In “A New Attack on Islam’s Critics” at FrontPage, Bruce Bawer takes apart a Norwegian propaganda piece (on state television, naturally) featuring none other than the thug Nathan Lean, the tiny propagandist whom the Iranian mullahcracy shill Reza Aslan employs to send me veiled threats and publish claims about me that he knows to be false:
The partiality of the news media, heaven knows, is an international
phenomenon. But there are few places on this fragile blue planet of
ours where consumers are forced to shell out so much money to be fed so
much outright, shameless, and (not infrequently) downright vile
propaganda as is the case in little Norway. At present every Norwegian
household that owns a TV must pay an annual “license fee” of $451.00 a
year to subsidize NRK, the government-owned TV and radio network. (Next
year the fee will climb to $568.57.) You have to pay, even if you
never, ever watch NRK, most of whose programming is not unlike a triple
dose of Ambien. Take the schedule for Wednesday, October 24, which
consisted of a blizzard of national and local news programs (one of them
in Sami); “Murder, She Wrote”; reality shows, one set on a remote
Finnish island, another on a Danish chestnut farm whose proprietors run it “the good old-fashioned way”; an investigative program that asked why the number of moose in Norway has tripled in the last decade; and a musical tribute
to United Nations Day by the Stavanger Symphony Orchestra. (You may
not know that October 24 is United Nations Day, but I can assure you
that every kid in Norway does.)But what’s worst about NRK is not the comical dullness of much of its
daily menu but, well, two things: first, the day-to-day, knee-jerk,
petty mendacities of its news reporting, which is almost invariably
tilted against the U.S., Israel, capitalism, and so on; and, second, the
larger, grander, more sweeping, and even, at times, utterly
breathtaking duplicities of some of the few high-profile prime-time
programs that NRK actually produces itself. Case in point: Brennpunkt, or
“burning point,” a series that pretends to be devoted to investigative
journalism, and that, on the evening of October 23, served up an hour
entitled “Intet kommer i en lukket hÃ¥nd.” It was explained that this
title, which literally translates as “Nothing comes in a closed hand,”
was a quotation from Indira Gandhi; a quick Google search established
that the original quotation was: “You cannot shake hands with a clenched
fist.”Whose “clenched fist” was the title referring to? That became clear
quickly enough. Director/reporter Frode Nielsen told us that “more and
more right-wing extremists are directing their intense hate against
Islam.” Standing outside the Olso courthouse, and noting that in recent
months both mass-murderer Anders Behring Breivik and terrorist Mullah
Krekar have been brought to justice in that building, he declared that
“the hate is equally dangerous on both sides.” Yet Nielsen’s topic
wasn’t Islamic hate. It was, rather, “those who have devoted their
lives to running a hate campaign against a religion.”Over the next hour, Nielsen introduced us to a series of people who
fell, very clearly, into two categories: the Good Guys and the Bad.
What was curious was that several of the Bad Guys (some of whom
genuinely were bad) were shown saying things that were
inconvertibly true but that Nielsen obviously regarded as irrefutable
evidence of their perfidy. For example, a young, soft-spoken Jewish man
whose name I didn’t catch said that “the Muslim world views kindness as
weakness.” Anders Gravers, head of Stop Islamization of Europe, told a
Danish audience that “Islam is the opposite of freedom, just as
Communism is!” Pat Robertson, shown on The 700 Club, said
that, owing to the advance of Islam in Norway, genital multilation and
rape are also on the rise. Chaim ben Pesach of the Jewish Task Force,
who spent years in a U.S. prison for committing acts of terror, said:
“You can’t negotiate with evil, you have to defeat evil”¦.You can’t mix a
violent, hateful culture with civilized people”¦. [Western leaders] are
betraying their people”¦.This is the beginning of end of the Western
world if this continues.” Every word was true, even if the guy saying it
was a despicable creep — but Nielsen’s only comment was that Pesach
“denies that this sounds like Nazism.” Similarly, Koran-burning Florida
preacher Terry Jones told Nielsen that “if you follow strictly the
Koran, the Medina version, that does lead to violence” — a statement of
pure fact from which Nielsen cuts directly to Mark Potok of the Southern
Law Poverty Center lamenting how much “disinformation” is out there.Other Bad Guys were raucous groups of English Defence League,
Norwegian Defence League, and Danish Defence League protesters who were
shown at street demos, waving flags and placards and screaming about
Islam. Lots of people with lots of hate, but behind all of them,
Nielsen said, is a small group of ideologues who spread their “hate
propaganda” to the multitudes via the Internet. Not only have these
ideologues influenced all these Bad Guys; they”re also responsible for
creating the baddest Bad Guy of all, Anders Behring Breivik. We heard a
good deal about these mysterious puppeteers, these shadowy instigators,
before the names of a few of them (including Brigitte Gabriel and Geert
Wilders) were finally mentioned.And only then, in the big reveal, did Nielsen actually show
us a couple of these Satanic creatures, live and in person, addressing a
street rally in Stockholm late in the summer of 2012. Their names:
Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller. Nielsen, in voice-over, described
them as “right-wing extremists” who are “strongly tied to Israeli
extremists.” We saw them making their presentations in Stockholm, while
cops in riot gear struggled to subdue a mob of violent protestors who
were screaming: “Fucking racists! No racists in our streets!” Gesturing
toward the rioters, Spencer said calmly: “That’s the force we are
fighting against.” Such people, he said, employ violence precisely
because “they cannot defeat us intellectually or morally.” Spencer made
sense and didn’t look dangerous, but Nielsen assured us he was: both his
and Geller’s “propaganda,” Nielsen said, “is described as dangerous by
those who monitor the anti-Islam movement.” Nielsen spoke about
Spencer’s “propaganda” as if it were hidden away on clandestine websites
with top-secret passwords, rather than published on a widely read
website and in New York Times bestsellers.Arrayed against Spencer and his armies of hate were a handful of Good
Guys. Norwegian Bishop Gunnar Stålsett murmured PC platitudes about
brotherhood. Matthew Collins of the group Hope Not Hate (whose
magnificently mendacious Counter-Jihad Report I wrote about here) compared the EDL to the Tea Party, which, he pronounced, is “as dangerous as any Islamist.” Nathan Lean, author of The Islamophobia Industry, said
that Breivik took the writings of Spencer and company “to the logical
conclusion”¦They weren’t the ones who committed the acts of violence, but
they certainly were the ones who shaped the way he viewed the world,
the way he views the Muslims, the way he viewed Europe.” Lean added that
“people like bin Laden and people like Spencer are mirror images of one
another,” saying that instead of fearing “stealth jihad, and creeping
sharia”¦we should fear these groups”¦that promote and produce an
environment and an atmosphere of hate.” Potok also linked Spencer to
Breivik: “Words have consequences”¦.If you say that the dirty Muslims are
coming to rape our daughers and destroy our society”¦you can’t be
shocked when somebody like Anders Breivik starts to murder people. You
have some kind of responsibility for that.” (As if to assure us that the
SPLC is the voice of truth and virtue, Nielsen prefaced Potok’s
comments with a montage of uplifting images from the civil-rights
movement.)At no point in the program was there so much as a hint that anything
Spencer or any of the other Bad Guys say about Islam is true. Lean did
mention the film Obsession: Radical Islam’s War against the West, but
instead of actually examining its content, he used it as an example of
the Bad Guys” determination to “provoke Muslims” and to “advance the
fear of Muslims.” While he talked about Obsession, we got a
quick glimpse of You Tube clips from the film on a computer screen: a
church being set aflame, an imam preaching takeover of the West. But
none of this material was discussed. It was as if the contents of films
like Obsession, and of books like Spencer’s, were all sheer Islamophobic fantasy….No, Nielsen plainly wanted us to understand that if people are
getting worked up about Islam, it’s because they”re confused and
ignorant. “The world is changing rapidly and people are frightened,”
volunteered Potok. Lean, for his part, noted that some people “argue
that Muslims don’t constitute a race,” but maintained that this is just
“a convenient way to avoid addressing”¦the civil rights issue of our
time” (from which Nielsen cut to the Lincoln Memorial and that new,
Chinese-looking statue of Martin Luther King, Jr.). The director of the
Rosa Parks Museum counseled that when people fear, “they just lash out
and attack,” even though many of them don’t even know what they fear,
and end up discovering that their fears are “completely unfounded.” The
program concluded with a musical message from Gatas Parlament, a trio of
white Communist rappers who are famous in Norway for (among other
things) putting up a website a few years ago in which they offered a
bounty for the head of George W. Bush. Dancing in an Oslo street, the
three men sang into the camera: “Are you sure that your prejudice makes
sense?”¦Stop tolerating intolerance!” This, indeed, should be the bottom
line when it comes to this topic: stop tolerating intolerance. But the
obvious agenda of Nielsen, and of his masters at NRK, is to turn the
reality of all this — the reality of exactly who, in the West nowadays,
is tolerating whose intolerance — upside down….