RUTHFULLY YOURS

Well into the second decade of Islamic jihad against the West, we all know the bloody script. In London, “radical jihadists” or “Islamist extremists” for the third time in a year went on a rampage, ramming pedestrians and slashing throats, and leaving seven dead and 48 wounded so far. Police immediately round up suspects they obviously could have snatched before the carnage. Prime Minister Theresa May blusters “enough is enough” and “terrorism breeds terrorism.” Politicians across the world issue rote “condemnations” of terrorism,” then go back to business as usual. Shrines of teddy bears, flowers, candles, and therapeutic bromides are the best the Brits can do in response to yet another act of a war they don’t even know they’re in.

Welcome to the new normal for a Western civilization, content, like H.G. Wells’ Eloi, to party and consume in leisure and affluence until the Morlocks devour them.

Like most acts of appeasement, this refusal to defend our way of life––individual rights and freedom, tolerance, separation of church and state, representative government, popular sovereignty, and political liberty––starts with the denial of reality. PM May’s comments in response to the attack are a textbook example of the received wisdom that cripples our response to Europe’s ancient enemy that it fought for a thousand years to drive from its lands.

The terrorists, May claims, “are bound together by the single evil ideology of Islamist extremism that preaches hatred, sows division and promotes sectarianism. It is an ideology that claims our Western values of freedom, democracy and human rights are incompatible with the religion of Islam. It is an ideology that is a perversion of Islam and a perversion of the truth. Defeating this ideology is one of the great challenges of our time but it cannot be defeated through military intervention alone.” Meaning, as May says, “teaching Western values.”

It’s important to parse this statement, for it reprises every delusion that has marked the West’s response to Islamic jihad since 9/11. Jihad is not “Islamist extremism,” but has been a foundational tenet of traditional Islam since the seventh century. The Koran repeatedly commands Muslims to “slay the idolaters wherever you find them,” “Fight those who do not believe in Allah,” “fight those of the unbelievers who are near to you and let them find in you hardness,” “kill them wherever you find them, and drive them out from whence they drove you out,” “I [Allah] will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve . . . Therefore, strike off their heads” ––these are just a few samples of the divine justification for “hatred, division, and sectarianism” found in Islam’s most holy book.

Moreover, the jihad imperative is consistent over 14 centuries. Here is Ibn Taymiyyah, 14th century jurist and theologian:

Since lawful warfare is essentially jihad and sine its aim is that the religion is Allah’s entirely and Allah’s word is uppermost, therefore, according to all Muslims, those who stand in the way of this aim must be fought.

Or Ibn Khaldun, the 15th century historian and jurist:

In the Muslim community, the holy war is a religious duty, because of the universalism of the [Muslim] mission and [the obligation to] convert everybody to Islam either by persuasion or force . . . Islam is under obligation to gain power over other nations.

Medieval backwardness? Here’s Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna writing in the early 20th century:

It is the nature of Islam to dominate, not to be dominated, to impose its laws on all nations, and extend its power to the entire planet.

His disciple Sayyid Qutb explains how this domination will happen:

Islam has the right to remove all those obstacles which are in its path,” not “through sermons or discourse,” for “Those who have usurped the power of Allah on earth and made his worshipers their slaves will not be dispossessed by words alone.”

So too the Ayatollah Khomeini, the most revered modern Shi’a theologian and creator of the Islamic Republic of Iran, the world’s foremost state sponsor of terrorism:

Those who study jihad will understand why Islam wants to conquer the whole world . . . Those who know nothing of Islam pretend that Islam counsels against war. Those [who say this] are witless. Islam says: Kill all the unbelievers just as they would kill you all! . . . Kill them, put them to the sword and scatter [their armies]! . . . Islam says: Kill in the service of Allah those who want to kill you!

Not only are knife-related crimes surging, but the perpetrators and victims of such crimes are increasingly younger and increasingly female.

Germany’s knife-crime problem is being exacerbated by its lenient judicial system, in which offenders receive relatively light sentences, even for serious crimes. In many instances, individuals who are arrested for knife-related crimes are released after questioning from police. This practice allows criminal suspects to continue committing crimes with virtual impunity.

More than 1,600 knife-related crimes were reported in Germany during just the first five months of 2017 — an average of 300 such crimes each month, or ten a day.

A Syrian migrant was stabbed to death in northern Germany by another Syrian because he was eating ice cream during Ramadan. The murder — which occurred in broad daylight in a busy pedestrian shopping area in Oldenburg and caused great consternation among local citizens — is not just the latest example of Sharia law being enforced on German streets. The crime also highlighted the growing epidemic of knife violence in Germany.

Knives, axes and machetes have become weapons of choice for criminals in Germany, which has some of the strictest gun laws in Europe. Knives are not only being used to carry out jihadist attacks, but increasingly to commit homicides, robberies, home invasions, sexual assaults, honor killings and many other kinds of violent crime.Reliable statistics on knife violence in Germany do not exist. A search of German police blotters, however, shows that during the past ten years the number of knife-related crimes in Germany has increased by more than 1,200%. Around 4,000 such crimes were reported to police in 2016, up from just 300 in 2007.

It is also impossible to determine how many of these knife crimes involved migrants. Increased censorship by the police and the media, aimed at stemming anti-immigration sentiments, makes the public incapable of knowing the names and national origins of many perpetrators or victims.

The surge in knife-related violence in Germany does, however, coincide with Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision to allow in some two million migrants from Africa, Asia and the Middle East. The number of reported knife crimes in Germany jumped by 600% during the past four years — from about 550 in 2013 to nearly 4,000 in 2016.

Police reports show that both migrants and non-migrants are responsible for the increase in knife crimes in Germany. Merkel’s open-door migration policies appear to have set in motion a self-reinforcing cycle of violence in which more and more people are carrying knives in public — including for self-defense. Her policies appear to be leading to more and more stabbings, especially when alcohol is involved.

The mosque boasts that it has been “able to organize many activities”. One of these, it says, “is to spread Islam to the non-Muslims in Finland”.

Now Muslims in Finland want a mega-mosque. The idea that mega-mosques “prevent radicalization” is clearly popular among proponents of Finnish mega mosques, but on what evidence is this view based? Can they name one country where this was actually the case?

Finland would be wise to look at what the establishment of Saudi and Gulf state-funded mosques in the rest of Europe has already done to the continent in terms of Islamization and radicalization.

In recent years, Muslims in Finland have been complaining about not having an official mosque. This is not entirely true; the Finnish Tartars have an official mosque with a minaret — in Träskända — which other Muslims are free to use. There are also around 80 small mosques in Finland, around 30 of them in converted buildings or private flats in Helsinki, although many of them are referred to as “prayer rooms”. One such mosque is the Masjid Iman mosque, located in Helsinki on the Munkkiniemen street. According to its website, the 214-square-meter mosque, which calls itself “The Islamic Multicultural Dawah Center”, was established in 1999 and is “one of the well-known mosques in the Helsinki area”. As is increasingly taking place, the mosque, according to the website, was formerly a church. The mosque boasts that it has been “able to organize many activities”. One of these, it says, “is to spread Islam to the non-Muslims in Finland”.

Now Muslims in Finland want a mega-mosque. Two years ago, a Finnish convert, Pia Jardi, spokesperson for the mega-mosque project, known as “Oasis”, said, “There is a need for a grand mosque because so far we do not have one in Helsinki. A mosque would signal to the Muslims that they are a part of society”.

Another board member of the Oasis project, Imam and then chair of the Islamic Society of Finland, Anas Hajjar, was less modest. In October 2015, he told Yle, a Finnish news outlet, “…the need for mosques in the capital region keeps growing… We need three mosques in Helsinki, and one in Esbo and one in Vanda”. According to Hajjar, the planned mega-mosque will be 20,000 square meters, but besides the actual mosque, there will also be sports and youth facilities. The actual prayer room will accommodate 1,500 people. Hajjar told Yle that mega-mosques, “prevent radicalization, as they make young Muslims feel like part of society”.

Anas Hajjar has been linked to the Muslim Brotherhood. In 2014, after the United Arab Emirates designated the Muslim Brotherhood and its local affiliates a terrorist organization, Anas Hajjar’s organization, The Islamic Society of Finland, was included on the list. The Helsinki Times reported the surprise of The Islamic Society of Finland at its inclusion on the terror watch list: “We’re very surprised by such a decision, and we have no idea why we’re on the list. We condemn such, outright arbitrary, decisions,” said the society’s director of public relations, Abdihakim Yasin.

The GCCEI needs to examine, among other things, the way in which its patron, Saudi Arabia, has participated in, if not spearheaded, the very extremism that it is claiming now to combat: the connection between Wahhabism and terrorism; the hostility of its regime to democracy; the abuse of human rights; and the suppression of moderate interpretations of Islam.

When Trump stated that fighting extremism and terrorism “transcends every other consideration,” he was, in effect, giving them unwritten permission to continue repressing their citizens and whatever else they wished.

The GCCEI will be managed by a board of 12 directors appointed every five years, and the number of directors from each member state will be based on that country’s financial contribution to the center. In other words, the center will be ruled by — and further the interests of — wealthy absolute monarchies.

During his trip to Saudi Arabia, Israel and Europe in May, U.S. President Donald Trump inaugurated the Global Center for Combating Extremist Ideology (GCCEI) in Riyadh — an endeavor that its appointed secretary-general, Nasir Al-Biqami of Umm al-Qura University in Mecca, described as the “fruit of collaboration between Muslim countries that believe in the importance of combating terrorism.”

However admirable a goal from the point of view of the West, this initiative has little chance of success, given the repressive regimes involved and the extremist worldview of the individuals who will be funded to promote it.As Elliott Abrams, senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and top adviser to former U.S. President George W. Bush, wrote:

“Partnerships with repressive regimes may in some cases exacerbate rather than solve the problem for us. Gradual reform is exactly the right approach, but will we see President Trump pushing President Sisi of Egypt (with whom he is friendly), or Erdogan of Turkey, or the Bahrainis, for gradual reform?”

Pointing to the weakness of Trump’s praise of Bahrain and Saudi Arabia for “working to undermine… radicalism,” Abrams stated:

“This is quite wrong. The Sunni royal family’s oppression of the country’s Shia majority is in fact creating a breeding ground for radicalism and opening a door for Iranian subversion. … Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabi Islam is at least a gateway drug for extremism. All around the world, Saudi money is being used to suppress indigenous forms of Islam. Saudi preachers, mosques, and schools teach that local and moderate versions of Islam are impure and must be replaced by the only true version: the Saudi Wahhabi version. But that version of Islam treats unbelievers with contempt and often hatred, oppresses women, and opposes democracy.”

Jihadism loves a weak horse, as no less an authority than Osama Bin Laden reminded us, if we care to listen. What we owe the memory of violent Islam’s many recent victims is to acknowledge the very real war that made them its casualties and respond accordingly.

Those with heads still below the clouds and feet firmly on the ground – or simply with heads not in the sand — should be readily able to accept several fundamental truths about Islam and the West.

First, we are at war. The enemy is a soldier, not a criminal.

Second, the enemy and his motives and methods are in plain sight, not remotely a mystery. What inspires them might be incomprehensible to any sane observer, but the bitter fruits of that inspiration are clear as day.

Third, there are ways to respond other than through vapid hand-wringing, hand holding, candle-lit vigils and impotent head-shaking.

Fourth, it is not too late to act, despite decades of poor decisions in the West.

These truths are clear to me, though plainly not to everyone. There is a broad lack of will to recognise this escalaing war and, more culpable than even that, a refusal to identify an enemy, other than dressing him in palliative euphemism. Why this is so, take your pick. Academics have sought to instill an unshakable deference before “the other”, also infusing with reflexive horror the very thought of standing up for, or even recognising, the existence and virtues of Western values, especially Judeo-Christian ones. There is also queasiness at the thought of being called to fight a war in an age of comfort, endless distractions and, let’s be blunt, spinelessness. Top off that list with a simple lack of understanding of how to fight back and then, to complete the recipe, add the mandatory dash of “tolerance”, which apparently means we must tolerate the intolerant and intolerable.

The sneering green Left likes to brand all who dispute global warming as “climate deniers”, which is funny when you think about it because temperatures have flat-lined for almost 20 years, the IPCC admits its models have been hopelessly out of whack, and every Flanneryesque prediction of doom by roasting or melting inevitably falls on its face. There is nothing there to deny, in other words, except rent-seekers’ press releases.

But Islam’s propensity to inspire murderous assaults, well that is very much “there”. Blood on the streets of Manchester, London and, as of last night, the Melbourne suburb of Brighton, attests to that. Yet here, where the evidence of a palpable threat is beyond dispute, a virulent denialism flourishes. Often it is encouraged and abetted by those most loud in their climate alarmism. The infamous episode of Q&A, in which junketeering warmist Lawrence Krauss cast aspersions on whitegoods by way of dismissing Islamic butchery, provides a priceless example:

TONY JONES: Lawrence, we see that Trump is stepping back from some of his positions. Will he step back on…? He’s obviously got within his administration people who are serious climate science deniers.

LAWRENCE KRAUSS: Yes, he certainly does.

So let us start, first of all, with the Kraussian doctrine of dismissal by diminution. “More chance of being hit by a falling fridge than by terrorism,” the great mind pronounced. Tell that to a Coptic Eqyptian, buddy. True or not — and it most certainly isn’t – you are still left with the fact that such logic is irrelevant and, ultimately, entirely meaningless.

Then there are those who simply cannot see any evil whatsoever in Islam. This is the Religion of Peace™ brigade, the ones who insist the threat starts and ends with those “lone wolves”. They swear there is nothing to see here, shrink from appending the label “terrorist”. That would be simplistic stereotyping, don’t you know. More than that, describing someone as a terrorist poses the obvious question: to what end are little girls being blown up and Saturday night revellers knifed? The answer is so obvious denialists cannot utter it, nor will they sit silent and let others do so. The person who speaks the self-evident truth must be torn down, blitzed with a Twitter storm, made the object of ridicule and shunning.

While it seems hardly believable anyone would think this way, many political “leaders” find it convenient to pay lip service. The protagonists of this line cast the enemy as a “criminal” and support only law-enforcement responses. How long might World War Two have lasted if every Luftwaffe pilot downed over Britain were to have been put on trial, with attendant costs and delays. Fortunately, in those days, the ability to recognise a war and discern its foot soldiers had yet to be eroded by cant and cowardice.

Whether belief in the caliphate or a tendency to jihadism is the core business of any or all forms of Islam or merely the whacky obsession of the very few doesn’t matter in practical terms. There are people with certain beliefs who are eager to kill us, that is what matters and, just at the moment, the only thing that matters. Seemingly, many of their co-religionists either agree with the killers, support them actively or passively, give them cover in the Muslim enclaves in Paris, London, Brussels, Manchester or wherever.

Photo ops, soft words and Iftar dinners at Kirribilli did nothing to curtail the murderous impulses of the man who, last night in Melbourne, staged a lethal ambush in the name of Allah. That creature is dead, as is an innocent desk clerk, and three officers wounded. If our leaders won’t lead, we need better ones.

Terrible attacks in both Manchester and London further underline the fundamentally flawed official response to Islamic terrorism. The official refusal to name the enemy leads to a muddled law-and-order response, focussed on the criminal plans and actions of errant individuals. Yes, the powers-that-be talk incessantly about the so-called ‘war on terror’. But this is a cop out, as they must know in their hearts even as their mouths spill those Religion of Peace™ platitudes.

To wage a real war, you highlight the goals of the enemy, not simply his methods. Just imagine if, instead of assailing the philosophy of Nazism and its plans for domination, Churchill had talked only about the need to wage war only on Stukas, U-boats and the Bismark. Get the point? Terror is the weapon. Militant Islam, implemented in accord with quite specific Koranic instructions, is the hand that wields it.

It seems to me that the ordinary punter “gets it”, whilst “educated” officialdom remains in a fog of stupidity and political correctness.

I suspect that large numbers of ordinary people are sick of efforts by the likes of Malcolm Turnbull and Therese May to describe Islamic terrorists as somehow “un-Islamic”, supposedly guilty of perverting Islam, despite numerous quotations from the sacred texts lending full justification to the jihadis’ mayhem. Of course, neither Turnbull nor May is in any position to propound a corpus of doctrine which would constitute “authentic” peaceful Islam.

Unfortunately and inconveniently, a large percentage of Muslims in the West countries regard Sharia supremacism and violent jihad as authentically Islamic and other Muslims who opt for peaceful integration as un-Islamic. Whether we like it or not, a large number of Muslims in our midst, whether by thought or deed, feel themselves at war with the rest of us.

By trying to pretend that we are not at war, we have sacrificed innocent lives. We should long ago recognised that this is not simply a matter for the police and the criminal justice system. Nor is it any longer a matter of our intelligence services being able to catch terrorists just before they commit mass murder. So far, with the notable exception of the Lindt Cafe siege, Australian intelligence has largely succeeded in foiling large-scale potential terrorist acts. But even the best intelligence service cannot hope this run of luck will continue. Someday, somehow, an Islamic terrorist group will slip through the net. (stop press: last night in Melbourne a Somali-trained disciple of the Prophet killed one person, wounded three police officers and, his one good deed, saved the courts the trouble of dealing with him by succumbing to hail of bullets).

The great tragedy in both Manchester and London is that at least some of the perpetrators were “known” to authorities, as was the perpetrator of Melbourne’s ambush. We have now further learnt that up to 23,000 are, err, “known” to Intelligence authorities in Britain. The problem is that only approximately 3,000 can be monitored at any one time. The rest, including the perpetrators of the latest horrors, were off the intensive watch list for the time being.

Clearly, the reactive police approach favoured in peacetime has failed, and will continue to fail, with more tragic loss of innocent lives.

By contrast, waging war against a named enemy must be necessarily proactive. The following are the essential elements of waging war:

(1) Name our enemy. To the extent that Islam is a spiritual exercise, it can be tolerated. However, to the extent that it is a political ideology, which does not recognise any distinction between the sacred and the secular, it must be fought and defeated. We may choose to identify the enemy as “Sharia Supremacism”. This is the goal for which the terrorists are fighting.

(2) Institute preventive detention. The onus would be on those interned to prove that they pose no threat to life and limb. Those who declare war on our civil society through incitement, association and actions should not expect protection from institutions whose legitimacy they reject.

(3) Those who have chosen to fight for the Islamic State are our enemies. Where possible they should be stripped of Australian citizenship and prevented from returning. Whether they become stateless is their problem not ours. After all, they have chosen to place themselves outside of Australian civil society.

(4) All funding from abroad for mosques, Islamic institutions and associations should be blocked. Saudi funding of Wahhabism in this country and worldwide is an especially pernicious facilitator of global jihad.

(5) All mosques which promote Sharia supremacism to be closed down. Likewise, Islamic associations, such as Hizb Ut-Tahrir should not only be banned but, in addition, its members interned.

(6) Proactive counter-terrorism must inevitably be the responsibility of the specialist military. The police forces have to remain primarily focused on civil law enforcement.

Today we hear that the perpetrator of the latest incident in Melbourne was yet another of those “well known” to police — a fact that underscores the point that the sooner we move away from the stupid delusion that a peacetime criminal justice system can deal with the threat, the safer we will all be.

LONDON—One of three knife-wielding assailants who killed seven people in a weekend terror attack here was known to security services, authorities said Monday. Neighbors said his zeal for Islamic extremism was broadcast to the nation in a television documentary called “The Jihadis Next Door.”

But police said they had no intelligence suggesting the man, Khuram Shazad Butt, a 27-year-old Pakistan-born British citizen, was plotting violence ahead of Saturday’s rampage.

Several neighbors said Butt had appeared in the documentary, which followed radical preachers calling for Islamic law in Britain and was aired early last year. One neighbor said Butt was reported to the police as a potential danger two years ago. Police declined to comment.

On Monday, police also identified a second attacker as Rachid Redouane, 30, who they said had claimed to be Moroccan and Libyan. They said they were working to determine the identity of the third attacker.

Saturday night’s attack in a crowded area of pubs and restaurants was the third by Islamist terrorists this year in the U.K.—and the third involving someone who had come to the attention of security officials but wasn’t deemed threatening enough to be closely monitored or detained before they struck.

“We cannot go on as we are,” British Prime Minister Theresa May said Monday, pledging to take tough new steps against Islamist extremism. She vowed to crack down on online radicalism and said she would consider expanding the powers of the police.

London’s police chief, Cressida Dick, named one thing she didn’t think should be considered: arming regular officers. “I don’t think the public in this country want to live in a place where we are all armed to the teeth,” she told the British Broadcasting Corp. on Monday. CONTINUE AT SITE

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.