I’ve published earlier about Norway’s city councilman Khalid Haji Ahmed, here is Bruce Bawer’s take on him.
The Norwegian Labor Party’s Holocaust Fan
If you haven’t noticed, Norway has been undergoing a bit of bad publicity of late apropos of what has been described as its unparalleled levels of anti-Semitism. One of the country’s few highly placed truth-tellers, Hanne Nabintu Herland, a religious scholar at the University of Oslo, recently put it this way: “How could a country that was once a loyal friend of Israel be transformed into a nation with a government that refuses to distance itself from Hamas as a terrorist organization? Norway is the most anti-Semitic country in the West, because of the left-wing elite.” Alan Dershowitz said the same thing here at Front Page last year after a series of unpleasant personal experiences in the land of the fjords: “Norway is the most anti-Semitic and anti-Israel country in Europe today.”
Nor did it do much to rehabilitate Norway’s image when the Royal Palace announced a couple of weeks ago the awarding of a medal to Trond Ali Linstad, a Muslim convert who is also an outspoken anti-Semite. (Fortunately, the public furor over this decision caused the king to change his mind.)
The other day, when I noticed a headline indicating that the Norwegian police were apologizing to the country’s Jewish population, I experienced a fleeting sense of hope. Had at least one important national institution actually realized the error of its recent ways? Then it turned out – and, knowing the country as long as I have, I should have seen this coming – that the police were apologing for having helped the Nazis during the occupation with the job of rounding up Jews and shipping them off to be exterminated. A full news cycle was consumed with conspicuous self-flagellation about this horrible chapter of Norwegian history. The sole still-living Jew to have been handed over to the Germans was interviewed all over the place.
I watched several TV news and debate programs that solemnly addressed the police department’s apology. But on none of them was there so much as a hint that in 2012, the Jews are still the chief victims of prejudice in Norway. No, the message sent out by all the commentators I heard was the usual one: that the enduring lesson of the anti-Semitic crimes of yesteryear is that we should be especially alert nowadays to similar offenses against “other groups.” Everybody knows, of course, which “other group” is meant by this. And nobody needed to spell out the now-familiar formula: that the Jews are today’s Nazis, and the Muslims today’s Jews.
This latest round of hand-wringing over the Holocaust was barely over when a new story made the headlines: the other day a young Yemeni-Norwegian named Khalid Haji Ahmed, who until recently was an official in the Workers’ Youth League (Arbeidernes Ungdomsfylking, or AUF), the junior division of Norway’s Labor Party, and who is currently a member of the city council in the town of Hamar (pop. 29,000), was discovered to have taken part in a Facebook discussion of a status update that read as follows:
“Fucking Jew whores, wish Hitler could come back and shower you a little more.”
Ahmed was apparently one of several AUF members who took part in the discussion and who seemed to take an affirmative position toward their friend’s pro-Holocaust sentiment. Among the comments Ahmed posted was this, in reference to the original status update: “Best of luck eight times over.” (Facebook later deleted the discussion, in response to which the person who had posted the original status update wrote: “It’s probably Jews who run that, too.”)
