RUTHFULLY YOURS

The only man I ever met whose ambition was to be a suicide bomber was an inmate at the British prison where I worked as a doctor in the 1990s and 2000s. He was a career criminal of very nasty propensities whose father was Arab and mother English. He had reached his 30s, the age at which criminals usually turn away from crime in favor of something better—in his case the killing of as many infidels as possible, along with himself.

Coming to religion is one reason, or pretext, for abandoning crime. In the prison there was much more Islamic evangelism than Christian. I would find Qurans and Islamic pamphlets in drawers, insinuated there by I knew not whom, but never Bibles or Christian pamphlets.

I interpreted religion as the means prisoners used to rationalize giving up common crime while at the same time not feeling defeated by, or having surrendered to, the society around them—for they knew conversion to Islam gave that society the shudders.

The problem for the security services, however, is that there is no invariable profile, social or psychological, of the Muslim terrorist. Nor is there a kind of economic lever that can be pulled so that, with better material prospects, young Muslims will be less attracted to terrorism. There have, it is true, been no-hopers among the terrorists, but there have also been medical students and doctors. There was nothing (except himself) impeding the recent Manchester bomber from having a normal or even a highly successful career. As Prime Minister Theresa May rightly said after the most recent atrocities in London, what the terrorists have in common is an ideology. She rightly called it evil, but it is also stupid: It makes the Baader-Meinhof Gang look like Aristotle.

An ideology, however stupid, is not easy to destroy; believing six impossible things before breakfast is almost par for the human course. One obvious thing to do would be to strangle the foreign funding of so much Islamist activity in Britain. That is no doubt complicated in many ways, but no British government, solicitous of trade relations, has dared even try. The British economy is precarious, and it is difficult to be strong when your economy is weak.

Instead, we have gone in for what a Dutch friend of mine calls “creative appeasement.” Authorities make concessions even before, one suspects, there have been any demands for them. Thus, a public library in Birmingham, one of the largest known to me, has installed women-only tables, a euphemism for Muslim women only. Whether there was ever a request or demand for sex-segregated seating from Muslims is probably undiscoverable; truth seldom emerges from a public authority. But the justification would almost certainly be that without such tables, Muslim women would not be able to use the library at all. CONTINUE AT SITE

I am an American who has lived in Norway for almost twenty years. I love Norway. There is much that is wonderful about it. But there are some aspects of it, generally institutional, that, when viewed through the eyes of an outsider, can seem, at best, bizarre and comical and, at worst, menacing and malignant.

This, as it happens, was the thrust of Lilyhammer, a terrific, hilarious TV series (2012-14) about Frank Tagliano, a New York mobster (played by Steven van Zandt), who is relocated by the Witness Protection Program to Lillehammer, Norway. In the series, which I reviewed three years ago, both Frank and the viewer are introduced to a wide range of Norwegian customs and cultural practices – ranging from the absurdly expensive and extensive preparation required to acquire a Norwegian driver’s license to dugnad, the tradition whereby people who rent apartments are expected to maintain the public spaces of the building in which they live (as well as its grounds).

Many of the practices Frank encounters come under the category of naive do-gooderism – such as the volunteer night patrols that are trained to respond to gangster criminality with “dialogue.” In one episode, the manager of a day-care center brainwashes small children with a puppet show about “Muriburiland,” an imaginary Communist utopia rich in solidarity and free of the evils of capitalism. As I wrote in my review, Frank “even spends a few days in a Norwegian prison, which he finds surprisingly cushy (‘I should have been arrested a lot sooner!’) and where he and other inmates – and guards – are taught to play the recorder by a hippie lady.”

One institution Frank doesn’t experience is a Norwegian psychiatric ward – which is a shame, because Norway’s approach to mental illness would have made for one of the series’ more instructive episodes. In other countries, it’s understood that if somebody’s suffering from, say, bipolar disorder, he needs medication to keep from getting depressed (and potentially suicidal) as well as from becoming manic (which entails destructive conduct toward one’s family, friends, and finances, and which can also lead to suicide). It’s further understood in other countries that if a bipolar person goes off his meds and has a severe manic or depressive episode, he needs to be hospitalized, kept under lock and key, and medicated until he ceases to be a danger to himself and others.

In this as in so many other ways, however, Norway is special. Among psychologically healthy people, Norwegian law is very clear about who counts as an individual’s next of kin: for example, a spouse trumps a parent, an adult offspring trumps a sibling. But psychotics who are committed to psych wards are permitted to name their own “next of kin” – which has vital repercussions, because the persons treating a patient are only obliged to share information about his treatment and the current state of his health with the designated next of kin, and are prohibited by privacy laws from sharing such information with anyone else. So it is that a psychotic patient may, for example, name as his next of kin his mailman, his garbageman, some celebrity he’s never met, or the self-styled fortune teller in the hospital room next to his – thereby leaving his real next of kin entirely in the dark about how his treatment and condition.

Norway also has something called the “Control Commission” that wields immense power over the lives of mentally ill people and their loved ones. It is the commission, and only the commission, that can order a patient to be held against his will or to be released from commitment (calling “sectioning” in Britain). It also has the authority to determine the specific conditions of such patients’ hospitalization. The commission tends to consist primarily of lawyers and doctors, with a sprinkling of persons in other professions. It is sort of a modern-day Star Chamber whose decisions can only be overruled by a court.

“Who cares whether it’s a perversion of Islam or not?” The subject was terrorism, specifically the attack at London Bridge, and after the politicians had made their usual statements to the effect that this atrocity had nothing whatsoever to do with Islam, or was (at most) a terrible betrayal or perversion or hijacking thereof, several of us expressed the usual outrage over this barefaced lie. But one friend of mine, quoted above, wasn’t having it. “Who,” he asked, “cares?”

It’s a common question, posed routinely by millions of people who sincerely think that focusing on Islam in the wake of terrorist acts only makes things worse. Yes, the politicians may be lying through their teeth when they accuse terrorists of hijacking Islam, but these lies, we’re told, are benign lies, which help to avoid giving unnecessary insult, to prevent increased radicalization, and to preserve social cohesion. Why, then, not just go along with the pretense that the terrorists’ ideology is a perversion of Islam?

Quick answer: It’s a matter of living with the truth. For some of us, that’s important. People who have lived under totalitarian regimes but who now enjoy freedom understand this in a way that suburban American twenty-somethings may not. No, none of us can ever know the whole truth about any subject. But if we live in a free country, we are free to inquire, to study, to struggle for knowledge of the truth, and that is a freedom to be cherished.

Equally precious is our right to articulate the truth and act responsibly upon it. There are whole lives based on lies, whole marriages based on lies, and whole societies based on lies. To study Communist history is to see what kind of society takes shape when people feel compelled to assent to the truth of a proposition that they know to be false. I’ve just begun reading Orlando Figes’s 2007 book The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia, described on its back cover as “the story of ordinary people in Stalin’s Russia, a world where everyone was afraid to talk and a society spoke in whispers.” A society, in short, of necessary lies and forbidden truths.

I know that that is not the kind of society my friend and most of those who share his views would like to live in. Presumably they believe that universal voluntary assent to a single lie about the subject of Islam would be, on balance, a positive pragmatic act, not a major sacrifice. I could not disagree more. Even if universal assent to a lie begins as voluntary, the assent soon ends up being mandatory and speaking the truth becomes a crime. And freedom, just like that, is lost.

We’ve already seen this grim reality start to take hold in the West, with people like Lars Hedegaard in Denmark, Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, and Ezra Levant in Canada being prosecuted merely for speaking the truth about Islam. I wrote a whole book, Surrender: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom (2009), about self-censorship and state censorship in the West on the subject of Islam. This brand of censorship is a phenomenon that emerged, and has spread, with unsettling rapidity. CONTINUE AT SITE