By Bruce Bawer
In recent days, while Britons have been in an uproar over the December 3 butchery of 18-year-old Henry Nowak in Southampton by a knife-wielding Sikh, who was convicted of the murder on May 28, many Norwegians have been worked up over a similar crime. Late on the evening of May 17 – which in Norway is Constitution Day, a festive occasion celebrated around the country with parades and parties – an 18-year old boy, as yet unnamed by authorities, was brutally beaten by four individuals, strangers to him, who were aged between 15 and 17. Unlike Henry Nowak, the victim in Bergen survived the assault, which was completely unprovoked. At the time of the incident, he was dressed in a one-piece blue outfit that identified him as a “russ,” a person who is about to graduate, or who has just graduated, from secondary school. By all accounts he did nothing to provoke the attack, which was filmed by one of two witnesses who then shared the video on social media.
At this writing, all but one of the assailants have been arrested and those in custody have yet to be fully questioned. Public officials have used this fact as an excuse to refrain from commenting on the crime. But one person whom the police have taken to task is the head of the parliamentary justice committee, Jon Helgheim of the Progress Party, who shared images of the perpetrators and their actions online. In response to the cops’ criticism, Helgheim said: “The police should stay far away from trying to control what politicians think.”
Of course, in today’s Norway, if perhaps not quite as much as in Britain, a major part of the job of law-enforcement officers is to act as thought police. I discovered as much several years ago when I was called in for an interview with two officers of the supposedly elite PST (Police Security Service) who’d been sent from Oslo to grill me about my writings on Islam. That day, I managed to turn the situation around, probing my interrogators’ knowledge of Islam (they knew virtually nothing about it) and asking if they’d ever read the Koran (of course they hadn’t). I urged them to educate themselves instead of wasting their time trying to intimidate an American citizen who actually knows something about the subject.
Alas, the police appear not to have taken my advice. On June 4, they arrested a Bergen man in his thirties for posting several statements on X that they say could be viewed as threats. “I don’t care anymore,” he wrote. “Take cover. Terror is loose.” He also wrote a post addressed to the PST, calling them a very naughty (but funny) name and accusing them, bemusingly, of having “awakened a demon I was trying to save us from.” Reportedly, the man is “linked to an anti-immigrant group” and is known to have made “suggestions of violence or reprisals against journalists at Bergensavisen, the mayor of Bergen and a district court judge in Oslo”; the police are currently investigating seven criminal cases against him involving “hate speech” and threats. In other words, the man is in trouble, at least in part, for stating his opinions in public.
Also being excoriated by police are independent citizens who have been sharing the video of the May 17 attack. Yes, the attorney for the victim has also asked the public to stop spreading the video: that’s a legitimate enough request for a man in his position. But the police have no business sticking their noses into such matters. Why, then, are they doing so? The reason is obvious. At this point in modern Norwegian history, when a disproportionate amount of serious crime is committed by young men with certain minority backgrounds, the cops see it as their job not so much to tackle that crime as to keep it from being too high-profile. As Helgheim wrote in an online post, he didn’t share images of the Bergen assault in order to ensure that the individuals involved be recognizable; he did it “to draw attention to this phenomenon that is far too little discussed.”
The phenomenon in question, of course, is, as he put it, the “cowardly and sickening” violence that is routinely committed against individual ethnic Norwegian boys by groups of boys with immigrant backgrounds – almost all of them Muslim and originating in “parts of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.” “It is,” declared Helgheim, “a problem we should have taken seriously a long time ago.” One aspect of this kind of behavior, he went on to note, is that in “some immigrant communities” it “is either tacitly accepted, or even seen as somewhat positive and manly.” Helgheim called on those “communities” to stand up against this sort of primitive conduct. They “must stop raising boys and girls differently,” he insisted. “They must stop turning a blind eye to violent tendencies in boys. They must “put away the clan culture they have brought with them from their homeland, which contributes massively to crime in Norway.” Well, good luck with that. The lamentable fact is that, to the adults in Europe’s Muslim “communities,” the savagery of the gangs their sons run with is not a bug but a feature. It’s part of those “communities’” broad-scale effort to intimidate native Europeans and, in the long run, replace and subordinate them.
Meanwhile Jørgen Riple, the attorney for one of the defendants, had a few quotable remarks to offer. His client, he claimed, “is sorry about what happened.” He’s “sorry things got out of control.” He “hasn’t slept since it happened.” Boo-hoo. Alexander Gonzalo Sele, the lawyer for another of the defendants is, for his part, particularly exercised about posters that have appeared around downtown Bergen showing the faces of the perpetrators, giving their names, and identifying them an “immigrant gang.” Sele has issued an official complaint to the police about the posters, and has done the same for Helgheim. At least we were supplied, in addition to all this pro-defense hooey, with a brief glimpse of the victim’s mental state. His legal-aid lawyer, Malene Lillebostad Svendsen, says that he finds the whole matter “incomprehensible,” that he experienced it as “brutal,” and that “it has taken a toll on him.” Let’s be grateful that he didn’t end up like Henry Nowak. And let’s hope that it doesn’t take too many more such close calls before the bulk of the Norwegian people recognize – and finally act meaningfully upon – their duty to keep their country from falling entirely into the hands of feral imported thugs.
First published in Front Page Magazine
One Response
Yup.