The New Quislings: How the International Left Used the Oslo Massacre to Silence Debate About Islam (NB: Hele anmeldelsen kom ikke med fra begyndelsen, beklager.)
Af Peder Jensen
The American author Bruce Bawer, who has lived in Norway for over a decade, in early 2012 published the ebook The New Quislings: How the International Left Used the Oslo Massacre to Silence Debate About Islam. It deals with the aftermath of the terror attacks in the Oslo region on July 22, 2011 where Anders Behring Breivik killed 77 people in cold blood, first with a bomb in central Oslo and then with a shooting spree at the island of Utøya outside of the city. Relative to its population size, Norway lost more of its citizens in these attacks than the USA did during the Islamic Jihadist attacks of September 11, 2001.
A similarly deadly atrocity somewhere else would have caused a lot of grief and pain, but perhaps not triggered the nearly existential crisis that it did in Norway. As a previously sheltered Scandinavian society, Norway has had a tendency to see itself as immune to the ills that befall the rest of the world. The country’s left-wing political elite, which sees itself as a beacon of virtue, eagerly seized upon a suggestion by the American writer and alleged terror expert Mark Juergensmeyer that Breivik was a “Christian terrorist,” although Breivik openly admits that he is not a religious man at all. Even his defense lawyer Geir Lippestad states that ABB respects and admires the violent methods employed by the Islamic Jihadist terrorist network al-Qaida.
Bawer is at his best in this book when pointing out that in the days following the terror attacks, the Norwegian political and media elites were busy reaching out to imams and visiting mosques, while at the sametime ruthlessly attacking all those who were seen as critical of Islam, Multiculturalism or the official immigration policies. These local dissidents were the only ones who were seen as outside of the circle of universal peace, love and the brotherhood of man.
He notes the glaring double standard that if people who commit acts of terrorism shout Islamic slogans or cite the Koran as justification for their actions, this has absolutely nothing to do with Islam in any way. On the other hand, if a mentally unbalanced man quotes a large number of peaceful individuals and uses this to justify terrorism, these writers should immediately be attacked and blamed as co-responsible for his acts. Apparently, terror has absolutely nothing to do with Islam but a lot to do with so-called Islamophobia.
Breivik’s unspeakable atrocities in a single day gave the ruling Multicultural elites a chance to reestablish their authority, which had been slowly, but steadily eroding for years, and suppress public dissent. Far too often, they eagerly grasped this opportunity with both hands. In the first months after 22/7, the only possible choice for individuals who had been critical of Islam or mass immigration was to repent, now, of face public ostracism. Bawer describes a repressive atmosphere of fear and public ritual shaming of political dissidents.
The aggressive name-calling and campaign of intimidation did not stop after it gradually became clear that Breivik had probably acted alone, barely even after he was declared insane by psychiatrists. The right-wing Progress Party suffered its greatest losses in many years during the local elections in Norway in September 2011. The fact that they sometimes gave in and tried to appease those who verbally assaulted them only made them appear weakand made the aggressors more aggressive.
Bawer writes about me going public as Fjordman shortly after the Breivik case. He states that he knew me from several years back and that we had met socially a few times in Oslo in addition to exchanging emails. This is correct. Bawer was friendly towards me and invited me along for the Pim Fortuyn Memorial Conference on Islam in The Hague in the Netherlandsin February 2006, where I met some international writers such as Robert Spencer, Andrew G. Bostom, Ibn Warraq and Bat Ye’or for the first time. I knew Spencer, Bostom and others via the Internet already but had not met them in person prior to this date.
Bawer indicates in his book that he generally liked my personality, stating that I was friendly, “obviously very widely read”and knowledgeable about many aspects of Arabic culture as well as about Islam and Islamic history. I was highly critical of Islam, but at the same time did not say bigoted or offensive things about individual Muslims as human beings. On the negative side, he includes some critical comments about me, states that he thinks my pen name is “very silly” and indicates that I can also appear arrogant at times:
“In any event, at the time of the atrocities I had not been in contact with him for a couple of years, had seen virtually none of his recent work, and had actually forgotten his real name. As soon as it emerged that he was Breivik’s ‘hero,’ I was overcome with sympathy for him. As far as I knew, he had never written anything that any sane person would read as encouraging violence. In my view, he was an earnest, intelligent young man for whom there had been no place in a foreign service that treats Hamas with more respect than it does Israel, and who therefore sought to serve his country’s interests in the only way he could come up with – by writing about the truth as he saw it.”






