There is a lot of focus on muslim anti-Semitism right now, and rightly so. As NRK’s Tormod Strand has disclosed, muslim children have brought anti-Semitism back into the Norwegian schools. Yet Kristin Halvorsen of the Socialist Left has a point when she says anti-Semitism is not a “muslim-problem” but a “Norwegian problem”.
Anti-Semitism in Norway goes back to long before there were any muslims here. In the first Norwegian constitution of 1814 it was specified that neither Jews nor Jesuits were to be allowed access to the realm. When Jews finally were allowed into the country, they were met with suspicion. When Jews were fleeing Nazi-Germany, Norway allowed only some very few to seek refuge here. When Norway was occupied by Nazi-Germany, Norwegian collaborators identified and rounded up Norwegian Jews and sent around 700 of them to their deaths in the concentration camps.
In contemporary Norway we see an enormous attention being directed at Israel. Academics, humanitarian organizations, trade unions and politicians wage a seemingness endless war against the state of Israel. There is constantly some Norwegian raising some sort of debate on whether or not it is a good idea to somehow punish or condemn Israel. Israel is a very Norwegian obsession.
It is telling that when Manfred Gerstenfeld of the JCPA edited a “Behind the Humanitarian Mask” a book on anti-Semitism and anti-Israelism in the Nordic countries, he was misquoted and demonized throughout the Scandinavian peninsula. The campaign against this unfortunate academic, who has sought only to provide insight, was not engineered by Norwegian muslims, but by central players in the Norwegian academia, media and politics.
Anti-semitic muslims constitute a very visible part of the problem of anti-Semitism in Norway. But the larger part is to be found within the Norwegian mainstream; the media-men and the politicos.
