Anette Trettebergstuen (Labor), founded the “Friends of Palestine” parliamentary group and sits on parliament’s Foreign Affairs committee. Just recently she grabbed a quote (“In addition to being gay, Trettebergstuen is fiercely secular“) from this site and attributed it to an unnamed “Israeli newspaper”. In an interview in Blikk (Norwegian magazine catering to the gay community) a few years back she advocated boycotting Gay Pride in Jerusalem. Now just yesterday a homosexual couple was attacked right here in Oslo, for just holding hands. Perhaps Trettebergstuen should concentrate less on faraway Israel and more on here-and-now Oslo?
Unauthorized translation from Verdens Gang (VG), Norway’s largest daily:
- Suddenly a man i his forties came up to us, excused himself and asked us if we spoke Norwegian. Then he asked “what’s that?” while pointing to our hands, says Anders (24) to Dagbladet.
Kicked hard
The man, who was of foreign origin, clearly expressed his thoughts on normal Norwegian values.- He said: “I don’t like that. This is a muslim part of town”.
The couple continued to walk calmly along the pavement, but immediately afterwards the man came after them and kicked one of them hard from behind. Ander’s boyfriend took out his mobile phone to call the police, and the perpetrator quickly vanished from the site. The Oslo-police say that the incident has been reported and is under investigation.
It is precisely this kind of incident which makes Norwegians question the virtues of modern, multicultural society. Yet most muslims are decent folk – it’s people like Trettebergstuen who are the problem. Her kind have not got a clue about how to respond to incidents like yesterday’s. They can’t be seen to mobilize against the muslims – that would be racist. Neither can they fail to slam an obvious case of gaybashing – that would be discriminatory and bigoted. So what to do?
One two-step solution lies in speaking out against homophobia in general terms, without targeting any specific group of the population while everyone understands perfectly well which specific group of the population one is referring to and THEN appease the offended segments of the population by directing some particularly harsh criticism against Israel. This way the gays are vindicated, the muslims both chastised (over attitudes to gays) and pleased (with criticism of Israel) and Labor ends up looking tough, but fair.
This site predicts that Trettebergstuen will engage in some anti-Israel PR stunt pretty soon.
