Nothing surprises me anymore about the Norwegian government. It acts as if it borders Saudi Arabia and Syria. Oil sheiks of the north.
We all know what would happen if this scandal was taking place in a ‘certain Middle Eastern country‘, all hell would be breaking loose right now with Norway leading the charge.
Also: Norwegian government agencies nor companies are well enough secured against cyber attacks
Norway’s National Security Authority NSM (Nasjonal sikkerhetsmyndighet) released a report on Tuesday warning that neither government agencies nor companies are well enough secured against cyber attacks and industrial espionage via the Internet. NSM stressed that individuals working within both public and private sector entities are now the biggest targets of online crime.
NOTE: Which at times comes from their own government. The Norwegian people would be better served if its government would focus on itself, cleaning up its own act, than looking for bogymen elsewhere.
To show the lengths that the Norwegian government will go in violating the civil liberties of its people (journalists or otherwise) is not an anomaly, I supply below the fold, a couple of pages from Dr.Manfred Gerstenfeld’s well sourced book, Behind the Humanitarian Mask, available free online.
Pages (55-57) depict the Norwegian government’s wire tapping the phone of Berit Reisel, a member of a Norwegian government appointed committee Unheard of in democracies. I am told that her phone was tapped by the government for years, because she disagreed with the socialist point of view and wrote so. This is an extreme illustration of Norwegian duplicity.
Government Obstruction
Two years later, after the settlement had been announced, Reisel gave an interview to the Dutch Jewish weekly NIW. She said that by fall 1995, she and her colleagues had realized that no commission of inquiry had been established at the ministry. The team now started to investigate the matter and discovered that there had indeed been problems with the postwar restitution. They informed the Justice Ministry about their findings.
In January 1996, the WJC had released information on the Norwegian 56 Behind the Humanitarian Mask: The Nordic Countries, Israel, and the Jews government’s shortcomings in postwar restitution. The spokesperson of the Justice Ministry asked Reisel, before they jointly appeared on a radio program, to lie and say that her team and the Justice Ministry had already been collaborating for a year. She promised that this would mark the beginning of good collaboration.
Reisel agreed to her request.156
When, two days later, Reisel met a top official at the Justice Ministry, he said the Jews had received all they were entitled to after the war. He added that she could not be a member of the commission as she was prejudiced and unreliable. He told her the same regarding Bruland. Reisel told the journalist from the Dutch paper that, at a further meeting at the Justice Ministry chaired by this top official, there were a professor of history, a professor of law, two accountants and a representative of the National Archive. They were all very aggressive against the Jews and said the issue of the restitution had been a simple administrative matter that one should not judge ethically or morally. A representative of the Foreign Ministry was the only one who did not agree with that and a quarrel
ensued.157
A few weeks later a commission was established and the Jewish communities of Oslo and Trondheim were each entitled to name a member. They chose Reisel and Bruland. Reisel recounts that in the first meeting, the chairman Oluf Skarpnes said he could not find in the law that the Jews had to give up their property before they were murdered. Regarding the Holocaust, he also said the Jews to whom this had happened must have done something terrible. Being a lawyer he considered that “one could not kill people and take their property unless they had done something wrong.”158
Bruland observed, “I had the feeling Skarpnes was mandated by the bureaucrats of the ministry to silence this problem. I cannot prove it and he certainly never told me about it; yet it seemed clear to me. Skarpnes had no understanding of Jews and couldn’t imagine what it meant to be a Jew after the war.”159
Bias in the National Archive
When the members of the Skarpnes Commission were to be appointed, the representatives of the Jewish communities opposed the naming of an official of the National Archive who showed a preconceived opinion in meetings so that he could not be considered neutral.160 Instead his wife was appointed. When this was discovered she withdrew and thereupon her best friend was appointed.
In her newspaper interview, Reisel said that in a meeting where many commission members were present, the latter had said: “We will help the Justice Department with this issue and see to it that the Jews will not receive a penny. The miserly Jews must keep their trap shut.” Manfred Gerstenfeld 57
During the summer vacation of 1996, Reisel found that Skarpnes had concluded a contract with the National Archive without the knowledge of the commission members. The contract stated that the two women against whom the Jewish representatives had objected would be the researchers. This caused the atmosphere in the commission to become very unpleasant. It was clear that the authorities were continuing to obstruct the process.
Skarpnes told Reisel that if she did not sign the text of the report he supported, it would cost her dearly as far as her life and health was concerned. A few days later she was physically attacked. Her impression is that the two events were linked. Her phone was also tapped. On a number of occasions when she picked up the phone to make a call, she heard playbacks of an earlier conversation of hers.161
Ultimately the two representatives of the Jewish community decided to write a minority report. This was unprecedented in Norway for members of an official commission. When this became known, the media devoted major attention to it. This led to a government decision that Reisel and Bruland’s minority report should serve as the basis for the evaluations in the restitution process. The Norwegian parliament accepted this proposal.
