Listening to the radio on two or three occasions since the beginning of February, I’ve heard reporters  out on the street asking black passersby which men and women in African-American history they look up to.  The occasion, of course, is Black History Month.

For most of the passersby I heard, the question seemed to be a surprisingly difficult one.  Many of them could come up with only one name: Martin Luther King, Jr.  Some, after a bit of prodding, added Malcolm X.  A few mentioned Oprah.  One named Will Smith.  What was perhaps surprising – or perhaps not – is that only a couple thought of President Obama.

I’m of two minds about a “history month” devoted to any particular group, whether blacks, gays, women, Latinos, short people, bald guys, or whatever.  On the one hand, Americans don’t need to be given any more encouragement to think of themselves as members of groups – we’ve already gone too far down that road.  On the other hand, Americans desperately need to know more about their own history.  Not, of course, from the narrow and hostile perspective of Howard Zinn and company, but from a comprehensive perspective that, while certainly not overlooking the dark chapters of our country’s past, acknowledges that the American story is unique, extraordinary, and incomparably inspiring – and that its principal actors have come from every corner of the earth.

Another consideration is that black Americans, like members of pretty much every other group, have often been taught to idolize certain other members of their group who simply don’t deserve their respect.  Jesse “Hymietown” Jackson, anyone?  Al “Tawana Brawley” Sharpton?  Talk to young people who’ve taken courses in Black Studies and they’ll tell you that their heroes include unspeakable creeps like Huey Newton and Angela Davis.  It’s appalling.  Many revere Muhammed Ali, but while they know about the bigotry to which he was so cruelly subjected, they’re clueless about his own history of appalling prejudice.

Then there’s the nearly ubiquitous contemporary tendency to use the word “hero” almost as a synonym for “celebrity.”  So one ends up with young people whose black “heroes” are basketball players – or hip-hop artists who are at least as well known for their rap sheets as for their rap.

My own feeling, while listening to those radio interviews, was that if we’re going to have a Black History Month, let’s take advantage of the occasion to inform young Americans today – of whatever skin color – about great black Americans of the past whom they may not know about but who helped to turn America into a greater and more tolerant country.

People like Hattie McDaniel, who played Mammy in Gone With the Wind and won the first acting Oscar ever given to a black person.  Even as a top-flight movie star, McDaniel was subjected to humiliating prejudice (she wasn’t invited to attend the Atlanta premiere of GWTW), but she endured it with immense self-respect and self-discipline, working as a maid when she couldn’t get acting jobs playing maids.  She was not an activist in the narrowest sense, but, as the wonderful actress Fay Bainter said in presenting the award to McDaniel, her Oscar victory was itself a triumph for the cause of true diversity, “enabl[ing] us to embrace the whole of America – an America that we love, and an America that, almost alone in the world today, recognizes and pays tribute to those who have given their best, regardless of creed, race, or color.”

And what about Zora Neale Hurston, whose eloquent, achingly beautiful 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God is infinitely better than anything Toni Morrison or Alice Walker ever wrote?  Unlike many other prominent black Americans of her day, Hurston was no fan of the New Deal, which she saw as a formula for dependency.  If she was about anything, it was individual independence, writing:

I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all. I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all but about it. Even in the helter-skelter skirmish that is my life, I have seen that the world is to the strong regardless of a little pigmentation more of less. No, I do not weep at the world – I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.

Recently the Partij voor Moslim Nederland (Party for Muslim Netherlands), which already enjoys a significant presence in various municipal governments in that country, announced that it intended to run candidates for the Dutch Parliament.  An article in Forbes listed the party’s major principles, which included limits on “offensive” speech about religion; the criminalization of blasphemy and of the destruction of religious texts; immediate admission of Turkey to the EU; an end to support for Israel; and the free and unimpeded importation of Muslim brides from abroad.

Whether to work within existing parties, or to concentrate on forming and building up separate Muslim parties, has always been a key strategic question for the soft jihadists of Europe.  Though there are Muslims in Norway who are prominent members of several large traditional parties, the country now has a Muslim party too.  Founded in 2009 as the Independent Labour Party, it was obliged later that year to change its name to the Samtidspartiet (Contemporary Party) because of official concerns that it might be confused with the Norwegian Labor Party.  When outlining the party’s goals, its founder, Norwegian-Pakistani Ghuffor Butt, focused on a desire for lower taxes, gas prices, and the like – making it sound like rather a libertarian party for Muslims.  Formerly a cinema director, producer, and political journalist in Pakistan, as well as an actor in some twenty Pakistani movies, Butt ran – and, as far as I know, still runs – a successful store in Grønland, a largely Muslim district in Oslo, that sells Bollywood films.

Yet lest these credentials suggest he was a “liberal” and “modern” Muslim, Butt made it clear, in answer to a Dagbladet journalist’s questions, that his party’s other objectives included lifting the ban on hijab in the police force, establishing exclusively Muslim schools and hospitals, instructing immigrant-group children in their parents’ native tongue rather than in Norwegian, easing residence-visa rules, using taxpayer money to fund the building of mosques and pay the salaries of imams, punishing those who had reprinted the Danish Muhammed cartoons, withdrawing troops from Afghanistan, and prohibiting homosexuality.  (Later, presumably loath to offend some of his allies on the left, Butt made a phone call to Dagbladet to walk back the bit about gays: while homosexual conduct is forbidden by Islam, he said, the party did not intend to change Norwegian law on the subject.  Yeah, right.)

“If Norwegians didn’t drink alcohol, have premarital sex, and eat pork,” Butt told Dagbladet, “they’d be the world’s best Muslims.”  He also suggested that Mossad was responsible for 9/11 and echoed the popular myth that Jews hadn’t shown up for work at the World Trade Center that day.

It is interesting to note that the official launch of this putatively Norwegian political party took place in Pakistan – yet another apparent indication of the way in which many Norwegian-Pakistanis view their relationships to their old and new homelands.  As Butt explained, it was easier to reach Norwegian Pakistani voters in Norway this way because they didn’t watch Norwegian TV: thanks to satellite dishes, their sets are tuned to the Pakistani channels on which he was planning to do interviews.  “In three years, Oslo’s mayor will be a Norwegian-Pakistani,” he predicted (wrong so far), and expressed the hope that within fifteen years a “second-generation immigrant” would be Norway’s prime minister.

This is how it happens, folks.  Little by little.  Law by law.  The proponents of sharia get themselves elected to positions of power – and then, before too long, they start trying to subject the rest of us to it, bit by bit:

Hasan Küçük, Hague councilor for the Islam Democrats, says dogs should be banned as pets in the city, reports De Telegraaf. The Muslim party says that the animals belong in nature, not inside the house. Küçük says that keeping dogs is animal abuse and should therefore be criminalized.

Needless to say, Hasan Küçük’s concerns have nothing whatsoever to do with animal abuse – and everything to do with the fact that Islam considers dogs to be impure.  Like women, Jews, and gays, dogs are on the front line of the confrontation in the West between sharia-observant Muslims and the rest of us.  When you see Muslims making trouble over dogs, you can bet that it’s just the beginning of all kinds of trouble over all kinds of things that run afoul of Islamic religious law.

To be sure, Küçük’s suggestion – which came in response to a proposal by animal-rights advocates that The Hague be made more dog-friendly – was immediately shot down by other members of the city council.  Küçük was undoubtedly not surprised.  He knows these things don’t change in a day – they change over time, by a gradual process of wearing down.  People like Küçük are exceedingly patient.  And they trust in their own patience and intransigence – and in our weakness, our distraction, our readiness to give in, eventually, under steady pressure, on what may seem to us like small matters that are not worth fighting over.

Küçük’s proposal is nothing new.  For years now, the Western media have featured, with some frequency, news stories about blind people with guide dogs being refused taxi rides by devout Muslims cabdrivers, being thrown off buses because of complaints by Muslim passengers, or being refused access to stores by devout Muslim shopkeepers.  Daniel Pipes has been assiduous in cataloging such cases, some of them dating back to the 1990s, in places ranging from Milwaukee to Melbourne.

The Muslims in these cases invariably argue that their religion commands them not to be around dogs.  But it’s not just about dogs but about pretty much every little detail of daily life.  The same people who object fiercely to the presence of dogs in their shops or cabs also maintain that their religion commands them not to do, or touch, or say, or see, or be in the vicinity of a great variety of things that are commonplace in the Western world.  And once they’ve gotten their way with regard to dogs, they’ll move on to another thing – and then another, and another – at which they take offense, and once again spell out exactly how they expect non-Muslims to change their behavior in order to keep the peace.

Last month, after the Costa Concordia fiasco in Livorno, Gregoria De Falco – the port official who ordered the cartoonishly cowardly captain, Francesco Schettino, to get back on his ship and aid in the rescue effort – became an instant hero.  But De Falco’s wife dissented, saying it was “ridiculous” to call her husband a hero.  “The worrying thing,” she said, “is that people like my husband who simply do their duty every day, immediately become idols, personalities, heroes in this country. That is not normal.”

Wise lady.  But it’s not only in Italy, these days, that some people are awed when others simply do their duty.  Take last Sunday’s guilty verdicts in the Kingston, Ontario, honor-killing case.  On June 30, 2009, as Stephen Brown recounted here the other day, three teenage sisters and their father’s first wife were found dead in a car in the Rideau Canal.  Three weeks later, police arrested the girls’ father, Afghani-born real-estate tycoon Mohammad Shafia, their mother, Tooba Mohammad Yahya, and their brother, Hamed.  All three have now been handed 25-year prison sentences for first-degree murder.

You didn’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to crack this case.  Far from it.  The perpetrators’ alibis were monumentally feeble, the motives transparent, the evidence ludicrously incriminating.  On the family computer, someone had Googled “where to commit a murder” and “Can a prisoner have control over his real estate.” On wiretaps recorded after the murders, the father was heard boasting of his sense of honor, calling his dead daughters “filthy and rotten children” and saying “may the devil shit on their graves.”

Yet after the verdict, commentaries hailed the judge and jurors as courageous.  How depressing that it should be considered courageous to send such people to prison!  “Experts in so-called honour killings,” wrote Monique Muise in the Montreal Gazette, “heralded the verdict as a step forward; a clear message that neither Canada’s courts nor its people will tolerate this type of crime.” How depressing that a free country needs to send a message that it’s unacceptable to kill your children!

There are other depressing aspects to the case.  Even to breathe the words “honor killing” in connection with such a crime nowadays is to invite a lecture by multiculturalists to the effect that the very term is racist.  “Murder is murder,” they’ll insist; “non-Muslims kill their loved ones, too.” Readers of an article on the CBC website about the Shafia case felt compelled to protest that “we [Canadians are not] superior to any culture when it comes to how we treat children” and that “we shouldn’t make negative comments about immigrant’s [sic] practices when domestic violence is rampant amongst those who are Canadian born.”

This was basically the line Alia Hogben, executive director of the Canadian Council of Muslim Women, fed to Muise.  “I’m frustrated and fed up with the kind of emphasis and time that’s been spent calling it an honour killing,” Hogben said.  “The media attention in particular has been very much on this being something exotic, something foreign, as opposed to the fact that this was the murder of four women in Canada,” she said. “I think it was because that separated us from them. People want to believe it’s other people doing this. Canadians don’t do this.”

Founded in 1985, Reporters Sans Frontières (RSF), also known as Reporters Without Borders, professes to be motivated by a profound devotion to freedom of expression.  The organization has apparently done good work on behalf of journalists in countries like Cuba and China, where press freedom simply doesn’t exist.  But RSF also issues an annual Press Freedom Index – the latest was released just the other day – in which it purports to rank countries according to the degree of freedom their journalists enjoy.  Let’s just say that the list doesn’t represent RSF at its finest.

As someone who frequently slams the New York Times, I’m glad to be able to say that Times reporter Andrew Rosenthal, writing about RSF’s new list last week, summoned precisely the right word to describe it: “ridiculous.” As Rosenthal put it: “Like US News & World Report with colleges, they freshen the list each year based on new developments, and – again like US News – they sometimes end up with a pecking-order that doesn’t quite mesh with reality.”

For example, on the new list, the United States comes in at #47, falling from #20 last year, purportedly because police officers have beaten and arrested journalists reporting on the Occupy Wall Street movement.  One suspects that at least some of those whom RSF counts as mistreated journalists are bloggers who were taking active, and violent, part in them.  Be that as it may, it turns out that Hungary was given a better ranking this year than the U.S., even though its news media are under government control.  Rosenthal issues a challenge to RSF: “Can you find me a journalist who thinks he’d have a freer hand in Hungary than in the United States? I don’t think so.”

But it’s not just Hungary’s position relative to the U.S. that is ludicrous.  To judge by RSF’s rankings, you’d think some of the most troubling recent assaults by Western governments on the freedom of expression never took place at all.

Take one of two countries tied for tenth place – Canada, where a few years back both Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant were hauled before Human Rights Commissions for writing critically about Islam.  Although the Ontario Human Rights Commission declared that the offending article by Steyn – which had appeared in the new magazine Macleans – was beyond its jurisdiction, it condemned the article anyway, rendering, in effect, a guilty verdict without a trial on a matter that it acknowledged was none of its business.

Steyn’s article appeared in 2006, and his cases before the Ontario and Canadian Human Rights Commissions were wound up in 2008; so were two cases against Levant before the Alberta Human Rights Commission.  But there’s no indication that anything has changed in Canada to render critics of Islam less vulnerable to government harassment in 2011 than Steyn and Levant were in 2008.  In any event, it’s worth noting that Canada’s Press Freedom ranking in 2008 was #13, while the U.S. was tied with several other countries for 36^th place.

Tied with Canada at #10 this year is Denmark, where author and journalist Lars Hedegaard has been put on trial for criticizing Islam in a conversation held in his own home.  Hedegaard – who is the founder and director of Denmark’s Free Press Society as well as of the International Free Press Society – was found not guilty of racism in 2011, but the case was retried, and later in the year he was found guilty and fined 5,000 kroner ($884).  It was an outrageous travesty of Western justice and a chilling betrayal of the freedom of expression for which Hedegaard’s own organization stands – and which the RSF, too, purportedly exists to defend.  But does RSF even know about the case?  From 2010 to 2011, Denmark actually went up a slot on its Press Freedom list, from #11 to #10.

At #5 on RSF’s new list is Austria.  Elizabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff, anyone?  In February 2011, an Austrian court convicted her of “denigration of religious beliefs of a legally recognized religion” – guess which one? – and fined her up to €480; in December, Austria’s Supreme Court affirmed the verdict.  Despite this scandalous precedent, Austria’s new RSF ranking, too, represents a step up from 2010, when it was at #7.

The only thing worse than having the biases of the mainstream media inflicted upon you on a daily basis is having to subsidize it.  For Americans, to be sure, the rip-off isn’t so terrible: the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which funds PBS and NPR, gets $430 million a year from the federal government, which comes to only a couple of bucks per household.  In Britain, by contrast, the BBC license fee is now £145.50 ($226) annually per TV-owning family.  And in Canada, the CBC receives more than $1.5 billion a year from the Canadian government, which amounts to upwards of $100 per household.

And what, exactly, are Canadian taxpayers paying for?  That’s the question asked – and very illuminatingly answered – by a new documentary, This Hour Could Have 10,000 Minutes: The Biases of the CBC, produced by James Cohen and Fred Litwin.  (The title is a reference to “This Hour Has 22 Minutes,” a long-running CBC series specializing in political satire.)  Focusing on two main topics – anti-Israel bias and anti-conservative bias – the documentary consists almost entirely of CBC clips (most but not all of them from news programs) in which we can see these biases in action.  To judge by this compilation, the CBC is perhaps even more slanted than the infamously partial BBC – and, perhaps, even more brazen about it.

Take the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  In the documentary we see excerpts from a CBC report on the second Gaza “Freedom Flotilla” that consists entirely of interviews with flotilla participants – all of whom represent it as a virtuous and innocuous aid mission and condemn Israel’s actions against the previous flotilla as absolutely unjustified.  At no point does the CBC provide even a brief reminder that there is, in fact, another side to the story.  (As the documentary asks: “Is this reporting?  Or stenography?”)

In one report, the CBC describes the Jewish Defense League, untruthfully, as a terrorist group that’s banned in Canada.  In another report, on Hamas’s struggle with Fatah and takeover of Gaza, the CBC includes file footage of Israeli soldiers firing at terrorists – images that have nothing to do with the story in question.  In both cases, the CBC was compelled to issue on-air apologies. (This documentary, in fact, is packed with on-air apologies for this sort of thing.)

We’re shown a clip in which an interviewer lets nutty ex-Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, a 9/11 Truther, rant away about Israel – and doesn’t challenge her when she accuses Israel of committing a “massacre” of “unarmed humanitarian activists.” And we’re shown another clip in which the despicable George Galloway is treated with fawning respect by interviewer George Stroumboulopoulos, who describes him as being banned from Canada (he’s not) and who agrees with Galloway that it’s “ridiculous” to consider him a terrorist.  (To clarify this issue, the documentary makers show a clip from Arab TV in which Galloway is seen handing money over to Hamas – and bragging about it.)

Not only is the CBC systematically anti-Israeli and pro-Palestinian.  Its journalists introduce Israel and Palestine into stories that are utterly unrelated to Israel and Palestine, comparing aggressors with Israel and victims with Palestinians, the more firmly to fix in viewers’ minds the notion that Israelis are, indeed, the incarnation of evil and Palestinians as pure as the driven snow.

In a story about Somalis fleeing from belligerent Islamists in North Africa, for example, a CBC reporter says that “the Somalis are becoming the Palestinians of Africa.” In a story about Egypt’s use of its emergency laws to quell uprisings, another CBC reporter, in an apparent effort to make Egypt’s actions sound less harsh, points out that “Israel has an emergency law too,” which he proceeds to describe at length – even though those laws have nothing whatsoever to do with the events he’s reporting on.

The CBC, as the documentary points out, “can use any story to show how awful Israel is.” In a report on the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the CBC manages to work in an absurd comparison between the Soviets’ wall and Israel’s security fence: “For some people, the Berlin anniversary is a reminder of their own divisions.  Today a group of Palestinian activists took down a slab of the security barrier that separates Israel and the West Bank.” (The report also describes the barrier as an “electronic fence,” which it isn’t.)

It was, shall we say, an interesting week in Norway.  On Tuesday, January 17, a video was posted on YouTube that called for Norwegian soldiers to be withdrawn from Afghanistan.  Over images of Norwegian soldiers and of Norway’s prime minister, foreign minister, and crown prince, a text calling for Allah to “destroy them and let it be painful” was read aloud in Arabic, with subtitles in Norwegian.  The video, which concluded with an image of Norway’s flag in flames, urged Muslims to show up for a protest rally on Friday outside the parliament building in Oslo.

The video provoked instant outrage.  On Wednesday, the security police arrested a suspect, but announced that even if the rally organizers proved to be responsible for the video, their permit wouldn’t be withdrawn.  It soon emerged that there were connections between the video and a Facebook group whose members included Arfan Bhatti, one of four men arrested in 2006 for shooting at the Oslo synagogue.  (Bhatti was also suspected by police of plotting to blow up the U.S. and Israeli embassies.)  Another member was Mohyeldeen Mohammed, who at a jihadist rally two years ago threatened Norway with its own 9/11.

And guess who else turned out to be an active member of the Facebook group?  None other than Aisha Shezadi Kausar (20), whom I wrote about a couple of weeks ago – the girl who’s being sent around to schools by the Norwegian literary establishment so she can brainwash kids into thinking the niqab is just dandy.  (Her essay, “You, Me, and Niqab,” has been reprinted in a collection of essays being distributed to students all over the country.)  On Facebook, Kausar clicked “like” on the news of the upcoming rally.

On Thursday, the Communist daily Klassekampen ran a sympathetic interview with Kausar.  When Niqab Girl walked into a café with interviewer Åse Brandvold, the customers emitted audible groans.  Brandvold: “Her garment provokes them….Only the eyes show.  They are radiant.” Kausar: “I want to go over to them and say: Hi, I’m Aisha, and I’m an ordinary person.” Yes, an “ordinary person” who admitted to Brandvold that she planned to take part in the Saturday rally and who, when asked to comment on the video, said: “It’s just a video.” Though Brandvold pressed her (ever so slightly), Niqab Girl refused to condemn the video:  “I’m tired of Muslims always being expected to distance themselves from one another all the time.”

At some point during the week came the stunning announcement by the Norwegian Police Security Service (PST) that Islamists represent the major terrorist threat to the country.  Needless to say, this news should not have been stunning to anybody, but (as I describe in a forthcoming e-book) ever since last July 22, when anti-jihadist Anders Behring Breivik bombed a building in Oslo and massacred several dozen teenagers on the island of Utøya, the Norwegian political and cultural elite has done a very effective job of suppressing criticism of Islam on the grounds that the “lesson” of Breivik’s actions is that ethnic Norwegians must stop saying unpleasant things about Islam and embrace their bold, bearded, berobed, and belligerent fellow countrymen as friends and neighbors.

So it was that PST got slammed on a Thursday night TV debate program by Muslim leaders who called for it to stop demonizing their community and pay more attention to the threat of violence by Islam-hating “Christian terrorist” groups in Norway.  (Never mind that, as a terrorism expert bravely pointed out on the show, there are no such groups in Norway.)  On the same broadcast, the head of the aggressive, fast-growing Islam Net, Fahad Qureshi (whose every comment was greeted by a storm of applause from his followers in the studio audience) attacked a politician for having called the perpetrators of the threatening video “vermin”: instead of being dehumanized, Qureshi insisted, the jihadists who’d made that video should be accorded respect and invited to take part in dialogue.

The other day I wrote about a young Muslim woman in Norway who wears a niqab – a veil that covers everything except the eyes – and who’s busy these days giving talks at Norwegian schools about her religion and her choice of outerwear.

Now, just across the border in Sweden, that country’s version of the Department of Education, which is called Skolverket (and which in English labels itself the Swedish National Agency for Education), has sent down a ruling about the role of niqab in Swedish schools.  This ruling is a response to new legislation as well as to a decision by Sweden’s Discrimination Ombudsman, which in turn came in response to a complaint by an adult student in Stockholm who cried prejudice a couple of years back when she was told to take off her niqab in class.

Skolverket’s decision, interestingly, has been represented by the Swedish media in different ways –  indeed, in two more or less antithetical ways.  On the one hand, Dagbladet begins its report as follows: “Students’ right to wear veils in schools has long been a hot question.  Now Skolverket has ruled that full-covering veils may be forbidden in certain situations.” Dagbladet goes on to quote Skolverket’s guidelines to the effect that niqab can be banned in lab or shop classes, in which there may be safety issues, or when the niqab “significantly impedes the interaction between teachers and students.” Skolverket leaves it up to teachers to decide when there’s a problem.

But the Swedish edition of Metro is (characteristically) more straightforward about what Skolverket’s ruling really amounts to.  “Skolverket approves full-covering veil,” reads the Metro headline.  “Only in exceptional cases can principals and teachers say no.” Metro notes that “the authorities cite religious freedom and believe it is up to the schools and teachers to adapt education to the students’ needs.” The newspaper quotes from Skolverket’s guidelines: “The full-covering veil can impede contact and interaction between teachers and students, but Skolverket feels that these difficulties can be overcome in the great majority of cases.”

In short, the Swedish educational authorities have caved in.  Henceforth, niqab is permitted in Swedish schools.  If any teacher thinks it’s getting in the way of normal classroom interaction (and how could it not?) or that it represents a potential safety problem – well, it’s up to that teacher to say so and take the consequences.

Which, of course, is a full-scale cop-out on the part of the Swedish authorities.  What teacher in his or her right mind would dare to say “take off that niqab” in the wake of this ruling?  Skolverket has effectively left such teachers high and dry.  The minute any teacher dares to step into that minefield, Swedish Muslim “spokespeople” will come crashing down on them.  There’s no limit to how widespread the protests might be and how much mayhem they might lead to – just look, after all, at what happened after a Danish newspaper ran a few cartoons of Muhammed.  Can one imagine the Swedish educational bureaucrats – not to mention the politicians and national media – doing anything other than folding at once?  When Skolverket says it is leaving decisions to teachers, it is being cynical and cowardly, washing its hands of a difficult matter and passing it on to already put-upon people in essentially powerless, thankless positions.

The Swedish establishment has responded to Skolverket’s ruling with a predictable thumbs-up.  The Swedish People’s Party, for example, has greeted its “welcome decision” with open arms.  So has one Daniel Nordström, who in an opinion piece in Folkbladet expresses sympathy for teachers who will now be put in the position of deciding when and when not to allow niqab – but who argues that a general ban is not the way to go either.

Anti-Americanism is, of course, as European as Apfelstrudel.  But over the last few years it’s rollercoastered like the stock market.  The invasion of Iraq sent it skyrocketing.  It was muted somewhat by the election of a black man as President of the United States.  (That Americans, whom Europeans are taught to think of as incurable racists, had done such a thing rendered some veteran America-bashers temporarily mute.)  But European anti-Americanism has never entirely gone away, and the troubles America has been through of late have been the occasion for much Schadenfreude, especially given that they’ve provided a pleasant distraction from Europe’s own even more formidable problems.

Still, it wasn’t until I ran across an article the other day in the Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet that I realized European anti-Americanism, thanks to Urinegate, is once again in full bloom.  The article, written by somebody named Asbjørn Svarstad, begins by noting that the American soldiers who filmed themselves urinating on dead Taliban members may not be the first GIs to have behaved in such a manner.  “American commandos who were dropped over Snåsa [in northern Norway] toward the end of World War II,” writes Asbjørn Svarstad, “are suspected of having displayed the same kind of contempt for their enemies.”

The main character in Svarstad’s story is none other than William Colby, who would later become head of the CIA but who back in 1945 was a 24-year-old major in charge of the Norwegian Special Operation Group (NORSO) under the command of the OSS.  NORSO, which sounds rather like Brad Pitt’s unit in Inglourious Basterds, consisted of Norwegian-Americans and Norwegians who were operating behind enemy lines on a mission called Operation RYPE.  On May 2, 1945, Colby’s men, who were stationed at a farm called Gjevsjøen, were discovered by five German soldiers, whom they quickly dispatched.  According to Svarstad, local Norwegians – and here’s the meat of the story – later claimed that they were then invited by the Americans to urinate on the Germans’ corpses.

One of Svarstad’s sources is Norwegian journalist Ola Flyum, whom he describes as an authority on how northern Norway experienced World War II.  Flyum’s verdict on the NORSO episode is as follows: “This kind of behavior says a great deal about the way in which the Americans conducted themselves.  The Norwegians were shaken.  Such a culture was unknown to them.  I see many reasons to examine whether this was a war crime.”

Yes, you read that right.  The local Norwegians had lived for five years under the Nazis, who had come to subdue and tyrannize them, to execute troublemakers and cart Jews off to their deaths.  But, if Flyum is to be believed, the real trauma for these folks was being invited by their American liberators to relieve themselves on the bodies of their oppressors.

Interesting.  And even more interesting are the reader comments on Svarstad’s article, which the last time I checked totaled no fewer than 645. Let me emphasize that several readers, to their credit, sought to provide a degree of perspective by bringing up such small details as, ahem, the Nazi death camps.  But the overall tone of the comments was set by those who agreed heartily with the implicit message of the article: namely, that Americans are by nature more uncouth – and more prone to violence, war crimes, torture, and abuse of civilians – than anybody else, including the Nazis.

“Most of the Germans,” insisted one reader, “followed the rules and fought a civilized war.”  Another  agreed, saying that America “is way worse then Nazi Germany ever was.”   A third asserted that during the Vietnam War, the US, that “sanctimonious and arrogant s*** country,” had outdone Hitler.  A  couple of readers cited the Allied bombing of Dresden as proof that America and the western Allies were at least as bad as the Nazis; one recalled having “seen videos from WWII of P51 planes mowing down German farmers in May 1945.” Several readers insisted that it wasn’t the Western Allies that whupped the Nazis and freed Norway, but the Soviets: “America would have been a**-f***ed in a one-on-one against Nazi Germany.”

The news came three days before Christmas:

The Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) has announced that the Department of Defense will now allow Muslim and Sikh students participating in Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (JROTC) to wear headscarves and turbans while in uniform.

When I read this, the first thing I thought was: What?!  And the second was: Since when does CAIR make announcements on behalf of the Department of Defense?

The background was as follows: a Muslim girl in Tennessee was told by her JROTC commanding officer that she could not wear her headscarf, or hijab, in a homecoming parade.  She contacted CAIR, which in turn contacted Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, asking for a change in policy.  And instead of informing CAIR that the Department of Defense does not take its marching orders from fronts for terrorist organizations, Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Army Larry Stubblefield fell right into line, writing a letter to CAIR assuring that henceforth JROTC policy would be different.

France and the Netherlands have banned the niqab, the face-covering veil, in public; the hijab is also prohibited in certain venues (such as classrooms and government offices) in a few European jurisdictions.  But in most of the Western world, there are no laws against any Muslim garments.  In many Western cities, there has been a visible increase in the number of women wearing these things in public.  And there has also been an increase in the number of Muslims who demand their right to wear them in institutions ranging from the armed forces and police to schools and universities.

Case in point: a twenty-year-old woman named Aisha Shezadi Kausar.  Kausar wears niqab.  Last year her name appeared on an essay, “You, Me, and Niqab,” which was included in Utilslørt (Uncovered), a collection of essays by and about Muslim women.  On December 20, she was featured in a news report on Norwegian public television (NRK) about a nationwide project aimed at Norwegian children and teenagers. Kausar, NRK reported, is making personal appearances at various schools around Norway, where she presents her use of the niqab as a feminist choice.  In the report, she was seen in front of an auditorium full of students, first praying, then talking about Allah, and then making her case.  She’s engaged in a “struggle for freedom” and “fighting against xenophobia.” The only reasons for opposition to niqab are “prejudice” and “fear of foreigners.” At the end of her talk the students gave her a big round of applause, and the kids interviewed by NRK said all the “right” things about diversity and tolerance.  Plainly they had not learned anything about Islam, the place of women in Islam, or what niqab actually represents.  Their teachers had taken them away from their studies to be propagandized.

Who’s sponsoring this promotional campaign for symbols of female submission and subordination?  The Muslim Students’ Association?  The Norwegian Islamic Council?  No: the Norwegian Non-Fiction Writers and Translators Organisation (NFF) and a group called Foreningen !les (the exclamation point and the small “l” are part of the name) whose official goal is to promote reading and literature.  The premise of this sponsorship is that Kausar (the author, as far as I can determine, of exactly one essay) is an author and that they are sending her around to talk about her work.

In other words, Norwegian schools are setting aside time to allow their students to be fed pretty lies about Islam and niqab – and the country’s major organization for writers and translators is helping to foot the bill.

(If I were still an NFF member, I’d quit in protest.  Alas, I already quit in protest years ago over something else.)

Who is Aisha Shezadi Kausar?  Pretty much the only things I could find about her online were articles about hijab and niqab.  The author of a May 2009 article on Nettavis, entitled “A hijab – is it really worth making so much of a fuss about?”, interviewed Kausar, then nineteen years old.  At the time, according to the article, Kausar was not a wearer of hijab.  Nettavis, which is a news website for young people, quoted Kausar:

“It speaks for itself that it’s wrong that my belief should put a stop to my career choice.  After all, we have religious freedom in this country,” she says with a certain bitterness in her voice.

A little over a year later, in August 2010, the newspaper VG ran an interview with Kausar. Though in the May 2009 article she had been represented as a Muslim girl who chose not to wear hijab, in the August 2010 VG interview she was described as a wearer of hijab and was quoted as saying she had begun wearing it three years earlier.  She said that her motivation for doing so was, in large part, “[t]o show the Islamophobes that Muslim girls can choose.” She insisted, moreover, that nobody had pressured her to wear hijab. On the contrary, she called herself a “feminist in a religious head covering” and said that she “identifies with the tough Muslim ladies who have fought for women in hijab to be accepted.”

And now, just over a year later, here she is wearing and promoting the niqab.   And she’s still presenting herself as a feminist, a believer in freedom and diversity, and as somebody who, aside from her faith and her fashion choices, is not really all that different from the young people whom she addresses in Norwegian schools.

In addition to the Nettavis and VG articles, I did find Kausar’s Facebook and Twitter pages.  Judge for yourself.  On her Facebook page, under “People who inspire Aisha,” there’s precisely one name – the Prophet Muhammed.  Her favorite books?  The Koran, Hadith, and Sunnah.  Under “Favorite Movies” there’s a single entry, “Bollywood is Haram,” which is not the title of a movie but a statement, meaning of course that Bollywood films are against Islamic law.  If you click on “Bollywood is Haram” on Kausar’s Facebook page, it’ll take you to another Facebook page entitled “Bollywood is Haram,” at which you can read this explanation of the page by whoever set it up: “Bollywood is haram, people. We have to work against this beast that is spreading itself through our homes.  The filthy half-naked hags who dance on the TVs in our living rooms must be removed forever!”

How time flies!  It seems only yesterday that we folks in Norway first heard the name Mullah Krekar.  The sometime leader of Ansar al-Islam – which narrow-minded individuals insist on calling a terrorist organization, but which I prefer to think of as a heavily armed, Koran-toting Iraqi version of Rotary or the Knights of Columbus – the charismatic Krekar has long since become every (well, not quite every) Norwegian’s lovable grandpa.  Now, after many years in Norway, he has announced that he will soon be leaving us and returning to Iraq, where he will continue to pursue the task to which he has consecrated his life: that of serving his God.

And oh, how many ways there are to serve God!  Ansar al-Islam, according to the Canadian Institute of Strategic Studies, has “burned down girls’ schools and beaten and killed women for not wearing the burqa.” Human Rights Watch notes that under its previous name, Jund al-Islam, Krekar’s industrious associates took over villages in which they required, among other things, “the obligatory closure of offices and businesses during prayer time and enforced attendance by workers and proprietors at the mosque during those times; the veiling of women by wearing the traditional ‘abaya; obligatory beards for men; segregation of the sexes; barring women from education and employment; the removal of any photographs of women on packaged goods brought into the region; the confiscation of musical instruments and the banning of music both in public and private; and the banning of satellite receivers and televisions.”  The Lord’s work never ends!

Krekar first came to Norway in 1991 as an asylum seeker – although, as is true of many Muslim asylum seekers, his professional obligations obliged him to travel frequently between his new nation and the country from which he had fled.  But not till after 9/11 did his name become widely known here.  Arrested in the Netherlands in 2002 on his way back to Norway from Iraq, he was released after four months and allowed to proceed to Norway, where he was again arrested and released – a series of torments which, as the discerning reader will readily notice, are not unlike those visited upon Jesus by the Romans and the Sanhedrin.  Krekar has lived in Oslo ever since, in apartments which (in newspaper photographs) look quite pleasant, with fine bookcases full of handsomely bound volumes in Arabic.  A great man deserves no less.

Over the years Krekar has provided Norway with invaluable spiritual lessons of a sort that a few stubborn Norwegian officials have failed to appreciate, simply because Krekar’s brand of evangelism involves guns, explosives, and the removal of limbs without anesthesia.  Consequently they have persisted in attempts to take him away from us – and have thus caused him no little amount of distress.  Meanwhile those of us who appreciate Krekar can only be grateful for his long-term presence in our midst – and cherish the memories.

Ah, the memories!  Here’s just a sampling:

2003:

Perhaps the key event in Krekar’s emergence as a contemporary Norwegian folk hero was a speaking engagement at a popular Oslo café.  Krekar was the guest of the Liberal Party’s youth organization, which had invited him to give his political views.  The place was packed to overflowing – mostly, according to Morgenbladet, with “students in their twenties and thirties.” They greeted the Man of the Hour with spontaneous applause.  Morgenbladet quite aptly described Krekar’s response – a hand movement indicating that they should stop clapping – as one of “humility.”  After offering a twenty-minute analysis of international affairs, the humble homme de guerre took questions and graciously accepted his fans’ declarations of support.  The event was the greatest success in the cafe’s history.  Morgenbladet called Krekar “Norway’s beloved fundamentalist.”

In March, in a demonstration of the petty abuses that unfeeling authorities can visit upon their betters, VG reported that the police had confiscated Krekar’s wife’s cookbook, and that the mullah had been forced to eat the same kind of cake – apple! – fifty days in a row.

In an interview with Der Spiegel, Krekar again showed his humility by offering unstinting praise for a colleague: “Osama bin Laden is a good man.  He is the jewel in Islam’s crown.” Krekar confirmed that he had trained suicide bombers and – in a sign of his generous readiness to share the delights of Islamic law with unbelievers – declared his intention to help turn Norway into a sharia state.  In August, apparently appreciative of the contribution Krekar was making to Norwegian society and culture, William Nygaard, head of the venerable Aschehoug publishing house, invited him to the company’s annual garden party.

2004:

In January – would the torments never cease? – Norwegian police ransacked Krekar’s apartment.  Aftenposten provided a heartbreaking picture of the mullah’s wife and daughters, those innocent victims of official harassment.  “Daddy opened the door when the police buzzed,” said one of the girls. “We had to sit still in the living room and were not allowed to go outside or use the phone while they were there.” Krekar’s lawyer, Brynjar Meling, announced that his client planned to sue the Norwegian government for unwarranted prosecution, and to call Prime Minister Kjell Magne Bondevik as a witness.  Bondevik said Krekar would be deported.  In June, a Jordanian court convicted the poor, put-upon mullah in absentia of conspiracy to commit (that ugly word!) terrorism.

But not all the news was bleak.  The same year saw the publication by Aschehoug of Krekar’s In My Own Words.  A publisher’s representative characterized it as a “personal and political biography” in which the “Islamic and Kurdish activist [bless him for not using the “t” word!] examines the events in Iraqi Kurdistan and the case against him in Norway from his own perspective.”  At the book launch, Krekar declared his “great respect for the Norwegian people, for the king, the people, the culture, and the civilization.  And I say to you that I am proud of you.”

In April, in a small gesture toward the justice due him, the Dutch government awarded Krekar 45,000 euros in damages for wrongful imprisonment.  In August, Krekar sued Norway for millions of kroner in damages for all the trouble they had caused him.  In December, it was reported that Krekar, in a speech at an Iraqi mosque, had praised bin Laden for 9/11.  Once again, Krekar’s exemplary willingness to praise other laborers in the fields of the Lord testified to his remarkable lack of ego.

Ibn Warraq is the pseudonymous, Pakistani-born author of the modern classic Why I Am Not a Muslim and the writer or editor of several other estimable books about Muhammed, the Koran, Islamic culture, Muslim apostates, and Western civilization.  Surely few people know as much as he does about both the West and Islam.  Therefore I was more than eager to read his new book, Why the West Is Best: A Muslim Apostate’s Defense of Liberal Democracy.

Naturally, I expected something wise and incisive and steeped in learning – and I wasn’t disappointed.  But what I hadn’t counted on was how fresh, original, delightfully inspired, and emotionally stirring Warraq’s approach to his topic would be.  Take his first chapter, which is about New York, a city he views as “a testament to the robustness of Western culture and to its welcoming catholicity.” Warraq’s goal here is to help us to see a Western metropolis through the eyes of a person from, say, the Islamic world, and thus recognize the magnificence of things so familiar to us that we may take them for granted.

Let it be said at once that he is highly successful at this.  He tells a surprisingly touching story about an Iraqi colleague who, at age forty-five, left his country for the first time on a visit to New York and was so overwhelmed by “the number and variety of magazines available” at the Barnes & Noble in Warraq’s neighborhood that he started taking pictures of them.  Warraq quotes a paean to the New York Public Library by none other than Lenin, who, at some point between that institution’s founding in 1911 and the Russian Revolution, took time to marvel at the number of people who used the library, at the number of books they took out, at the then-expanding system of branch libraries, and at the resources the library made available to children.  “Such is the way things are done in New York,” Lenin wrote.  “And in Russia?”

Warraq devotes several pages to a celebration of Tin Pan Alley, noting perceptively that the Great American Songbook is not just a collection of pretty tunes and clever lyrics but a life-affirming cultural inheritance that “lend[s] dignity to the lives and struggles of ordinary people” and “cross[es] all the boundaries of race, class, and religion.” He pays tribute to American humor, noting that the abundance of comedy clubs in a city like New York “is a sure sign of a healthy society.” And he expresses admiration for “[t]he civilized pleasure of alcohol,” citing the philosopher Roger Scruton’s thumbs-up for American cocktail parties, which “immediately break the ice between strangers and set every large gathering in motion.”

In praising all these things about New York, of course, Warraq is not only extolling the core values of the West itself but, implicitly or explicitly, rebuking non-Western – and especially Muslim – culture.  Islam, after all, abhors a library or magazine rack which has not been cleansed of “offensive” items, and it frowns on music, humor, and the consumption of alcohol.  These, Warraq wants us to realize, are not minor issues – they are the kinds of things that make the difference between a happy life and a miserable one.  For him the Declaration of Independence’s foregrounding of the right to “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” is no mere rhetorical flourish – it sums up the rich possibilities and promise of life in the West as opposed to life in the less happy regions of the world.

At the beginning of a new year, it’s hard to avoid the question: where are we going?  What will our future be like?  Does America, does freedom, does Western civilization even have a future?

I date my career as a professional writer to an op-ed I published in the Los Angeles Times in the early 1980s.  I was a graduate student in English and was also teaching undergraduate composition courses.  One of the challenges I faced in the classroom was this: when, in a search for possible topics for my students to write about, I brought up things that I thought of as falling under the category of general knowledge, I found over and over again that most of my students didn’t know what I was talking about.  They didn’t know history.  Their knowledge of politics, geography, art, and literature was, at best, extremely spotty.

Yes, a few of them were very well informed about some sport or other, or about this or that singer or rock group or actor or TV show, but there was not much overlap between one kid’s knowledge and another’s.  There was, in fact, hardly any knowledge that they all shared – and these were students at what was considered a pretty decent college.  So I wrote a piece about it.

Thirty years later, the situation is, by all accounts, even worse than it was then – not just in America, but across the Western world.  And the problem isn’t just that they don’t know who wrote War and Peace.  It’s that they don’t know basic things that could mean the difference in the future between war and peace, poverty and wealth, slavery and freedom.

In 2007, a study of Swedish young people by a group called Information about Communism revealed that ninety percent of Swedes between the ages of fifteen and twenty didn’t know which foreign capital is closest to Stockholm, and most didn’t know which countries border on their own.

Moreover, most of them had no idea what Communism is.  Ninety percent didn’t know the meaning of the word “Gulag.”  Forty percent thought that Communism had actually brought increased prosperity to the people living under it.

“They lack understanding of basic concepts such as dictatorship and democracy, and this is unpleasant,” said Camilla Andersson of Information about Communism.  Swedish education minister Jan Björklund, asked about the study results, lamented “that Swedish history teaching is so limited.” But the problem, as I noted at the time, was not “limited” history teaching but slanted history teaching.  Kids, not just in Sweden but throughout the Western world, are fed pretty lies about Communism and ugly lies about America, capitalism, and Western civilization generally.

A similar study, performed in 2008 by the think tank Civita, found that “two of three young Norwegians between 14 and 20 years old have not heard of Pol Pot and the Gulag,” while 34.5% thought that Communism had “contributed to increased prosperity in some places in the world.”

The other day I took note here of a recent New York Times feature in which several prominent figures from the worlds of law and religion were invited to answer the question: Is religious freedom in America under threat?  I focused on one of the responses, entitled “A Campaign Against Patriotic Muslims,” in which Salam Al-Marayati, president of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, maintained that when it came to his coreligionists, the answer was a definite yes.  Al-Marayati painted a picture of an America awash in “anti-Islam groups” and “Muslim haters” who make life difficult for American Muslims, whom he depicted as overwhelmingly peaceful, freedom-loving, and terrorism-hating.  It didn’t seem to matter to the Times that Al-Marayati himself is a longtime associate of and apologist for terrorists.

Another participant in the same Times feature was Noah Feldman, a Harvard law professor.  Like Al-Marayati, Feldman claimed to be concerned about a plague of Islam-hatred in America.  Feldman complained about legislative proposals in Oklahoma and Tennessee that would “ban Islamic law from the courts — a measure that the American separation of church and state makes completely unnecessary.”  Feldman concluded: “It would be nice to say these proposed laws are un-American. But they are sadly reminiscent of our history of targeting vulnerable religious minorities out of bigotry and political expediency. We can only look forward to a day when anti-Islamic sentiment seems as archaic as these other old hatreds do today.”

It’s interesting to note that while the New York Times was giving Al-Marayati and Feldman a platform from which to preach about the supposed persecution of Muslims in America, a woman named Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff was actually being persecuted, and prosecuted, in Austria – not for being an adherent of Islam but for speaking the truth about it.  Most readers of Front Page will know about Sabaditsch-Wolff, whose whole saga has been covered here, from her frank, fact-based statements about Islam at a 1997 seminar to her conviction last February on the charge of “denigration of the religious beliefs of a legally recognized religion” to her appeal to a higher court, which last week affirmed the February verdict and ordered her to pay a €480 fine or spend two months in jail.  Sabaditsch-Wolff, who refuses to pay the fine, quite rightly called it “a black day for Austria.”

Most readers of Front Page will also know exactly what got Sabaditsch-Wolff in trouble with the Austrian judiciary: she said that the founder of Islam “married” his wife Aisha when she was six and consummated the “marriage” when she was nine, and that this made him, by definition, a pedophile.  This, of course, is a plain statement of fact – and, according to the court, if Sabaditsch-Wolff had just indicated that Muhammed had had intercourse with a child, she supposedly wouldn’t have been convicted.  But the appeals court didn’t like the way she put it – she said that Muhammed had a thing for small children, or words to that effect, which added to the statement of fact something that the court viewed as an unacceptable expression of opinion about the facts.  In other words, it would appear to be illegal in Austria now to express disapproval of the sexual molestation of children, provided the child molester in question is the prophet of a certain religion.

The court underscored, moreover, that while Austrians’ freedom of expression is guaranteed by the European Court of Human Rights, that right is bound up with the obligation not to be insulting – which is another way of saying that there’s no real freedom of expression at all.

The other day the New York Times invited a few contributors to answer the question “Is America’s religious freedom under threat?”  The answer provided by Salam Al-Marayati, head of the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC), in an essay entitled “A Campaign Against Patriotic Muslims,” was a resounding yes – at least, that is, where his co-religionists are concerned.  Among Al-Marayati’s assertions: “religious freedom for the Muslim American is under threat….Today’s anti-Muslim rhetoric is eerily similar to the pre-Nazi rhetoric against Jews….Hate against Muslim children in elementary and secondary schools is on the rise.”  There is, insisted Al-Marayati, “an inquisition mentality toward America’s Muslims.”

People who have written books critical of Islam were described by Al-Marayati as “Muslim-haters” whose “work is reminiscent of the pre-Nazi propaganda…that regarded Judaism as a threat to Germany.”  Al-Marayati railed about the controversy over the TLC reality show “All-American Muslim,” which, he sneered, “became a controversy because it did not include a terrorist.”  America, he claimed, is being misled by those who, refusing to define American Islam by what he called its “mainstream,” insist rather on viewing it “through the lens of extremism.”  “I love my faith and I love my country,” maintained Al-Marayati at the end of his piece. “The fact that some readers still question which country I am referring to indicates a serious level of distrust toward Muslim Americans.”

This isn’t the first time Al-Marayati has pleaded for American non-Muslims to reject “Muslim-haters” and recognize the compatibility of the Koran and the Constitution, Islamic law and Jeffersonian democracy.  A couple of years ago he informed readers of the Huffington Post that “Islamic law has five goals accepted by all the scholars of Islam: securing and developing rights to life, expression, faith, family and property. That’s similar to the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness.”  The concluding flourish of his Huff Po article was almost identical to that of his Times piece: “I am an American.  I am a Muslim. I will work for a better future for all Americans and Muslims worldwide.”

Then there’s the op-ed he published in the Wall Street Journal after the 2009 massacre at Fort Hood.    Al-Marayati’s goal there was to put as much distance as possible between the killer, Army major Nidal Hasan, and Islam.  Hasan, Al-Marayati contended, suffered from a “critical fault in understanding the Quran” and a “deeply flawed understanding of Islam” – which, he assured his readers, is (what else?) a religion of peace and justice.  In short, Al-Marayati constructed an alternate reality in which there is no such thing as jihad and in which America is not engaged in a war with its practitioners.

So who is this spokesman for “mainstream” Islam – this man intent on spreading the good news that American Muslims are (as he put it in the Times) overwhelmingly “God-loving and America-loving” citizens who thoroughly reject all forms of violence and extremism?  Well, he first gained national attention in 1999, when Dick Gephardt, having nominated him as a member of the National Commission on Terrorism, withdrew the nomination after learning that Al-Marayati had, in fact, publicly defended terrorism.  (As Daniel Pipes noted shortly thereafter, this was “the first time that a prominent Muslim figure in America has been repudiated because of extremist politics.”)

“Is Swedish culture worth preserving?”  Several years ago, at a Nordic conference on integration policy, a Norwegian participant, Hege Storhaug, asked this question of Swedish government representative Lise Bergh.  “Yes, what is Swedish culture?” Bergh replied.  “And [by asking that] I’ve answered the question.”  As Storhaug later noted, Bergh’s reply was a perfect reflection of Swedish leaders’ contempt for and rejection of their own culture – a mentality that, Storhaug worried, might ultimately spell Sweden’s doom.

“What is Swedish culture?”  I was reminded of Bergh’s rhetoric question the other morning when I was making my way across the lobby of a hotel in Sweden.  Suddenly a double column of about a dozen teenage girls and boys, dressed in long white robes and carrying lit candles, began to process into the room, softly singing the traditional song “Santa Lucia.”  I hadn’t realized it was Saint Lucy’s Day, on which such processions by children and teenagers (formerly just girls, but now also boys) are common in Scandinavia, especially in Sweden.  Tourists all around me responded to this unfamiliar spectacle by yanking out their cameras or cell phones and snapping pictures, but since I’ve seen my share of Santa Lucia processions and was in a hurry, I rushed right past them, my mind on other things.

Not until I reached the end of the lobby did something tell me to stop and turn around.  For the next minute or so I stood there and watched as the girls and boys made their way slowly away from me and into the hotel bar and restaurant.  To my surprise, I found myself being deeply touched; it was moving to think that Swedish kids (especially boys) of that age would be willing to don long white robes and participate in something that you might well expect them to regard as corny, embarrassing, and old-fashioned.

As I stood there, I remembered Bergh’s comment at that integration conference.  Certainly, I reflected, this was one part of Swedish culture.  It was not a big thing, by any means, but it was one of the many little things that come together to make up the culture of a nation.  It should perhaps be pointed out that for Swedes, who by and large are not very religious at all, the Santa Lucia processions tend to be less an expression of faith than a cherished ritual, like putting presents under the Christmas tree.  For most of the young people in the hotel that day, I would guess, taking part in a Santa Lucia procession was not about religious belief but about embracing the customs of their people – the traditions handed down to them by their parents and grandparents.

I hesitate to join the already Mormon Tabernacle-scale chorus of tributes to Christopher Hitchens.  For one thing, to my great regret, I never knew him, although we had many mutual friends.  (One of whom sent me, a couple of years ago, shortly before I was to visit Washington, D.C., an e-mail saying that Hitchens had expressed the desire to meet me; alas, I somehow didn’t notice the e-mail until after I’d returned home.)  But while I didn’t know Hitchens, he was too important a part of the landscape of my life for me not to say a few words about him now that he is gone.  And in this time of sadness I want to focus on one thing that cheers me – namely, the knowledge that there were more than a few young people who felt his influence.

For this influence there is ample evidence. On You Tube, you can see videos of his talks and debates at institutions of higher education ranging from Oxford and UCLA to the University of Waterloo and the College of New Jersey.  Seeing such videos always gave me a good feeling, as did the occasional glimpse of a young person reading one of his books.  It was encouraging to know that students were being exposed to him.  And since his death I’ve been pleasantly surprised to see how many young people have gone to the trouble of uploading You Tube tributes to him.  He did indeed have an impact on the young.

And that’s a good thing – for many reasons.  First of all, he was a fearless champion of individual liberty and human dignity – a man who, in the wake of 9/11, saw through the moral vacancy and hypocrisy of the left and broke with his sometime leftist comrades to stand up for freedom and against totalitarian tyranny.  In a time when when American teenagers borrow exorbitant sums of money (or bankrupt their parents) to attend colleges and universities where they’re taught contempt for everything their country stands for, Hitchens offered a salutary model of rebellion against leftist orthodoxy, of having a mind of one’s own and insisting on using it.

For such young people, “educated” by faculty-lounge foot soldiers who offer up bold-sounding battle cries but who are always desperately, timidly careful about toeing the lines of academic orthodoxy, Hitchens provided an admirable example of intellectual honesty, integrity, and courage, a first-rate lesson in independently observing the world, reflecting upon it, and developing and presenting arguments about it, orthodoxies be damned.  You didn’t have to agree with everything he said – who did? – to admire his constant readiness to say it as he saw it.  No lesson could be more important to a generation of students instructed by the spineless careerists and lockstep lemmings of the academy, whose mind-numbing, reality-immune ideological claptrap is enough to crush the intellectual ambitions of even the most gifted students – enough to make them cynical about the very idea of ideas.  (Either that, or enough to turn them into so many little copies of their teachers, churning out papers, essays, and eventually books saying the approved things about the approved topics in the approved kind of prose.)

I haven’t looked at Newsweek since its disgraceful number commemorating the tenth anniversary of 9/11, but at an airport the other day I spied the December 12 issue, its cover advertising a piece titled  “Why We Need Europe” by Simon Schama, and I couldn’t resist.

Schama – the British-born, Cambridge-educated historian who’s lived in the U.S. since 1980 and now teaches at Columbia – proved to have written an ardent defense of the European Union.

Now, I’m not an EU fan, and I view with pleasure the fact that it now appears to have one foot in the grave and another on a banana peel.  The first thing that comes to mind when I think about the EU is a sentence I’ve seen several times on a poster in the Copenhagen airport: “The European Union has created a set of rights to ensure air passengers are treated fairly.”

The first time I glimpsed that sentence, as I breezed past the poster, I stopped and went back to make sure I’d read it correctly.  Yep, I had.  “The European Union has created a set of rights…”

The word that threw me for a loop, of course, was created.  The idea of the EU “creating” rights seemed – well, somehow wrong, and more than a little unsettling.  As an American, I grew up with a different notion of rights, to wit:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.  That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed….

“Unalienable rights” – innate rights, natural rights, rights that can’t be created or uncreated by any man or woman.  The distinction between Thomas Jefferson’s and the EU’s way of thinking about rights may seem like a distinction without a difference, but the difference is real, and meaningful.  It’s all about the way in which the people conceive of their relationship to those who govern them, and vice-versa.  In the American view, governments don’t exist to create rights but to secure them.

I don’t think it’s insignificant that while the opening and closing passages of the Declaration of Independence rise to the level of poetry, the many different, and quite long, founding documents of the EU are, from beginning to end, exemplary specimens of technocratic prose.  Consider, for example, the first sentence of the EU’s Charter of Fundamental Rights: “The peoples of Europe, in creating an ever closer union among them, are resolved to share a peaceful future based on common values.”

Ouch.  But not to worry!  Check out this, from a news story that ran early last year but that I only became aware of the other day:

The European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA) wants the EU’s human rights charter recast as an 80-minute-long epic poem, accompanied by music, dance and “multi-media elements.”

“The FRA intends to launch a negotiated procedure for the creation and implementation of an artistic concept for the presentation of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights in Poems,” reads the agency tender issued this month.

Has an invitation to write a poem ever been written in such unpoetic prose?  Alas, there actually turned out to be an EU official who actually recognized these plans as “a frivolous waste of time and money” and put the kibosh on the whole ridiculous endeavor.

During the last few years I’ve often caught myself wasting – sorry, spending – precious moments of my life trying to think like a European intellectual.  Why?  Well, certainly not because I want to be like them.  No, it’s just that I’m possessed of a compulsion to figure out what makes them tick, because they exercise such outsized influence on the world I live in.

It’s a dirty job, but somebody’s got to do it.

Alas, my effort has been largely in vain.  I do have my theories about these people, but even after all these years I can’t say that I fully understand what’s going in those heads.  I suppose it would be kind of scary if I did.

* * *

What am I talking about when I talk about intellectuals, European and otherwise?  I’m talking about men and women of the left.  Not “classical liberals”  – no, we’re talking hard left here – people whose philosophical pedigree leads straight back to Karl Marx.

Yes, there are non-leftists who are sometimes described, perhaps grudgingly, as intellectuals.  But when that label’s affixed to them, the people doing the affixing almost invariably feel a need to prefix “intellectual” with some word like “conservative” or “right-wing” – even if the person in question is somebody you or I might consider pretty middle-of-the-road.  Meanwhile a left-wing intellectual is typically prefix-free: a left-wing intellectual is just an intellectual, period.

To be sure, many people on the left dismiss the idea that anyone not on the left could be legitimately described as an intellectual. For them, intellectualism consists essentially of reiterating and fiercely defending their own lockstep ideology.  Google “right-wing intellectual” and the very first hit you’ll get is a snarky post at the Democratic Underground website asking “Is there such a thing as a right-wing intellectual?” Google “conservative intellectual” and the top hits include items about “conservative intellectual collapse” and “conservative intellectual bankruptcy.”

The difference between the U.S. and continental Europe (Britain leans more our way) is that America has a vibrant network of non-left intellectual institutions –  think tanks, magazines, websites like this one – and electronic media that are receptive to their ideas.  In Europe non-left intellectuals are more on their own.  And they are almost never, ever referred to by anybody as intellectuals.

And why is this?  Because being an “intellectual,” at least in the European sense, isn’t about being intelligent.  It’s about belonging to a class of high priests whose role is to preserve and pass on its own sacred dogma.  It’s not about contributing to a free exchange of ideas in the expectation that the best ideas will rise to the top, but about trying to demonize and intimidate opponents and stifle dissent.  It’s about “speaking truth to power” – and the “power” is always democratic capitalism, and the “truth” always comes in various shades of red.

* * *

American and European intellectuals have a curious relationship.  The former envy the latter for the influence they wield.  And the Europeans envy them right back, for being, as they see it, at the heart of things, while they’re very aware of being big fish in small ponds.

Whatever you may think about American intellectuals, the European ones are worse.  They’re far more insufferable than ours – mainly because they’re used to being taken so much more seriously.  Newspapers across Europe publish not just 600-word op-eds but essays in political philosophy that go on for pages and pages and are written by members of the intellectual elite.  One reflection of the difference between the status of the left-wing intellectual in the U.S. and Europe is that essays written by people like Gore Vidal, Noam Chomsky, and Naomi Klein and first published in the U.S. In some place like The New York Review of Books routinely crop up, in translation, in big-circulation Scandinavian tabloids, where they are proudly promoted on the front page and spread over the entirety of pages two and three.  It’s an American intellectual’s wet dream: being read on the subway by the proletariat.  Is it any wonder left-wing American intellectuals look to Europe with such longing?

* * *

There was a time when, for a very brief period, I was suckered in by the line that American anti-intellectualism is a bad thing.  I snapped out of that one fast enough once I saw what this was all really about.  What it’s about is this: the spoon-feeding of the masses with the idea that being intelligent means looking at reality not plain but through ideology-distorted lenses.

I am about to say something that will strike you as blindingly obvious.  Here it is:

You can’t believe everything the news media tell you.

Now, you know that, and I know it. Still, knowing it is one thing and living it is another.  “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty,” said a famous abolitionist.  Eternal vigilance is also the price of truth.  Which is to say that you can’t ever afford to let down your guard when you’re reading or watching or listening to the news.  You may think you’re taking it all in with a proper degree of cynicism, but are you?  Or are you capable of being suckered into believing a lie if it’s repeated often enough?

There’s a reason why such questions are on my mind these days.  I live in Norway, and on July 22, a lunatic murdered several dozen people here, most of them young people attending a Labor Party youth camp.  He turned out to have written a “manifesto” criticizing the Norwegian left for its role in advancing multiculturalism and the Islamization of Norway.  In it he cited with approval scores of writers and thinkers, ranging from classical philosophers of liberty such as John Stuart Mill and Thomas Jefferson to contemporary critics of Islam such as Robert Spencer, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and various people in Norway.  Norwegian leftists lost no time in exploiting this situation, accusing their ideological adversaries of being “right-wing extremists” and “Muslim-haters” who had gone too far in their rhetoric and, in doing so, inspired a man to commit mass murder.  The purpose of all this was plainly to convince the Norwegian public that these “haters” were enemies of the people who had to be shunned, silenced if possible, lest they inspire further mayhem.

More than four months later, incredibly, this campaign of hate has not let up.  Nearly every day brings yet another op-ed in a major national newspaper which has little or nothing to say about the actual issues – nothing, that is, about Islam or immigration policy or multiculturalism – but which is rife with name-calling, demonization, and wholesale misrepresentation of those who have had serious things to say about these issues.  This campaign is breathtaking in its relentlessness, its repetitiveness, its breathtaking dishonesty, and its almost total lack of anything in the way of real intellectual or argumentative content.  I’ve never seen anything quite like it.  It’s a terrifying demonstration of the degree to which a supposedly free country’s national media can give itself over to sheer, vicious disinformation.

It’s particularly difficult for me to ignore this campaign of hate because, as it happens, I’m one of its chief targets.  People who believe what they read in the Norwegian press are now under the impression that (among other things) I am a right-wing extremist and a hater of Muslims, that I have called for Muslims to be deported en masse from Europe, and that the July 22 murderer quoted me extensively in his manifesto and named me as one of his heroes.  (On the contrary, he made clear in online postings that he didn’t care for my politics; my name appears in his manifesto only in articles he read online and cut-and-pasted into his text.)  Since July 22 I’ve seen myself mentioned in major Norwegian newspapers dozens of times, but – so far as I’ve noticed – not once has anyone represented my work and my ideas honestly, and not once has anyone quoted a substantial statement or argument by me and sought to refute it.  Nope, it’s all just been pure character assassination.

And I’ve gotten used to it, sort of.  I’m confident that people who know and respect my work will not have their minds changed by any of this.  At the same time, I’m very well aware that there are people out there who have never read a word by me but who now have opinions about me based on all this insidious propaganda.  How many times does a Norwegian newspaper reader who’s unfamiliar with my work have to read that I’m a dangerous, racist extremist before he or she accepts it as gospel?  The same goes for all the other principled critics of Islam who’ve been smeared in this repulsive campaign: how many Norwegians are now quite certain that men and women who have criticized Islam in the name of individual liberty, sexual equality, and human rights are nothing but disgusting bigots?

Which leads to a far broader question: Has any of us ever entirely escaped this trap?  Isn’t there somebody whom the media once taught you to revile but whom you’ve since learned to respect, if not revere?  Or vice-versa?  I’m embarrassed, for example, to admit how long it took before I realized that Woodrow Wilson wasn’t the magisterial figure I’d been assured he was – first by school history textbooks and then by years of glowing references in the left-wing media.  I could name dozens of other examples.  The media shape our image of the world and of the major players in it, and only sometimes, in some cases, do some of us do a bit of poking around and learn enough to realize we’ve been misinformed.