oy vey!
Norway’s challenge http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Editorials/Article.aspx?id=230788 By JPOST EDITORAL 07/24/2011 22:02 Europe’s fringe right-wing extremists present a real danger to society. But Oslo’s devastating tragedy should not be allowed to be manipulated by those who would cover up the abject failure of multiculturalism. Talkbacks (406) The cold-blooded calculation of the Norway tragedy boggles the mind. For over an hour, Anders Behring Breivik, 32, dressed as a police officer and armed with a rifle and a hand gun, prowled Utoeya, a tiny forested holiday island a few dozen kilometers from Oslo, calmly massacring teenagers. The youngsters had been attending the annual summer camp for the youth wing of Norway’s ruling Labor party. With no one armed to confront Breivik, escape from the island by water was the only avenue to safety. When he finally was forced to put down his weapons by a police team that reportedly took 40 minutes to respond, at least 86 were dead and many more were wounded. Just hours before Breivik, a former member of a populist anti-immigration party who wrote blogs attacking multiculturalism and Islam, had detonated a bomb in Oslo’s government district that killed seven. The attacks, which targeted a government known for its embrace of multiculturalist policies, are being billed as the worst incident of bloodshed on Norwegian soil since World War II. As Israelis, a people that is sadly all too familiar with the horrors of indiscriminate, murderous terrorism, our hearts go out with empathy to the Norwegian people, who perhaps more than any other nation symbolize the unswerving – and sometimes naïve – pursuit of peace. Oslo is the namesake of one of the most ambitious – and misguided – attempts by Israel, under the mediation of the Norwegians, to reach a peace accord with our Palestinian neighbors. Norway’s capital is where the Nobel Peace Prize is presented annually. And though Norway has troops in Afghanistan to bolster the allied forces there, the basically peaceful nature of Norwegians goes a long way to explaining the utter shock that has gripped the nation in the wake of the tragedy and the blatant incongruity of the conspicuous deployment of security forces in city centers to safeguard citizens. Now along with their dogged pursuit of peace, the Norwegians are also coming to grips with the reality of evil in their midst. It would be wrongheaded, however, to allow the fact that this terrible tragedy was perpetrated by a right-wing extremist to detract attention from the underlying problems faced not only by Norway, but by many Western European nations. Undoubtedly, there will be those – particularly on the Left – who will extrapolate out from Breivik’s horrific act that the real danger facing contemporary Europe is rightwing extremism and that criticism of multiculturalism is nothing more than so much Islamophobia. While it is still too early to determine definitively Breivik’s precise motives, it could very well be that the attack was more pernicious – and more widespread – than the isolated act of a lunatic. Perhaps Brievik’s inexcusable act of vicious terror should serve not only as a warning that there may be more elements on the extreme Right willing to use violence to further their goals, but also as an opportunity to seriously reevaluate policies for immigrant integration in Norway and elsewhere. While there is absolutely no justification for the sort of heinous act perpetrated this weekend in Norway, discontent with multiculturalism’s failure must not be delegitimatized or mistakenly portrayed as an opinion held by only the most extremist elements of the Right. Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron and Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel have both recently lamented the “failure of multiculturalism” in their respective countries. Amartya Sen, the 1998 Nobel Prize laureate for welfare economics from India, has noted how terribly impractical it is to believe that the coexistence of an array of cultures in close proximity will lead to peace. Without a shared cultural foundation, no meaningful communication among diverse groups is possible, Sen has argued. Norway, a country so oriented toward promoting peace, where the Muslim population is forecast to increase from 3 percent to 6.5% of the population by 2030, should heed Sen’s incisive analysis. The challenge for Norway in particular and for Europe as a whole, where the Muslim population is expected to account for 8% of the population by 2030 according to a Pew Research Center, is to strike the right balance. Fostering an open society untainted by xenophobia or racism should go hand in hand with protection of unique European culture and values. Europe’s fringe right-wing extremists present a real danger to society. But Oslo’s devastating tragedy should not be allowed to be manipulated by those who would cover up the abject failure of multiculturalism.
The editor-in-chief adds: As a newspaper, The Jerusalem Post strongly denounces all acts of violence against innocent civilians. This editorial is not aimed at deflecting attention from the horrific massacre perpetuated in Norway, nor the need to take greater precautions against extremists from all sides.
but the hebrews don't mind killing palestinians, kind of a sport in Izraheil! also, the jews are big on multi-culturalism here in the us, that's why 50% of the Harvard student body is jewish!
As The Right Bemoans Norway’s Criminal Justice System, It Is One Of The Safest Countries On Earth By Zaid Jilani on Jul 25, 2011 at 12:20 pm
A prison in Norway. Following last week’s shocking bombing and shooting attack by alleged suspect Anders Breivik, much of the world is now awaiting his trial. Many right wingers, particularly those in the United States, are now bemoaning Norway’s criminal justice system, noting that the country uses a maximum sentencing law that typically only allows prisoners to be jailed for 21 years (although prisoners can be held for additional five-year sentences if they are deemed dangerous). “Most murderers in Norway spend just 14 years behind bars. The terrorist is 32 years old. He will get out when he’s 53. That means he’s serving about 3 months for every person he murdered. Justice?” asked a blogger at Big Peace. Yet before Americans rush to judge Norway’s criminal justice system — which relies far less on punitive measures than ours and that has a strong focus on rehabilitation — they should look at the results it produces. Norway is one of the safest countries on earth, boasting some of the world’s lowest crime rates: - Norway Has Some Of The Lowest Murder Rates In The World: In 2009, Norway had .6 intentional homicides per 100,000 people. In the same year, the United States had 5 murders per 100,000 people, meaning that the U.S. proportionally has 8 times as many homicides. - Norway’s Incarceration Rate Is A Fraction Of That Of The United States: 71 out of every 100,000 Norwegian citizens is incarcerated. In the United States, 743 out of every 100,000 citizens was incarcerated in 2009. The U.S. has the world’s highest incarceration rate. - Norway’s Prisoner Recidivism Rate Is Much Lower Than The United States’: The recidivism rate for prisoners in Norway is around 20 percent. Meanwhile, it’s estimated that 67 percent of America’s prisoners are re-arrested and 52 percent are re-incarcerated. While many Americans may have an understandable emotional reaction to a country that strives to treat even the most heinous of murderers humanely, they should also be aware of the fact that Norway’s criminal justice system appears to have produced a nation that is much safer and imprisons far less of its people than the United States or just about any other country.
A fire bell in the night for Norway A fire bell in the night for Norway by Patrick Buchanan
"Like a fire bell in the night," wrote Thomas Jefferson in 1820, "this momentous question ... awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union."
Jefferson was writing of the sudden resurgence of the slavery issue in the debate on Missouri's entry into the Union, as foreshadowing a civil war.
And that massacre in Oslo, where a terrorist detonated a fertilizer bomb to decapitate the government and proceeded to a youth camp to kill 68 children of Norway's ruling elite, is a fire bell in the night for Europe. For Anders Behring Breivik is no Islamic terrorist.
He was born in Norway and chose as his targets not Muslims whose presence he detests, but the Labor Party leaders who let them into the country, and their children, the future leaders of that party.
Though Breivik is being called insane, that is the wrong word.
Breivik is evil – a cold-blooded, calculating killer – though a deluded man of some intelligence, who in his 1,500-page manifesto reveals a knowledge of the history, culture and politics of Europe.
He admits to his "atrocious" but "necessary" crimes, done, he says, to bring attention to his ideas and advance his cause: a Crusader's war between the real Europe and the "cultural Marxists" and Muslims they invited in to alter the ethnic character and swamp the culture of the Old Continent.
Specifically, Breivik wanted to kill three-time Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland, the "mother of the nation," who spoke at the camp on Utoeya Island but departed before he arrived.
Predictably, the European press is linking Breivik to parties of the populist right that have arisen to oppose multiculturalism and immigration from the Islamic world. Breivik had belonged to the Progress Party, but quit because he found it insufficiently militant.
His writings are now being mined for references to U.S. conservative critics of multiculturalism and open borders. Purpose: Demonize the American right, just as the berserker's attack on Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson was used to smear Sarah Palin and Timothy McVeigh's Oklahoma City bombing was used to savage Rush Limbaugh and conservative critics of Big Government.
Guilt by association, which the left condemned when they claimed to be its victims in the Truman-McCarthy era, has been used by the left since it sought to tie the assassination of JFK by a Marxist from the Fair Play for Cuba Committee to the political conservatism of the city of Dallas.
But Europe's left will encounter difficulty in equating criticism of multiculturalism with neo-Nazism. For Angela Merkel of Germany, Nicolas Sarkozy of France and David Cameron of Britain have all declared multiculturalism a failure. From votes in Switzerland to polls across the continent, Europeans want an end to the wearing of burqas and the building of prayer towers in mosques.
The flood of illegal aliens into the Canary Islands from Africa, into Italy from Libya and Tunisia, and into Greece from Turkey has mainstream parties echoing the right. The Schengen Agreement itself, which guarantees open borders within the European Union to all who enter the EU, is under attack.
None of this is to deny the presence of violent actors or neo-Nazis on the European right who bear watching. But, awful as this atrocity was, native-born and homegrown terrorism is not the macro-threat to the continent.
That threat comes from a burgeoning Muslim presence in a Europe that has never known mass immigration, its failure to assimilate, its growing alienation, and its sometime sympathy for Islamic militants and terrorists.
Europe faces today an authentic and historic crisis.
With her native-born populations aging, shrinking and dying, Europe's nations have not discovered how to maintain their prosperity without immigrants. Yet the immigrants who have come – from the Caribbean, Africa, the Middle East, South Asia – have been slow to learn the language and have failed to attain the educational and occupational levels of Europeans. And the welfare states of Europe are breaking under the burden.
Norway, too, needs to wake up. From the first call for help, police needed 90 minutes to get out on the island in the Oslo lake to stop the massacre by the coward, who surrendered as soon as the men with guns arrived. Apparently, Breivik wanted to be around to deliver his declaration of European war in person. Yet, if convicted of the 76 murders, Breivik can, at most, get 21 years, the maximum sentence under Norwegian law.
Norway is a peaceful and progressive country, its leaders say.
Yet Norway sent troops to Afghanistan and has participated in the bombing of Libya, where civilians have been killed and Moammar Gadhafi has himself lost a son and three grandchildren to NATO bombs.
As for a climactic conflict between a once-Christian West and an Islamic world that is growing in numbers and advancing inexorably into Europe for the third time in 14 centuries, on this one, Breivik may be right.
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