charismatic evil, no people are immune to such horror, at no time.
And that includes the here and now. Unaware that history that occurs first as tragedy repeats itself as farce, the Rulers of the West have cooked up a potion with similar ingredients to those of 1930s Germany, complete with an imported Semito-Turkic minority that Europeans have far fewer reasons to like than they did the previous, semi-indigenous Semitic minority once living among them. What’s missing are hyperinflation and the evil genius. But not to worry — they are working hard on “quantitatively easing” and “prime pumping” the hyperinflation into being. And hyperinflations have a way of unearthing evil geniuses too.
All that while thinking that they have run away from Hitler as far and as fast as is humanly possible, having roiled from Berlin to Brisbane 24/7 for 50 years to find the fascist in every White and the evil in every facet of Western tradition.
Hence the loud guffaw reverberating through the cosmos.
De mortalitate
The early Church Father and martyr, Cyprian of Carthage, was witness to the smallpox pandemic that devastated the Roman Empire in the second half of the third century. The pandemic is known as the Plague of Cyprian, because he described it in the consoling missive to his congregation, De mortalitate, i.e. “On the Plague.” At its height, the plague killed 5,000 people a day in Rome alone and, according to Cyprian, no house in Carthage was without its victims.
It’s the irony of recurring human folly that the powers that be and the mob in Carthage blamed the Christians for the plague and unleashed murderous persecutions against them, just as the Christians would blame the Jews for the bubonic plague a millennium later, and kill them by the hundreds of thousands across the continent, from Spain to Lithuania. [1]
The task of science in epidemic etiology is to find and isolate the cause. Only then can the cure be devised. With respect to the Western brain rot that I call acute cognitive spongiform encephalitis, a small group of academics in the 1950s-60s was “patient zero.” What the homosexual Canadian flight attendant Gaëtan Dugas was with respect to the spread of AIDS, they were with respect to multiculturalism, “diversity,” demonizing the white race, extolling the barbaric and inferior as long as non-white, rewriting history, white population replacement, Islamization, “justice and equity” (with mutations such as “environmental justice”), celebration of loose sex and of deviant sexuality, demonization of men and masculinization of women, sabotage of the West camouflaged as love of Gaia, and the conversion of the entire Western gestalt from amalgamated Christianity and Enlightenment rationalism to a fanatical secular religion replete with totems and taboos, manifest lies, forbidden truths, hallucinatory mandates revealed to chosen prophets, and persecution of apostates.
The American philosopher Stephen Hicks has traced this causal chain superbly in his Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault.[2]
Hicks traces the roots of postmodernism to Rousseau, Kant and Heidegger, but we shall examine just five of the post-1950 main branches: all university professors of major renown. Of the four academics whom Hicks credits with originating postmodernism — Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, and Richard Rorty — we shall look next at Foucault and Derrida. Then, the father of the postmodern New Left, Herbert Marcuse, whom Hicks also covers in his book. Finally, two chief Anglophone spreaders of the pox in the realms of history and literary criticism: Howard Zinn and Edward Said.
All of that, and all of these, have been mutations of Marxism, just as the successful virus absorbs and adapts to the body’s defenses and then finds a new avenue of attack that circumvents the body’s immune system.
This perception is of significant operational implication. To cite just one of some twenty major plagues now bedeviling the West, it implies that the advanced Islamization of Western Europe and the creeping one of the Anglophonic diaspora cannot be combated by arguing about the history of Islamic imperialism, the wiles of taqiyyah or the evils of sharia.
Islam and Muslims are not the lethal disease. It’s the West’s postmodern Marxism-soaked universities that are the lethal disease, and the generations of their programmed graduates who are now the Ruling Class of the West. Without them, Muslims would have been back where they were in 1955 — in Sanaa and Fallujah, Islamabad and Jawhar, but not in Houston, Melbourne, Amsterdam and Cologne. Islam would have still had its supremacist dreams, but dormant and subdued — for Muslims, in their own native milieus and dealing with a self-confident, rational West, would have had other things to worry about than how to make the World Khalifate come true. In fact, a sort of tenuous friendship could have existed between the West and Dar-al-Islam, the way it existed between mid 19 th and mid 20 th centuries.
If only the West’s nouveau-Marxists had not shot their host society in the head…
Picture on the left by permission of D.T. Devareaux; picture on the right, popular icon, creator unknown
Notes:
| 1. | It’s important to keep track of such things in a civilization that’s dying by its own hand. For what is taking place is bad karma accumulated from horrific stupidity in the past, acting to produce a countervailing horrific stupidity in the present. The chain of stupidity could be broken if people were able to see the pattern. You cannot and should not atone for the murder of six million Jews by self-kneecapping through the import of 25 million profoundly alien Muslims three generations later. | |
| 2. | Stephen R. C. Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault, Ockham’s Razor, August 2011. |
Takuan Seiyo is a European-born American writer living in exile in Japan.
Previous posts:
Our Norwegian correspondent The Observer sends his translation of an article and interview with two respectable high-profile Muslim leaders in Oslo, who have strongly negative opinions about Jews and the worldwide Jewish conspiracy. The Observer notes:
A new trend seems to have developed in the Islamic community in Norway: grab hold of a journalist and speak your mind on issues such as stoning, adultery, apostasy and Jews — and don’t hold back.
This article deals with the twisted views of the imam and the chairman of Norway’s largest mosque. It should also be pointed out that this is the same mosque that the Norwegian police apologized so profusely to last year for the fact that we have freedom of speech in Norway.
The translated article from Dagsavisen:
Imam blames Jews for media coverage
Controversial: Many Norwegians have a negative view on Islam due to Jewish domination of the media. This accusation is made by the imam and by the chairman of Norway’s largest mosque.
We are visiting Central Jamaat-e Ahl-e Sunnat, the mosque with the largest member base in Norway, to talk to its spiritual leader. The mosque was founded in 1977 and currently has more than 5,000 members. The Cultural Center in Grønland in Oslo can accommodate 2500 people during prayers. The spiritual leader, Imam Nehmat Ali Shah is not fluent in Norwegian, so every now and then Chairman, Ghulam Sarwar has to translate from Punjabi.
“But we have the same opinions,” says Sarwar while the imam nods and smiles — he looks both stern and benign at the same time.
The subject of the interview is the relationship between the major religions and Norwegians’ attitudes toward Islam. The Imam begins by explaining that all three heavenly religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, are sacred to them. Many people are unaware of this fact, says Sarwar.
Then a statement is made that many will find far more problematic.
“The Jews ruin things”
“Schoolchildren visit the mosque regularly and some of the students may think that we are against Christianity,” says Sarwar. Both of them believe that the school visits confirms their views that Norwegians in general have an inaccurate impression of Islam and Muslims.
“Students, journalists and people like you ask the same questions over and over again — about forced marriage, hijab and whether females can become imams.
“No one can be forcefully compelled to marry in Islam, but parents can assist in finding the right partner, and no, women cannot become imams. People are ignorant because they get their information from the media, and the media only write negatively about Islam. Judaism has a better grip on the media,” says Sarwar.
“Why do the media only write negatively about Islam?”
“Because the media has Jewish roots. The Jews control the media and that’s detrimental. Only a handful of people were behind the movie about Mohammed in the U.S. and they didn’t have a lot of money. So who was financing them, who was backing them?” asks Sarwar, referring to the anti-Islamic film The Innocence of Muslims, produced by a Christian Egyptian Copt living in the USA.
“Anxious people”
“Who are the Jews behind this in your opinion?”
“I couldn’t say. I don’t know exactly who, but there aren’t that many Jews. I read that seven million of them were killed in WW2, so there aren’t that many of them today, because there weren’t that many around back then either.”
“How did the Jews manage to attain such media power?”
“Because of education and business.”
Sarwar translates the question to Nehmat Ali Shah.
“Jews have immense commercial power that stretches around the world,” repeats the Imam through Sarwar.
“What is the relationship generally between Jews and Muslims?”
“It has never been good.”
“Why not?”
“Why did the Germans kill them? One reason is that they are anxious people,” says Sarwar.
Wants dialogue
“But at the same time you do say positive things about Judaism, that it is sacred?”
“Yes, we’re not saying that Jews should be killed or anything to that effect. Moses is our prophet, but some people only want to ruin things,” says Sarwar.
“The Quran says that we should accept all the prophets of Judaism, Christianity and Islam — from Moses to Jesus. If we speak ill of the prophets we would be contradicting our own books, but it’s not like that for Jews and Christians,” adds Al Shah.
“What do the media want to achieve by writing negatively about Islam?”
“They want to prevent Islam from growing.”
The Imam confirms what Sarwar is saying
“Dialogue is very important to us. You may find disagreements, but that doesn’t mean that we should stop talking to each other. Dialogue is the only way,” says Chairman Ghulam Sarwar while Imam Ali Shah Nehmat nods affirmatively.
Reacts sharply
Rune Ottosen, a professor of journalism from the University College of Oslo, reacts strongly when he hears about the remarks made by the two leaders of the Mosque:
“This sounds like anti-Semitic conspiracy theories of the worst kind,” he says.
He points out that the Norwegian media landscape is dominated by NRK, TV 2, Schibsted and A-pressen.
“The fact that they can actually think in such terms is so far removed from reality that I find it difficult to take them seriously. It is impossible to debate on such a basis,” says Ottosen.
He is willing to admit that the media coverage can be skewed and refers to own research about media coverage of Islam and Muslims.
“Of course prejudices exist, and yes, let’s talk about it. But the debate needs to be based on an actual knowledge of the Norwegian media landscape. These allegations are something entirely different. When such prominent figures say things like that, it just reaffirms that there are fundamental anti-Semitic sentiments within the Muslim community.”
