What was particularly perverse about this picture was that the politician whom Qureshi called on the carpet, Abid Q. Raja, is also a Muslim – one who’s made clear his own Islamist sympathies but who, in the current bizarre atmosphere, comes off, in comparison with the likes of Qureshi, as a moderate, a patriot, a stalwart champion of the royal house and of Norwegian democracy. (The possibility that such confrontations between top-flight Norwegian Muslims are part of a calculated good cop/bad cop strategy cannot be discounted.)
Anyway, Friday came around, and the big rally proved anti-climactic, to say the least. Muslim leaders had spent the week begging their coreligionists to stay away lest they screw up the post-Breivik interdict on Islam criticism. Nearly every Muslim in Norway obeyed. Dozens of journalists and scores of cops turned up for the protest – as did I – but only a few protesters. I stayed around long enough to hear Bhatti spewing into a microphone his contempt for America, Israel, “infidels,” and “kufr,” and echoing the threats uttered on the Norway-out-of-Afghanistan video. (Unfortunately, my video of Bhatti’s rant shows him and his supporters from about thirty yards away; the mounted policewoman seen in the foreground wouldn’t let me get closer.)
On Saturday afternoon, the top headline on the website of Norway’s biggest newspaper, VG, was about Niqab Girl. It turned out that the indirect government funding of her promotion tour for female subordination (her sponsor, the Norwegian Non-Fiction Writers and Translators Association, receives generous state support) was now being criticized by members of parliament from several parties – which raised the hope that there might actually be a limit to some of these people’s mind-boggling dhimmitude. Still, Wanda Voldner, head of Foreningen Les!, the group that’s sending Niqab Girl around to the schools, said there were no plans to end her tour.
VG further revealed that Niqab Girl – surprise! – supports the Taliban and prefers sharia to democracy. Voldner had no problems with this, either: “She doesn’t call for violence….We don’t see why we should change a collaboration that’s already underway.” The general secretary of the Norwegian Non-Fiction Writers and Translators Association (NFF) agreed: “There are many authors who have many different opinions….NFF doesn’t censor.”
No – neither of these groups would ever, ever censor an author. Perish the thought! Unless, of course, the author in question was a critic of Islam. No, as far as the Norwegian establishment is concerned, it’s perfectly legitimate to invite an “author” whose entire oeuvre consists of a thousand-word piece of propaganda to “lecture” to kids on the pretext that she’s talking about her “work”; but to invite an actual working writer who actually knows a thing or two about Islam to tell the same students the truth about it – and about the Koran, and sharia law, and jihad (and to explain why Niqab Girl’s lecture tour is, in fact, a form of jihad) – would be hate speech, pure and simple.
The only hope for an about-face on this march into madness lies with the Norwegian people. Can parents who have sons battling the Taliban in Afghanistan actually accept that their taxes are paying for a Taliban supporter to indoctrinate their younger children in Norwegian classrooms? For heaven’s sake, if this doesn’t raise enough people’s hackles to make a difference, what will?
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