As Islam continues to gain numbers and power in Western Europe, certain questions take on greater importance. If you’re female or Jewish or gay, for example, and the only local doctor without a full patient list is a Muslim (and given how some nationalized medical systems work, this kind of situation arises not infrequently), do you choose to assume that he doesn’t take his religion’s teachings seriously, or do you move?
A rise in Muslim numbers means a rise in Muslim influence on many fronts. In Norway, there are about 1500 Jews and about 175,000 Muslims. When Jewish parents complain about their kids being beaten by their Muslim classmates – a charge that, if acted upon, can lead to major unrest – how do you expect teachers, principals, cops, and politicians to respond?
Or consider the Christian People’s Party (KrF), the traditional political home of Norway’s aging religious right. As that cohort dies out, KrF risks extinction. How to recoup? Some of its leaders, possessed of a fanciful misconception that all “people of faith” share essentially the same values, have tried reaching out to Muslims. But so far this hasn’t worked too well, largely because of KrF’s ardent support for Israel. Which raises the question: as the party’s crisis intensifies even further, will KrF feel compelled to distance itself from Israel?
Then there’s this news item. On January 30, Norway’s newspaper of record, Aftenposten, reported that the Oslo police department had established a special patrol unit for the Muslim-heavy neighborhood of Tøyen. Police don’t routinely patrol on foot in Oslo, but the members of this four-person group will do so, the purported goal being to improve community relations – to have friendly chats with the locals, to get to know them better, to develop trust.
It’s a puzzling piece of news. As longtime observers of Muslim neighborhoods in Western Europe are well aware, once an urban area has become sufficiently Islamized, police cars (and fire engines) that try to enter it risk being attacked violently by the inhabitants. In districts that haven’t yet reached that magical saturation point, you can still enter without triggering displays of rage, but the tension and sense of threat will be palpable. Do Oslo authorities expect that Tøyen, which is definitely at that tense stage, will now transform suddenly into Mayberry, with its own genial Sheriff Andy and his three deputies hanging out on street corners and shooting the breeze with imams, halal butchers, and women in niqab?
One not insignificant detail ignored in the Aftenposten article is that neighborhoods like Tøyen have already had their own patrols for many years – patrols, that is, by the morality police, whose job is to seek out violations of sharia. The whole premise underlying the existence of the morality police is that these neighborhoods are, practically speaking, under the jurisdiction not of the Norwegian government but of local imams and patriarchs. Does Oslo’s tiny new constabulary quartet – the four horsemen of the apocalypse, as it were – plan to challenge that control? Or does it expect to forge some kind of working relationship with its Islamic counterpart? How will the morality police react when they see that one member of the new patrol is female? (Will she wear niqab?)
Like most other Western government programs conceived in response to the challenge of Islam, needless to say, this Tøyen initiative is absurd – based on the delusion (and how stunning that it still persists after all these years!) that if many Muslims feel little or no connection to mainstream society, it’s because authorities have failed to reach out to them sufficiently. It’s as if those authorities are unaware that one of the key commandments of the Koran is don’t befriend the infidel.
Speaking of the Koran, Aftenposten’s story about the new Tøyen patrol came three days before it was reported that Oslo police had prohibited an anti-Islam group, SIAN (Stop the Islamization of Norway), from carrying out a planned Koran-burning outside the Turkish embassy, in protest against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s opposition to Sweden and Finnish membership in NATO. (As it happens, a similar protest in Stockholm was allowed to go forward.) Why did the Oslo police ban the demo? Because, they explained, they feared it would provoke an act of terrorism and/or lead to domestic disorder – an outright admission that they’ve granted Al-Qaeda and ISIS a veto on free speech in Norway and that they’ve lost the numerical battle against the enemy within.
And most Norwegians, it turns out, are on the side of the cops. Survey results released on Tuesday show that only 33% of them think Koran-burning should be permitted. When only a third of a country’s population support the small minority who are actively standing up for everyone’s freedom, how long can that freedom endure?
Numbers! A surprisingly frank article appeared in last Sunday’s Aftenposten. The headline was “Not entirely colorblind: Have Oslo’s youth become a big colorful community after 50 years of immigration? There’s not much sign of it.” I expected it to be yet another piece – they’ve been writing them for decades – smearing Norwegians as racists. But no, in the eastern half of Oslo things have now moved beyond that. At Oslo’s largest school, Kuben Upper Secondary School, reporter Hilde Lundgaard visited a typical classroom, in which only two – yes, two – of the students were ethnic Norwegians. A few inquiries established that most of the non-Norwegian kids don’t have any ethnic Norwegian friends at all – and prefer it that way.
In fact, they don’t even see themselves as Norwegian. Even those who were born in Norway, Lundgaard found, refer to themselves as “foreigners.” A girl named Fatima, whose parents are Pakistani, admitted that she feels safest around “people with my cultural background.” One teacher told Lundgaard that “the pupils are unbelievably preoccupied with color and ethnicity.” Although the teacher apparently didn’t feel comfortable adding the word “religion,” Lundgaard cited a researcher, Monica Rosten, who’s dared to tiptoe closer to the truth, writing that “[students] with religious identity find one another.” Religious, of course, being code for Muslim.
Lundgaard’s article reads like a portrait of Norway’s future: a majority Muslim country in which the views of ethnic Norwegians about immigration and integration – or, for that matter, about anything whatsoever – have become irrelevant, simply because Muslims now outnumber them.
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