Editor’s note: The following article was a response to a piece in Aftenposten that likened Fjordman to a Nazi. The paper denied him his statutory “right of reply”, so he is publishing his prepared response here and at other online locations instead.
The Norwegian version of this article was published previously here. Many thanks to our Norwegian correspondent NA for translating it into English.
We encourage as many blogs as possible to mirror these posts. Our goal is for more people to read this article than if it had been published in Aftenposten, as Fjordman originally intended. The Norwegian MSM will discover that they no longer control the flow of information to the public. We will demonstrate that the “new media” can do a better job of disseminating news than the newspapers can.
Here follows the translated text of an essay that the newspaper
Aftenposten has now refused to publish. According to the
ethical guidelines of the Norwegian Press Association, one has the right to reply to accusations put forward about oneself in the press.
Aftenposten, a few days before I went public with my real name, posted a notorious
article about “Islamophobes” such as Robert Spencer, Bat Ye’or and myself (Fjordman) where we were presented as the new wave of right-wing extremism. The photos in the print edition were particularly nasty, where I was put next to Vidkun Quisling, Anders Behring Breivik and several neo-Nazis who are convicted murderers. I think they owe me for that. They were very close to a libel suit back then.
I sent them this essay a few days ago (as Peder Jensen, of course) for review. They rejected it. I’m not going to claim that it is the best text I have ever written, but I think it is at least as well-written, well-researched and logically coherent as the countless mediocre and easily-forgotten essays that very same newspaper has published about racist white Islamophobes and right-wing extremists.
I was first told that the text didn’t match the title. I think it does. I linked it to the Nazi sympathies of Islamic organizations such as the Muslim Brotherhood and showed how the authorities and the mainstream media have appeased the real Nazis of our time. However, they wanted me to remove the second part. I refused, and argued that the examples I had used were relevant. The same journalist then changed tactics and stated that my arguments were not new and had been used before. I suppose that means that Aftenposten will reject all future essays about Islamophobia or xenophobia, since most people have heard those arguments hundreds of times before, if not more. Somehow, I doubt that will happen.
Aftenposten asked me to remove the reference to my upcoming book The Curious Civilization from the text because this could be seen as a commercial of some kind. I admit that was indeed part of the reason why I put it there. That is the one change that I would have been willing to make to the text, to cut out that particular reference. Also note that they didn’t dispute a single factual claim that I wrote in the essay. I can easily document all of them.
The bottom line is that one has the “right to reply”, but apparently only as long as the journalists agree with your reply, which isn’t very helpful. I can accept being rejected if I simply don’t write well enough. I am not claiming that every single text I write is a masterpiece. Perhaps this one isn’t. But I cannot live with being turned down because of ideological censorship, and will not rewrite an essay to please those doing so. Perhaps I am wrong, but I personally sense an element of that motive here. If that is indeed the case then I will not accept it. That is why I started blogging in the first place. I therefore publish the text here to highlight censorship in the press.
Are Critics of Islam the Nazis of Our Time?
by Peder Jensen, also known as the writer Fjordman on the Internet
On the 30th of July of this year, Aftenposten printed the article “They are the third wave,” in which they harassed people such as Bat Ye’or, Robert Spencer and myself. The illustrations in the printed edition were particularly appalling. One was shown a picture of Bat Ye’or, and on the next page a picture of the convicted Nazi traitor Vidkun Quisling. This is extremely tactless, especially considering that the Nazis were responsible for the genocide of about six million Jews and the fact that Bat Ye’or is Jewish. Besides, Aftenposten‘s own historical relationship with the Nazis is far from pretty.
The message that is now being presented in the mass media after the atrocities committed by Anders Behring Breivik is that critics of Islam like myself are the Nazis of our time. But is this true? The Nazis were national Socialists, even though many people would now like us to forget the second part of their ideology. I have personally never heard of a totalitarian movement that could not also be partially described as Socialist. Is it a coincidence that a disproportionate number of Western converts to Islam are neo-Nazis or Marxists? Do they share a common totalitarian DNA?
In 2008, Marte Michelet from Dagbladet startlingly enough made common cause with Islamic organizations, Communists and neo-Nazis in favour of a new, large mosque in Cologne. German neo-Nazis regard Islamic organizations as allies in the struggle against “Jewish-Zionist dominance.” This did not lead to critical remarks from other media in Norway. There is more inbreeding in the Norwegian press than amongst Pakistani cousins.
As I mention in my upcoming book on European culture, The Curious Civilization, Muslims have a choice between Mozart and Hitler, and often choose Hitler of their own free will. In sharp contrast to the East Asian passion for European Classical music, Adolf Hitler’s autobiography Mein Kampf was number two on the bestseller list in the allegedly moderate NATO member state Turkey as late as in 2005. The book is still popular in parts of the Arab world.
The Muslim Brotherhood was founded by Hassan al-Banna in 1928, grew in parallel with the Nazi movement in Europe and was inspired by this in addition to Islam. Their leader Mahdi Akef has reassured his followers that Jihad “will smash Western civilization and replace it with Islam, which will dominate the world.” Akef stated in 2007 that if Muslims are not able to achieve this in the near future they are “obliged to continue Jihad [holy war to expand Islamic global rule], which will lead to the collapse of Western civilization.”
The Islamic Council of Norway, which is being funded by native Norwegian taxpayers, receives guidance from the European Council for Fatwa and Research about issues such as whether or not to support the death penalty for homosexuals. The Council is led by the powerful Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the spiritual guide of the Muslim Brotherhood. Qaradawi, who supports marriage with underage children, has openly boasted that Muslims will conquer Europe, spoken in positive terms of the Holocaust perpetrated by the Nazis, and suggested that the next mass murder of Jews will come at the hands of Muslims. As Walid al-Kubaisi points out, the Brotherhood has a big influence in many countries, the West included. Representatives of Jonas Gahr Støre’s Foreign Ministry have met members of the Muslim Brotherhood for talks in Oslo.
In 2007 under the government of Jens Stoltenberg, Norway was the only Western country to recognize the Palestinian government that was then led by Hamas. The ideology of Hamas has many similarities with Nazism. This move was widely applauded by the Norwegian press at the time. People within the governing parties and the political Left wanted to support such a government financially, which would imply that Norwegian taxpayers had to fund terrorists.
In September 2011 the Norwegian Police Security Service (PST) asked the cartoonist Kurt Westergaard to leave Norway because they feared that an assassination attempt would be made against him. According to Islamic sources, critics of Mohammed were killed by his followers. Given that his personal example, or Sunna, which along with the Koran constitutes the teachings of Islam, this remains a valid principle to this day. Those who want to kill Theo van Gogh or Geert Wilders are therefore acting in full compliance with traditional Islamic theology.
This is described in Halvor Tjønn’s surprisingly realistic Norwegian biography of Mohammed. Ibn Warraq, author of the book Why I Am Not a Muslim, is a man who was born in Pakistan but has to write under a pseudonym in order to avoid the death penalty for apostasy. Islam is the only religion on Earth that prescribes death to those who criticize or leave it.
Thomas Seltzer, a host on NRK3, has presented a caricature of me as a multi-handicapped writer in a wheelchair. I presume that this makes me the Norwegian equivalent of Stephen Hawking, which I take as a compliment. Alternatively, one could imagine it to be an insinuation that people in wheelchairs are drivelling fools, which is not particularly tasteful.
The difference between a humorist and a bully is that a true humorist makes fun of the powerful, not the weak. Seltzer can ridicule people like me because he knows that we will not assault him, but he does not dare to show a drooling Yusuf al-Qaradawi in a wheelchair explaining to Muslims that paedophilia is OK. By so doing he has himself indirectly admitted who the real successors to the Nazis in our time actually are. I can inform him that genuine neo-Nazis do not like me at all and have circulated rumours on the Internet for years about me being an Israeli agent because of my clear pro-Israeli line.
Some people might assert that I, who stretch the boundaries of freedom of speech, should put up with as much. Perhaps. The difference is that citizens do not have to pay for my writings. Through the TV license they have to pay for what is broadcast on NRK, whether they want to or not. In an age when a heavily left-leaning press looks like as a wall-to-wall carpet of Multicultural propaganda, one has to ask why. Hundreds of thousands of Norwegians are fed up with the fact that those who are deeply concerned for the future of their children because of a mass immigration that is unprecedented in human history are harassed by their own press corps and labelled as extremists, racists and Nazis.
Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg has spoken in favour of more openness and democracy after Breivik. One of the most important things one could do to get a democratic debate going in Norway is to remove press subsidies and to abolish NRK in its present form. The question is whether the Labour Party is willing to do this as long as NRK constitutes an integral part of the Left’s grip on power.
Norwegian-language version of this article.
