Fjordman’s latest essay has been published at FrontPage Mag. Some excerpts are below:
After Barack Hussein Obama was reelected as President of the United States in November 2012, the regular columnist Frithjof Jacobsen wrote in the Norwegian newspaper VG that the problem for Obama is that as a human being, he is so great that it becomes hard to live up to these expectations as a political leader. He claimed that the same was the case with another left-wing politician, Norway’s Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg.
Frithjof Jacobsen suggested that Stoltenberg is in a totally different league from all the other politicians in his country and has displayed exceptional “moral fiber.” If you believe this leading columnist in Norway’s largest national newspaper, “The public person Jens Stoltenberg has given the Übermensch a human face.”
Yes, he used the same term (overmenneske in Norwegian, Übermensch in the original German) as was employed by the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche about exceptional human beings above normal morality, which was also used or misused by the Nazis for their own purposes. This is an embarrassing reminder of the tradition for personality cults surrounding various left-wing leaders throughout history, most of them deeply flawed.
Read the rest at FrontPage Mag.[…]
It is disturbing to notice that the very same groups and individuals who once appeased or collaborated with totalitarian outside forces during the Cold War are now doing the same thing with Islamic organizations.
Vebjørn Selbekk, the editor of a small Christian newspaper in Norway, on January 10 2006 reprinted the Danish Mohammed cartoons. The former Oslo bishop Gunnar Stålsett reacted by claiming that he did this because he took pleasure in harassing Muslims. Selbekk merely wanted show what the international news story was about.
Selbekk had expected some reactions, but not on the scale of what happened. He soon received 50 explicit death threats from Muslims, and at that point he stopped counting. Some of these were very graphic, with details about cutting his throat in his bedroom. Prior to this, he had lived a quiet family life. Suddenly everything was turned upside down, with bodyguards instructing his children to check for bombs under their car.
In addition to the death threats against him, massive pressure for Selbekk to back down came from leading Norwegian politicians such as Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Støre of the Labor Party. After this event, the FM repeatedly had direct contact with leader Khaled Mashal of the Palestinian Islamic terror organization Hamas, contacts which Støre tried to hide and deny. In 2007, the Stoltenberg government made Norway the first country in the Western world to attempt to “normalize” its relationship with the terrorists of Hamas, since its youth organization AUF, the labor unions (LO) and coalition partner the Socialist Left Party had all pushed for this.
In 2006 Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg, at a point when Selbekk’s family were living with constant death threats, pointed to him as personally responsible for the burning of the Norwegian embassy in Damascus, Syria, perhaps the most serious attack on Norwegian territory since WW2. He thereby abandoned one of his countrymen and indirectly gave legitimacy to Islamic death threats against him. Selbekk has later described (video) that he felt as if the Stoltenberg government told militant Muslims “Just take him, he has hurt Norwegian interests.”
The conservative Prime Minister of Denmark, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, showed some spine during the Cartoon Jihad and refused to apologize to Muslims for the actions of one newspaper in his country. The Socialist Prime Minister of Norway, Jens Stoltenberg, displayed the spine of a badly baked soufflé and quickly caved in to Islamic pressure. If he has the exceptional “moral fiber” of an Übermensch, he certainly didn’t show it then.
As Vebjørn Selbekk warns, what is valuable is not free, including freedom of speech. Unfortunately, that lesson doesn’t seem to have sunk in with everybody, including the leaders of what was once called “the free world.”
For a complete archive of Fjordman’s writings, see the multi-index listing in the Fjordman Files.
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