Fjordman files the following report here at the Tundra Tabloids.

Is Ignorance the Reason Why People Don’t Like Islam?

by Fjordman

In July 2012, after the active trial against the mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik had ended, researchers Anders Ravik Jupskås and Tore Wig from the Department of Political Science at the University of Oslo wrote an essay about trends in Norway during the year after Breivik’s massacre. They talked about Islamophobia and “Islamophobic voices,” treating these terms as neutral, factual and self-explanatory. They further concluded that Breivik represented “homebred Islamophobic solo terrorism” and that his massacre was a massive “Counterjihadist” terrorist attack associated with “xenophobia.”

Anders Ravik Jupskås has been hailed in the mainstream media and consulted as one of Norway’s leading experts on so-called right-wing extremists. In a case where Jupskås was used as the senior academic “expert” by the state broadcaster NRK, he talked about right-wing extremism and so-called Islamophobia as nearly the same thing. In his view, there seems to be no rational reason to be opposed to Islamization or continued Muslim immigration. Such resistance basically comes down to ignorance, for the most part. This view was made explicit when Jupskås was interviewed by NRK, who presented numbers indicating that people in Oslo were supposed to be more positive towards Muslims than elsewhere in the country.

To begin with, it’s not clear whether these numbers are truly accurate. However, if they are, one possible explanation is that immigrants tend to congregate in the major urban areas. The Oslo region has one of the highest concentrations of immigrants in general and Muslims in particular in the country, to the point where they already numerically dominate entire neighborhoods in downtown Oslo. One could thus assume that a higher percentage of those being polled were actually Muslims, who liked themselves and loved being able to colonize such a wealthy and suicidally naïve country. This is just a possibility, but a possibility that was never mentioned.

Of course, the angle the state broadcaster NRK highlighted was that resistance to Islam and mass immigration is due to sheer ignorance. Jupskås claimed to see a “long-term trend” where people would become more tolerant of other cultures, and by people he seemed to imply the natives. He also suggested that if you know Muslims, you like them more. This clip, which was shown on prime-time TV, ended with the researcher Anders Ravik Jupskås concluding that it’s hard to understand why people are skeptical of Islam, but that this question “requires further analysis.”

My first thought when I heard this was disbelief, coupled with a relief that I avoided being permanently caught up in an academic system that can produce such nonsense under the label of “science.” My second thought was that perhaps Mr. Jupskås isn’t so stupid after all. He gets media coverage because he gives journalists with left-wing, pro-Multicultural sympathies exactly what they want to hear, presented under the mantle of “science”: opposition to Islam, mass immigration and Multiculturalism just has to be based on sheer ignorance and xenophobia, that is, “fear of the unknown.” The solution to this problem is to “get to know each other,” in other words, even more Muslim immigration.

When Jupskås stated that this issue required “further analysis,” it was virtually a job application. He knows he lives in a symbiotic relationship with the left-leaning mass media. Media exposure will heighten his visibility and status as an alleged “expert” and will increase his chances of building a respectable career as a “researcher” in the trendy field of investigating opposition to mass immigration among European “right-wing extremists.”

The only problem, of course, is that his conclusion is utterly false and can easily be proven to be so. To give a personal example: I started out as a typical naïve Scandinavian and gradually became more critical of and negative towards Islam and Islamic culture. It was a process that lasted years, but during those years I studied that culture, its history and language, and also lived and traveled in the region. After my return to Norway I lived in Oslo for eight years, and was horrified to see how my capital city changed gradually for the worse, year by year.

I realized that I had never truly left the Middle East; it had followed me back to my home country and into what once was a Norwegian city. Rapidly growing parts of Oslo no longer are Scandinavian in any meaningful sense, except when there is welfare money to be collected.

Although my Internet career began even earlier, I started writing under the pen name Fjordman for the first time in February 2005, while I was still only 29 years of age. I was not old, and I was not ignorant, either. On the contrary, I knew all too well what I was dealing with, and watched with horror the dangers that were spreading in my country and my continent, largely unopposed.

The underlying idea behind the “You just have to get to know them” mantra presented by the state broadcaster and the so-called researcher and scientist Anders Ravik Jupskås is that all people are really nice once you get to know them. One politician in neighboring Denmark stated this with all seriousness at one point, that a stranger is just a friend you don’t know yet. In other words: You have no enemies.

It must be wonderful to live in a world without enemies, but it is unfortunately not the real world. In November 2012, an ongoing controversy over a Christmas tree at a housing association in Kokkedal, a town north of Copenhagen, took a new turn when two journalists from TV2 News escaped unharmed after their van was attacked by 25 masked individuals. At the Egedalsvænget housing complex, the board had voted against paying 8,000 kroner for the annual Christmas tree and party, but earlier in the year had approved the payment of 60,000 kroner for a party celebrating the Islamic holiday of Eid. Five out of nine of the board members are Muslims.

After the men arrived and exited the van, the attackers promptly began throwing bricks and cobblestones at it. The attackers shouted slurs at the journalists, such as “Neo-Nazi,” and told them to leave. Following the attack that damaged the windows, doors and the dashboard of the van, the head of TV2 News condemned the treatment of his journalists: “It’s completely outrageous that things like this happen, but I’m glad it was only our hardware that was attacked and that our personnel were unharmed,” Jacob Nybroe told Jyllands-Posten newspaper. “But it’s disappointing that we can’t cover the news everywhere in Denmark.” The story of the axed Christmas tree was taken up by national media after several politicians and commentators suggested it demonstrated intolerance towards native European Christian customs exhibited by the minority Muslim population.

In this case, the locals do “get to know” Muslims, and it doesn’t seem to be working out very well. Muslims demonstrated that they are there to dominate and harass other people in “their” newly colonized territory. Besides, if “getting to know” the new immigrants from dysfunctional Third World countries is so great, why are the natives and their children currently fleeing such neighborhoods in cities all over Western Europe?

France probably has the highest percentage of Muslims of any Western European country today. According to the logic displayed by NRK and Mr. Jupskås, French people should really love Islam because they have met so many Muslims personally. The only problem with this theory is that it is flat-out wrong and has no empirical basis, which means that it is not real science, merely a combination of wishful thinking and propaganda.

A survey from October 2012 showed that 60% of the French think Islam is too prominent in their country. 43% said the presence of Muslims was a “threat” to national identity while only 17% saw it as culturally enriching. 67% said Muslims were not integrated into the mainstream, and 68% thought Muslims themselves were to blame for this. Muslim leaders and others indirectly admit that rising opposition to Islamization is a fact by warning that a wave of so-called Islamophobia is now sweeping society.

Similar trends can be seen in other European countries, from Germany to Britain. In response to this, international Islamic organizations are intensifying their efforts to clamp down upon any criticism or mockery of Islam in the Western world, precisely because they sense growing popular resistance — and they are right.

The bottom line is that Europeans are “getting to know” Islam and those who practice it, and they don’t like what they see. Some European countries in the south and east still have deep national memories of being at the receiving end of centuries of Muslim slave raids and looting, and needed no modern reminder of the true face of Islam.

No, this is not about xenophobia, fear of the unknown. It’s about fear and loathing of something they know all too well: the smugness, the muggings and the violent street crime, the daily insults, the arrogance, the gang rapes, the people who come from backward countries but still behave as if they are the new Master Race.

What we are witnessing now is a rising tide of righteous anger amongst the native peoples of an entire continent, the cradle of the most inventive and creative civilization the world has ever known, who have finally had enough of being robbed of their dignity, their history and their land in exchange for lies and Multicultural fairy tales presented to them by their mass media and so-called leaders.

It will only grow in strength in the years to come.