In the wake of the PM’s apology to Norwegian Jews for the persecution, state terrorism and injustice suffered during WWII, many other ministers feel they have to step up to the pressure to fight anti-Semitism in Norway. This time, the buck has stopped at the door steps of Minister of Education Kristin Halvorsen. A group of Israeli-Norwegian parents has written to her to discuss their concern that the children’s book Daddy is a Pirate unfairly casts Israeli’s as evil, whilst Palestinians are presented as heroes, will contribute to a climate of hatred in Norway. Minister Halvorsen seems to be of two minds on this one, whilst it is her ministerial duty to prevent racism, perpetuation of stereotypes in our school system, she claims that it is not the job for the ministry to control neither content nor literal expressions in literature.
She may have a point there. However, I don’t think anybody has asked the ministry to censure literature, but rather ensure that literature that does present ethnic groups in a stereotypic and unfair way, does not get a free pass to enter school libraries, or other educational material through the system of state sponsored books.
In stead of getting the right end of the stick, she merely pushes the concerned parents ahead of her responsibility, whilst serving up some vague but nice phrases that she and her ministry has a job to do to strengthen awareness and prevent racism.
Lifted from Vårt Land
Tells parents to contact publisher of children’s book critical of Israel
Kristin Halvorsen asks concerned parents to talk to the publisher of children’s book Daddy is a pirate as well as municipalities reading their concerns. Parents believe the book is unbalanced in its criticism of Israel.
- I understand the concern for texts that can help to reinforce the stereotypies among children and adolescents in schools and elsewhere in the Norwegian society. Yet, the Ministry of Education is not the right addressee for this inquiry, Halvorsen writes in a letter to a group of parents of Israeli-Norwegian children.
The children’s book Daddy is a Pirate by Hans Sande got parents to send a letter of concern to Halvorsen in January.
Request action.
The parents find book’s message particulalry worrying because the target audience are children between 5 and 12 years.” They strongly believe the children’s book enhances stereotypes where Israelis are bad and the Palestinians the big heroes.
The parents specifically asked what Halvorsen and the Ministry will do to prevent the emergence of prejudiced attitudes.
- The Ministry of Education has no influence over content and form of fiction for adults or children, says Halvorsen directs the concerned parents elsewhere:
Talk to the publisher.
- Criticism of the contents of books must primarily be discussed with the respective publishers. With regards to which books that are included on the lists of books suitable for school libraries, the parents should contact individual municipalities who are responsible for these decisions, and discuss their concerns with them (this last paragraph has been somewhat changed from the original Norwegian, since the translation was essentially meaningless without including the context).
Halvorsen does still offer parents one measure:
Creating attitudes. - I see that we have a long term and focused job to do in several arenas to strengthen awareness in schools. The Directorate of Education has therefore recently been commissioned with developing a special educational program aimed at teachers, school administrators and students in secondary schools.
While not on subject, this essay was in the Wall Street Journal today:
NORWAY’S LEFT SEEKS TO SILENCE CRITICS OF ISLAM BY LINKING THEM TO A MASS MURDERER
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204369404577206972422374842.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopOpinion
After the Oslo Massacre, an Assault on Free SpeechNorway’s left seeks to silence Islam’s critics by linking them to a mass murderer.
Last July 22, a powerful explosion rocked a government building in downtown Oslo, killing eight people. Later that day, 69 people, mostly teenagers, were shot to death by a lone gunman at a Labor Party camp on the nearby island of Utøya. By nightfall, police had a suspect in custody: a 32-year-old Norwegian named Anders Behring Breivik, who had apparently carried out both attacks on his own.
Contrary to nearly everyone’s original assumption that Islamic terrorists were behind the Oslo attack, a 1,500-page “manifesto” by Breivik showed that he opposed the mass immigration of Muslims into Norway and had targeted the Labor Party gathering because of the party’s role in shaping the country’s multicultural immigration policy.
As an American who had lived in Oslo since 1999, I was deeply distressed by the atrocities of July 22. But when I learned that they were the work of a native Norwegian who claimed to have acted in opposition to Norwegian multiculturalism, I was even more devastated. For I saw at once what this would mean.
Consider this: Criticizing Islam is now a punishable offense in several European countries. In the past few months alone, a Danish court fined writer Lars Hedegaard for talking about Islam’s treatment of women in his own home, and activist Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff was found guilty of lecturing about Muhammad’s marital history in what an Austrian court considered an inappropriate tone.
Critics of Islam have yet to be put on trial in Norway. But as I watched Norwegian TV’s coverage of the massacre in Oslo and at Utøya, it was clear to me that such critics—who were already used to being labeled racists and “Islamophobes”—would have an even rougher time after July 22.
“In Norway,” I wrote in these pages on July 25, “to speak negatively about any aspect of the Muslim faith has always been a touchy matter . . . . It will, I fear, be a great deal more difficult to broach these issues now that this murderous madman has become the poster boy for the criticism of Islam.”
This statement was harshly criticized by Norway’s multicultural left. How dare anyone speak of such issues at a time like this! It was as if the concerns I had raised were abstract or narrowly political.
On the contrary, Islam’s rise in the West is a subject that needs to be discussed frankly, without euphemism or disinformation. The survival of secular democracy, individual liberty and women’s rights depends upon it.
Sadly, my prediction turned out to be far more prescient than I could have imagined. In the weeks and months following Breivik’s rampage, dozens of high-profile Norwegian leftists stepped forward to claim that critics of Islam shared responsibility for his crimes—and to call, darkly if vaguely, for action.
On July 28, for instance, novelist Jostein Gaarder, author of “Sophie’s World,” and social anthropologist Thomas Hylland Eriksen, writing in the New York Times, linked Breivik to “right-wing” Islam critics, including me. “Mr. Breivik,” they wrote, “has now shown that those who claim to protect the next generation of Norwegians against Islamist extremism are, in fact, the greater menace.”
Lars Gule, former head of the Norwegian Humanist Association, agreed. “It is obvious,” wrote Mr. Gule in VG, Norway’s largest daily, on Aug. 1, “that certain groups, persons, and communities have contributed to Breivik’s warped view of reality, and these people need to take a good look at themselves. If not, others must help them.”
On Aug. 22, Norway’s newspaper of record, Aftenposten, ran an op-ed coauthored by Mr. Eriksen and three others—social anthropologist Sindre Bangstad, philosopher Arne Johan Vetlesen and Bushra Ishaq of Norway’s Anti-Racist Center. Titled “Hateful Utterances,” it called for tighter limits on free speech in the wake of July 22.
“Certain hateful utterances,” the authors insisted, “are legally and morally unacceptable.” Rejecting “free speech absolutism,” and criticizing the United States for “go[ing] the furthest in protecting the right to expression—including hateful expression,” they argued that “Norwegian editors as well as politicians” needed to make it clear that “it is not a human right to express oneself in public; and that certain hateful utterances . . . are not acceptable.”
Anthropologist Runar Døving agreed, declaring flatly, in a Sept. 2 interview with the Norwegian weekly Morgenbladet, that criticism of Islam should be censored. Mr. Døving admitted that his view of the public square was “authoritarian”—the expression of certain ideas, he said, should simply not be allowed—and that he was “entirely in favor of what many people are now describing as a witch hunt,” because “there needs to be an investigation of what was written before July 22″ so that we can “see the connection between words and actions.”
Indeed, a witch hunt is under way in Norway. In the name of multicultural tolerance and social harmony, some of the most powerful members of the country’s left-wing intelligentsia are seeking to silence Islam’s critics by linking them to a mass murderer who has become the most despised individual in modern Norwegian history. This campaign has been carried out on a scale, and with an intensity, that is profoundly unsettling. It should be firmly resisted by everyone who treasures freedom of expression and recognizes it as the cornerstone of human liberty.
Mr. Bawer’s e-book about the aftermath of the July 22 atrocities in Norway, “The New Quislings,” has just been published by Broadside Books, an imprint of HarperCollins.
Lest you think I am being critical of Norway to the exclusion of others, we in the US have our own buffoons, although you did manage to give this one a Nobel prize:
“Jimmy Carter. In a March 1989 Op-Ed article in The New York Times titled “Rushdie’s Book Is an Insult,” Carter argued that “The Satanic Verses” was guilty of “vilifying” Muhammad and “defaming” the Koran. “The author, a well-versed analyst of Moslem beliefs, must have anticipated a horrified reaction throughout the Islamic world,” Carter wrote. While condemning the death sentence and affirming Rushdie’s right to free speech, the former president argued that “we have tended to promote him and his book with little acknowledgment that it is a direct insult to those millions of Moslems whose sacred beliefs have been violated and are suffering in restrained silence the added embarrassment of the Ayatollah’s irresponsibility.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/04/arts/04iht-15donadio.6482640.html?pagewanted=all
thank you, this is very relevant, and documents from yet another angle the tight minded attitude representative of some of our intellectual “elite”. I personally think that in this context, “intellectual elite” is wholly misleading, if not an insult to true intellectuals. One survivor of the gruesome 22 of July massacre decried this attitude of PC leftists, saying that they betray the concept of openness and debate.
Bawer is a great essayist
a question for all the lefties. If the 77 murdered by Breivik had been Jews murdered by a fascists left or nazi right, would the end result have been the same? I believe not.
Prof, the echelons of Norwegian society are so filled with hatred of Jews in general and Israel in particular, nothing will change. Halvorsen is with the SV, called for boycott of Israel, laughing in front of a banner claiming Israeli genocide against the “Palestinians. She is head of education? Perhaps Quisling should have been head of humanities. He is well matched with the Ghould. what despicable people!!!
Halvorsen has no clue. Or does she? There is no doubt of a distinction between censorship and promotion of ideas. That she was participated in the 2009 Anti-Jewish Riots in Oslo is telling and troubling when it comes to her concern in the matter, at least from my perspective.
I would actually hate that scumbag Halvorsen a tiny bit less if she were at least honest about her fanatic hatred of Jews and went around Oslo goose-stepping in a Nazi uniform.
At least she would not be compounding her sick, murderous anti-Semitic hatred with lies.
Who of the factually educated can and will educate the ignorant educators in educating a brainwashed majority?
Herbert,
It is also amazing to see Bawer’s political transformation. He used to write frequently for the Slimes. Now he is one of its harshest critics.