Sunday, October 30, 2011

Birmingham Blogged Live Pt 2

Part one is here.


Read more »

Saturday, October 29, 2011

B-B-B-B-B-Blogging B-B-B-B-Birmingham.

Today, the EDL are demonstrating in Birmingham.

Birmingham has a rather large muslim population, and while I knew there was a demo coming up, I've been occupied (not #occupied) with fun things like cleaning the fishtank and introducing Magilla to the Khan Academy. I hadn't thought of liveblogging until my good friend Martin called me up this morning.

Anyway, the demo is about to start (it's nearly 11pm saturday evening here in Melbournistan), so let the liveblogging commence:

Read more »

Friday, October 28, 2011

ESW Liveblogging In Vienna.

Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff is currently sitting in the plenary in Vienna, attending the confab about "Confronting Intolerance and Discrimination against Muslims in Public Discourse".

She is also pretty much a lone voice in the wilderness that is public discourse in Austria when it comes to going against the current view, and seated with mainly men and mainly muslim ones at that when her views and travails are so widely known has to be challenging.

But... she is nothing if not brave, and more than capable of speaking up if she deems it fit.

I've offered to do a bit of a liveblog for her since she can't be here doing it herself (one of the bonuses of global timezones, I guess).

Well, off to a flying start with the first speech being somewhat uninspiring (direct quote:"[7:16:29 PM] this is terrible")
Read more »

Tuesday, October 25, 2011

He Lives! (Unedited Today VG Article - GoV Mirror)



Today’s edition of the Norwegian newspaper VG published an essay by Fjordman. The text, however, had been significantly redacted by the editors of VG without the author’s consent. To set the record straight, the complete article is reproduced below in English. This is a mirror of Gates of Vienna, and the Baron has the Norwegian version.

Just as we did several weeks ago, we aim to overcome the stifling censorship imposed by the Norwegian media by spreading this essay as widely as possible. To help the cause of free speech, please mirror it on your blog or website.

We intend to demonstrate once again to the Norwegian newspapers that we can reach a wider readership than they can.


Introductory note from Fjordman:

This is my most recent Norwegian article as it should have appeared in print. Today VG, the largest national newspaper in Norway, published this article in the paper edition, but they also cut out a couple of vital paragraphs without my knowledge or approval. My essay was not over-long, and I stayed within their normal limits.

The missing paragraphs referred to the fact that Mohammed had sex with a nine-year-old child (Aisha) and that modern Islamic theologians such as Yusuf al-Qaradawi support this policy today because it is a part of Mohammed’s Sunna, his personal example. Journalist Elisabeth Skarsbø Moen and others deleted this, accidentally-on-purpose. They also deleted my suggestion that NRK TV dare not show a drooling Yusuf al-Qaradawi in a wheelchair telling Muslims that pedophilia is OK, in contrast to the parody of me they have been broadcasting.

Why did they cut this out? Fear, plain and simple.

I composed this essay in response to Anders Giæver, who writes regular commentary for VG and has slimed me several times for my alleged “paranoia” about Islam and Muslims. So VG can harass me for having paranoia about pro-Islamic censorship, and when I reply they censor me with pro-Islamic censorship.


Fjordman Lives On

by Peder Jensen, also known as Fjordman


Translation: Cecilie, aided by Fjordman.

A commentator at VG (Verdens Gang, Norway’s largest national newspaper), Anders Giæver, has attacked me multiple times in his columns in that newspaper. On the one hand he describes me disdainfully as an average Norwegian, but also adds that I am “one of the most central promoters of Islam-hatred and Muslim-paranoia in Europe.”

Who has decided what constitutes paranoia? Mr. Giæver has read hardly any of the writings of Bat Ye’or about Eurabia, nor Robert Spencer’s website Jihad Watch, and has probably not understood what little he may have read. He is incapable of disproving a single factual piece of information I have published, nor my statement about Islam being impossible to reform or fit in with Western civilization. The only thing he has to show for himself, therefore, is personal attacks.

It is true that after the terrorist attacks of July 22nd I was exhausted. When I appeared in VG under my real name I seriously contemplated giving up my career as a writer. However, after the situation has calmed down a bit and I could think things through, I have decided to continue with undiminished force.

Right from the beginning I have been saying that terrorists, whether they come in the shape of Islamic Jihadists or Anders Behring Breivik, should not be allowed to decide what a free society can or cannot discuss, and I meant that. If that is the case, they should not to be allowed to dictate to people who are critical of Islam and mass immigration, either.

I will definitely not accept that the mass media should be allowed to threaten or harass me to make me shut up.

If one day I should stop my activities it will be through my personal choice, not one dictated by Anders Giæver, Marie Simonsen or other media bullies.

In its ethical guidance the “Vær Varsom” (“Be Careful”) poster, the Norwegian Press Association gives a person the right to reply to statements uttered about him in the press. I will in the future actively exercise this right, which means I will be more visible than ever.

If Norwegian newspapers refuse to publish my essays I will publish them on the Internet at Gates of Vienna, both in English and in Norwegian, as examples of press censorship. My book The Curious Civilization will also be published as planned in 2012.

The Islamic Council of Norway, which is coercively sponsored by native, non-Muslim Norwegian taxpayers, receives guidance from the European Council for Fatwa and Research about whether they should be for or against the death penalty for homosexuals.

The Council is headed by Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who is the spiritual guide of the Muslim Brotherhood. Qaradawi has among many other things boasted openly that Muslims will soon conquer Europe, and has praised the Nazi Holocaust.

Representatives for Jonas Gahr Støre’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs have met members of the Brotherhood for talks in Oslo.

The author Walid al-Kubaisi describes al-Qaradawi as being “more dangerous than bin Laden” and describes how he issues fatwas ruling that it is allowed (halal) to marry children. I refer to the article “Islam and marriage with minors.” Muhammed himself married Aisha when she was only six, and consummated the marriage when she was nine and he was 54 years old (Bukhari 7.62.64). This has become part of his Sunna, or personal example, to be followed for all time.

In February 2006 a delegation was sent from Norway to the Middle East to beg for mercy from the mighty Yusuf al-Qaradawi because of the Mohammed cartoons. This was supported by the Norwegian government of PM Jens Stoltenberg.

Qaradawi then demanded a legal ban on criticism of Mohammed, the founder of Islam. This would imply submission to sharia law and that Europe and the Western world would from now on be under Islamic rule. That is what the international conflict over the Danish cartoons was really about.

Thomas Seltzer, a host of NRK3, has shown a caricature of me as a paraplegic writer in a wheelchair. I suppose this makes me Norway’s answer to Stephen Hawking, which I take as a compliment. Alternatively, one could be lead to believe that people in wheelchairs are slavering idiots, 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 does not dare to show a drooling Qaradawi in a wheelchair telling Muslims that pedophilia is OK.

I don’t take this very personally, given that Mr. Seltzer can scarcely be taken seriously. However, it does annoy me that he can force others to sponsor this through TV licensing, whether they want to or not.

Among the most important things one can do to get a more open debate in Norway today is to cancel all public funding for the press, as well as put an end to NRK [the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation] in its present form.

Monday, October 24, 2011

A Norwegian Mirror. The Rule of Law After 7/22.


The Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten, which refused Fjordman’s first right-of-reply article, has accepted his second submission. Many thanks to Kepiblanc for translating it into English. The original Norwegian version, which has just been published at Aftenposten, is at the Gates of Vienna.


The Rule of Law After 7/22

by Peder Jensen, a.k.a. Fjordman

I know that some people dislike me, which they are perfectly entitled to do. Yet it is important to remember that a civilized country ruled by law must function regardless of personal likes or dislikes. My unpleasant encounter with the Norwegian police raises fundamental questions regarding the handling of witnesses in major criminal investigations. You can still be interested in these issues even if you disagree with or dislike my writings.

Furthermore, it is meaningless to hold well-documented texts responsible for the actions of a disturbed person. Assuming that we take “psychological accountability” seriously, we should also hold those accountable who distribute the Koran — which very explicitly encourages violence against non-Muslims — and thus make them co-responsible for countless actions of Jihadist terrorism around the entire world. Is this happening?

In his terror manifesto, Anders Behring Breivik quoted numerous different people from all over the world, obviously without their knowledge or approval. Being quoted by persons one has never met is something beyond one’s control, but since I was the only Norwegian among those quoted there I realized that I sooner or later would have to discuss this matter with the authorities.

I first contacted the Norwegian Police Security Service [PST] by physically knocking on the door of their headquarters in Oslo. However, they didn’t want to talk to me and told me to send them an email instead. I suppose the security services have coffee breaks, too. Judging by the newspapers one could get the impression that the police were actively seeking me out, yet neither the police nor the press had the slightest idea who I was until on August 4th when I knocked on the door to Manglerud Police Station, accompanied by Knut Ditlev-Simonsen from the law firm Staff. As far as they were concerned I might as well have been Mickey Mouse.

Although I was not legally obliged to do so I answered most of their questions. The only form of indirect contact I have ever had with Breivik is that both of us posted comments on the website Document.no. It is true that he tried to contact at me some point in 2009 and sent me a handful of emails. As with everything else he said to others prior to his atrocities, they were hardly spectacular or sensational and contained no hint of future terror actions. Furthermore, I was totally uninterested in meeting with him. Apart from that, I don’t know anything about Breivik. Absolutely nothing.

After some hesitation I voluntarily gave the police access to my telephone log, which must be considered to be a very friendly gesture by a person who is not charged with anything and who himself knows that he was not involved in the criminal actions. Virtually the only one of the police requests that I turned down was giving them my computer, which I considered to be too serious a violation of my privacy. I was then physically followed by several police officers and forced to hand it over.

It was Bård Dyrdal, leader of the program for questioning witnesses after the 7/22 terror attacks, who announced the use of force against my person, supported by police attorneys Christian Hatlo and Pål-Fredrik Hjort Kraby. “He had the status of witness and we got a long and fair explanation from him to the questions we had,” Kraby told NRK [Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation].

This is correct. I held the status as a witness both before and afterwards and have never been suspected of or charged with a criminal act of any kind. For the record, after having studied all of my communications for several months, the police informed me by email in October that I am still not suspected of anything.

When Dyrdal announced that I would immediately be escorted by half a dozen police officers to my flat in order to search through my books, movies, photos, kitchen equipment and dirty laundry for hours and hours he declared that there was a lot of pressure in this case, which probably means that the police let the mass media dictate their actions in the case against Behring Breivik. There was no objective, professional justification for what they did to me.

They also confiscated a suitcase with clothes and socks that contained no electronic equipment at all. At a time when far too many rapes and other serious crimes remain unsolved in parts of the country one has to wonder whether it is the right decision by the police to spend several months on studying the socks of a person who has no criminal record .

There is absolutely nothing on my PC that could possibly connect me to the terror attacks. The only thing there that might be of interest to the police authorities — and then to the PST more than the regular police — are contacts I have with peaceful individuals in many countries who do not like Islam. This means that the Norwegian police disregarded all common legal procedures in order to confiscate a PC that can be used for nothing other than conducting illegal political surveillance.

The police justified their actions against me by using something called a third-party search [tredjemannsransaking], which would imply that evidence of Breivik’s terror attacks should exist in my flat and that there was a danger that this evidence could be lost or destroyed. This is ridiculous. I had contacted the police myself and answered their questions for many hours precisely because I had nothing to hide. Besides, at this point two weeks had passed since the terror attacks, plenty of time to get rid of any evidence had such evidence existed in the first place, which it didn’t.

I have never before heard of any Western democratic country where a voluntary witness who himself contacted the authorities, who was described by the police as being cooperative, who has no criminal record, did not know the perpetrator, and on top of everything else was nowhere near the crime scene when the crime took place have his apartment ransacked and his computer equipment confiscated.

When I told Lars Hedegaard of the International Free Press Society what kind of treatment I had been given as a witness, he responded that it reminded him of the situation in totalitarian states, like the ones we are all too familiar with from the twentieth century. “If someone had told me a few years ago that the free and proud Norway which we Danes admired during the German occupation would end up like this, I would have considered them insane.” Harsh words from a neighbor, and damaging to Norway’s international reputation.

If my case is not disputed, I fear that it may create a dangerous precedent. Worst case scenario, it could imply that the police can from now on ransack the apartment of citizens they dislike, especially if they say something Politically Incorrect, and confiscate their computer equipment, camera and clothes without charging them of having done anything criminal whatsoever. If this happens, we no longer have a crime police; we have a thought police. Do we want a society like that?

Wednesday, October 12, 2011

If Aftenposten Won't Post, We Will.

A mirror for Fjordman*.

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.



*here in Australia, free speech is effectively no more, particularly after the success recently of a case against the conservative commentator, Andrew Bolt. It has become increasing apparent to me that I have the right to say anything I like, so long as it parrots the pc Party line, and I've noticed over the last 5 years or so since I began actually paying attention to the world around me that there are things that Must Not Be Said.

When good friends tell me not to take a particular pathway while out to dinner in a deserted restaurant, then we're in trouble.

When a media outlet can vilify a person who has done nothing wrong, for the thoughtcrime of writing something that - again - does not fit the prevailing narrative and refuses him the right of reply, then it's time to step up.

In my case, stepping up means I'm more than happy to mirror anything Fjordman wants to write.

I'm sure I'll get called the usual nazi scum and racist bigot, blah-de-blah and all the rest but guess what? Those who call me that usually have no concept of what Freedom and Democracy are all about.

I'm happy for them to air their opinions, because they only demonstrate how bereft of solid logic and reason they are. Telling me I'm wrong is one thing, demonstrating it is another altogether and where the enemies of Freedom (a quick shout-out to the #occupybrainspace herd) fall down.

At least if I'm in dialogue with a person I don't shout them down in an infantile attempt to drown out their position.

That wouldn't be civilised.

Monday, October 10, 2011

Where's Big Counterjihad When You Need It?


Over at Gov and Vlad Tepes a call has gone out for assistance.

The remarkable Fjordman is in somewhat straightened circumstances, so a few of us are helping put the word out for him. He hasn't had a blog of his own for years, although that has not stopped his productivity.

What did slow him down, however, was the Norwegian gunman Breivik naming him (among others) as being a bit of an inspiration*. I personally think that Breivik's 'manifesto' is a load of tripe. Breivik talks of christianity, say's he's not one, and yet gets wheeled out as being a fundamentalist christian. As someone who is into Extreme Popery, I call bullshite.

In the meantime, and along with everything else, Fjordman has now pretty much lost everything - job, home, country. I've got a cat he could have, but that's no use when there's nowhere to keep it.

He does have a few (for him) words over at Vlad's which I'll paste here:

Hello from Peder Jensen alias Fjordman. I will continue writing under one name or the other and hope to publish several books in the next year and a half, but after the Breivik case in Norway, which I got mixed up in against my will, I no longer have a job and I am also moving out of my old flat in Oslo, which I already left weeks ago. There are always some costs involved in moving to a different location and creating a new life somewhere else. If you have enjoyed some of my essays in the past I would be grateful if you donated a few bucks this time. Think of it as a Fjordman Relocation Fund. Just mark the donations as being for me and I will get it via Vlad’s fine website.

Thank you, and thank you for all the support and kind words I get from long-time readers.

Peder


This is not quite a twilight bark - more a twilight blog.

*very interesting review of Breivik's 'manifesto' by someone of the left-persuasion. I'm not sure she's read the Reliance, or the hadiths or the Hedaya, but that's only to be expected. A few weeks with HuT might help her with a few things. Like the fact that muslims believe that sharia law is Allah's Law for all men for all time, so whether she agrees with it or not is irrelevant.

That's not conspiracy theory, neither is it conspiracy that a man has been hounded out of his home for writing some hard-hitting essays that focus on the Decline and Fall of Western Civilisation.

We're just not supposed to mention the islamists because we're not allowed to hurt feelings.

Please check out the post over at VladTepes, and if you can donate money to assist Fjordman, please do. If you can't, then linklove and prayers are most welcome also.

crossposted at Tizonas