LO’s members must now boycott LO if they truly wish
to live in a country that Jews can also be a part of.
Again, we have a week behind us with anti-Semitic statements in the public sphere. The only consequences such things have in Norway is more fear among us Norwegian Jews. Are Norway’s anti-Semites exempt from Section 185 of the Penal Code, as the paragraph does not seem to be applied in some cases?
The well-known old accusation that Jews rule the world was again to be found in Aftenposten’s editorial on Tuesday, October 28. There, the newspaper informs its readers that «Netanyahu cannot rule Gaza and certainly not the whole world«. With knowledge of anti-Semitic statements and their history, the associations immediately bring to mind The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a document that has been thoroughly proven to be a forgery. It is claimed here that the Jews strive for world domination. The same was claimed by the Nazis in the Third Reich, with Hitler at the forefront. The protocols originate from the Russian Tsar’s secret police, but they are still presented as testimony to the fact that the Jews desire world domination. Aftenposten’s editorial takes us back to editor Nesse’s editorials from the 1930s. It is highly unfortunate that Aftenposten is once again circulating such forgeries and playing on old prejudices, not least when one knows that it is worlds away from the truth.
The former TV2 journalist and a well-known bitter enemy of Israel, Fredrik Græsvik, also had no problem using the word master race, a term that takes us back to the Nazis’ portrayal of Jews. He did this in a comment in the media X when he had been asked about Islam, but chose to use the opportunity to come up with an anti-Semitic rant: «I most certainly do. That and not least Judaism’s distorted image that the Jews are God’s chosen people and the master race. … .»
The statement was reported to the police by the Norwegian branch of the International Christian Embassy in Jerusalem (ICEJ) for violating the penal code’s prohibition against hate speech, but not surprisingly, the case was dismissed.
The level of vulgarity of today’s Norwegian anti-Semitism is also well illustrated in yet another joke that was told on October 10 during a morning broadcast on NRK Trøndelag P1 by host Eskil Flem: «Do you know what happened to the Jewish man who hit a wall with a full erection? He broke his nose.»
NRK was quick to apologize and remove it this time, but that does not change the fact that NRK’s journalists apparently consider the dissemination of Jew-hatred and propaganda against Israel as an integral part of NRK’s work.
How absurd and irrational the fight against Israel here in little Norway is can perhaps best be illustrated by the lament from the 19-year-old MDG representative in the Storting, Frøya Skjold Sjursæther: She accused Israel of not being able to do her job in the Storting because Israel had attacked a group of 30 Hamas terrorists who had shot and killed an IDF soldier in the middle of a ceasefire period. For her, as for NRK, Hamas terrorists are always civilians and killed Jews are not worth mentioning. That civilians are also hit during attacks on terrorists is always regrettable, but the caring young representative should rather complain that the terrorists are using civilian Arabs as human shields.
The completely absent criticism of terrorism, whether in Gaza or in Sudan, where hundreds of thousands have so far been murdered by Islamists, says something about our society. It was once said that if a lie is repeated often enough, it will eventually be believed as truth. Few have experienced this more concretely and persistently than the Jewish people. Today, we find the most grotesque examples of this political propaganda technique in Norway’s dealings with the Jewish state of Israel on several fronts. For many decades, Israel has been the international community’s victim of bullying in both the UN and in EU bodies. What we are now seeing is that the verbal harassment of the Jews’ nation-state has become a custom that has slipped right into the old anti-Semitism we recognize from the time before the Holocaust.
Here in Norway, we also have the powerful LO which has programmed to boycott everything that has to do with Israel, with a clear goal, in common with Hamas, to undermine Israel’s right to exist. We do not hear a single word from the LO leadership about the real genocide in Sudan or declarations of a boycott of regimes like Iran, Turkey, and Qatar just to name a few. They are only concerned with Israel. What is it that makes LO in particular not distance itself from extremist local groups like the Palestine Committee, which, like Hamas, has the entire state of Israel in its logo, unless the goal is the same for all three?
Why is the LO leadership conducting its own foreign policy against Israel, something that is completely irrelevant to the organization’s mandate? LO’s members must now boycott LO if they truly wish to live in a country that Jews can also be a part of.
But even Rødt and SV do not demand a boycott of medicines or technology, something that would hardly be as easy to get support for. It is still only malicious symbolic actions that only serve to create negative attitudes here in Norway and harm us Norwegian Jews. A boycott of wine, fruit, and vegetables is by definition anti-Semitism. The same can be said about support for terror, which is gradually perceived as both politically correct and approved. When so many in a society subscribe to propaganda and distorted images of a particular ethnic group, it does not happen by chance. Many do this because they perceive that their personal role models and representatives among the society’s leadership have such attitudes and express them through the policies pursued by the authorities.
The very prevalence of anti-Semitic behavior is measured and recorded via the Center for Studies of Holocaust and Religious Minorities’ extensive surveys. But we lack analyses that document and explain why there is so much anti-Semitism in Norway, why more and more people are carried away by delusions about the Jews and Israel, and why more and more people are expressing hateful prejudices against this group of people.
The main problem is the Storting’s long-standing hostile attitude towards Israel and a failed Middle East policy, which is based on false claims and irrational dreams of a world without the Jews’ ancient Israel and the establishment of a Sharia-ruled Palestine that has never existed in history. It is constantly demanded that Israel must tolerate being attacked with drones and rockets, without it being counted as military attacks. In any other country, it would be a matter of course to respond militarily to such things.
A Jewish proverb says that one rotten apple is enough to spoil a whole basket. That is precisely what is happening in Norway and in LO at the moment. It is our politicians who ultimately bear the responsibility for the fact that vulgar anti-Semitism and support for barbaric Islamist terror are now completely acceptable in our country. The fight against anti-Semitism cannot be separated from the fight against Islamist terrorism because they are two sides of the same coin when it comes to the Jews and Israel.
Terrorist organizations like the PLO and Hamas will continue their terror as long as the West supports them both financially and morally. The anti-Semites will continue to support the terrorists as long as politicians allow it, actively or passively. Just as the communist terror groups, like the Baader-Meinhof and the Red Army Faction, disappeared with the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, the PLO and Hamas can also disappear the day the UN, the EU, and countries like Norway turn their backs on them. The first step must be to stop the international lie about Israel’s occupation of the KGB’s fabricated «Palestine,» which our prime minister and his foreign minister still refuse to let go of.
Let us hope that this can happen without the collapse of the Western Bloc.
