Israel Matzav

Europe still ignoring reality

Bruce Bawer has a disturbing story about Norwegian women's rights activist Hege Storhaug (Hat Tip: Michael F).

Hege is a former journalist and longtime women’s rights activist in Oslo whose concern about the treatment of women and girls in Muslim communities made her a pioneering critic of Islam in Norway. Time and again she has taken extraordinary personal risks to stand up for females who are confined to their homes, who are denied educations and careers, and who are the victims (or potential victims) of honor killing, genital mutilation, forced marriage, and sundry forms of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse.

In 2006, her book But the Greatest of All Is Freedom: On the Consequences of Immigration became a huge—and controversial—best-seller in Norway. At the time, Hege lived in a neighborhood called Kampen, a part of Oslo that brings to mind the Haight-Ashbury or East Village of the 1960s. Hege notes that after her book began to sell big—and draw harsh media attacks—her neighborhood was papered over with posters featuring a photo of her with an X drawn over her face, along with the slogan NO TO RACISTS IN KAMPEN. Then one day—as Hege revealed in a powerful account posted yesterday on the website of Human Rights Service, the small foundation where she works—one or more people broke into her home, beat her, and left her bruised and unconscious in a pool of blood on the floor. Nothing was stolen. The date was January 1, 2007—three years to the day before the attempted murder of Westergaard.

At first, Hege kept the crime secret, for fear that publicizing it would discourage other critics of Islam from speaking out. Not until a month later did she report the brutal event to the police, and then only after a lawyer friend had secured a guarantee that the report would not be made public. But the steady rise in Muslim violence in Europe, culminating in the Westergaard attack, helped changed her mind about publicly revealing the assault. She also wanted to underscore the fact that many in the media—people like Vaïsse, I might add—were by their see-no-evil approach to the subject encouraging physical attacks on people like her and Westergaard. This state of affairs, she felt, needed to be addressed publicly and its real-world consequences made clear.

The fact is that for years Hege has been the target of a ruthless, tireless, and breathlessly mendacious campaign of criticism by the far-left Norwegian media. She’s become Public Enemy Number One among not only radical Muslims but also Communists, socialists (whose numbers in Norway’s capital are not insignificant), and what Hege calls “organized anti-racists.” These are members of Scandinavia’s many government-funded organizations who claim to be liberal opponents of racism but are in fact largely concerned with defending even the most illiberal aspects of immigrant cultures. Indeed, Hege doesn’t believe that her assailants were Muslims; she suspects that they were far leftists of the sort who proliferate in neighborhoods like Kampen and who have made common cause with European Islamists. Hege is also convinced—as am I—that the media’s concerted effort to identify her as a racist and Islamophobe influenced her attackers. This is not difficult to believe: it was, after all, the Dutch media’s demonization of Fortuyn that helped put him in an early grave instead of in his country’s prime ministership.

Bawer's column was prompted by another column I read the other day in Foreign Policy by Justin Vaisse. Vaisse argues that all the warnings about Europe becoming Eurabia are 'exaggerated' because Europe has now reached a 'replacement' birth rate. Bawer disagrees. Bawer says that Vaisse and others like him are closing their eyes to things like the drain on Europe's welfare system from large Muslim families where the husbands have multiple wives and don't work. Vaisee believes places like Malmo can't happen elsewhere. Bawer believes they're likely to happen. Bawer fears Europe's far Left, which supports the Islamists because it's the liberal thing to do.

The ordinary Europeans continue to believe that they can roll along as they are and nothing will happen to them. They allow the growth of Islam and the hatred of Jews in their midst because they don't see that they are the next victims on the list. This is even more true in Scandinavia than on the Continent. I have on my shelf a 256-page monogram called "Behind the Humanitarian Mask: The Nordic Countries, Israel and the Jews." It's written by Manfred Gerstenfeld of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. Storhaug is not cited there, but Bawer is. Here's what Bawer has to say about Oslo:

To walk the streets of Oslo today is to recall that this is a city where, within human memory, Jews were rounded up and shipped off to their deaths while their neighbors sat in their kitchens placidly consuming kjottkaker and boiled potatoes. There can be little doubt that Europeans' still largely suppressed guilt over the Holocaust, and their enduring irrational Jew-hatred, are significant factors in Europe's ongoing self-destruction.

The far Left and the Islamists are enemies of the Jews. If we don't recognize that, what could go wrong?

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 7:55 AM