The New Quislings by Bruce Bawer

Author:Bruce Bawer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2011-11-30T16:00:00+00:00

One of the New Quislings’ chief targets was my friend Hege Storhaug of Human Rights Service, who has devoted most of her adult life to the struggle to secure greater individual liberty and a higher quality of life for Muslim women and girls in Europe. On July 27 she was invited to call in to the NRK news interview program Dagsnytt, which is broadcast simultaneously on television and radio. Hege’s fellow participants, she was told, would be Per Fugelli, who had already blamed the Progress Party in part for the murders, and Magnus Marsdal, a young communist who had written a witheringly snide book about the Progress Party. (Marsdal exemplifies a true only-in-Norway situation: the classical liberal Progress Party receives about twenty to forty times as many votes as his totalitarian party does, but he’s treated by the media and the rest of the cultural elite as a respectable mainstream voice while members of the Progress Party are reviled as extremists.)

The host promised Hege that it would be a decent discussion with no personal attacks. Yet, as she wrote on August 1, it turned out to be “the worst debate I have ever experienced.” Marsdal was permitted to “Nazify HRS and me.” He had brought along quotations from work by Hege and her HRS colleague Rita Karlsen, which he distorted in good Stalinist fashion: for example, an article in which Rita expressed concern about young girls being forced to wear hijab was twisted, in effect, into a suggestion that the girls were wearing hijab voluntarily in order to serve as “warriors for Islam.” We are talking here about two women who have striven most of their adult lives to help ensure that Muslim girls and women can live in the West as freely as their non-Muslim counterparts.

On August 1, Dagsnytt again welcomed Marsdal, who this time went on the attack against Aftenposten opinion page editor Knut Olav Åmås for having published too many articles critical of Islam and immigration—and, in particular, for having praised my book While Europe Slept. Åmås, who participated in the discussion on Dagsnytt by telephone (and who has published op-eds by me), defended me, saying that I’m not an “extreme writer” but a writer who is concerned about the dangers posed to liberal society by fundamentalist religion. He insisted that all the writers that the Norwegian terrorist happened to read cannot be held responsible for his actions. But Åmås was clearly on the defensive—for Norway had entered a new era. The program host had introduced the segment by saying, chillingly: “Many people have felt that Aftenposten has let a hundred flowers bloom. But some of those flowers will be clipped now.” Mao, too, one recalled, had let flowers bloom, and then clipped them ruthlessly.

There are, insisted Marsdal, connections between opinions and actions. So opinions must be confronted. “Xenophobia and fascism” must be confronted, he said—and it was clear that by “xenophobia and fascism” he meant dissent from the far-left line, and that by “confronted” he meant crushed.

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