RUTHFULLY YOURS

Of late, however, as the city’s Muslim population has boomed, Grønland has been undergoing a transition from a mixed neighborhood to an essentially Muslim one.

In an Aftenposten article in January 2010, Olga Stokke and Hilde Lundegaard cited one Grønland resident’s observation – which is consistent with my own and that of many of my friends and colleagues – that since 9/11 the neighborhood has taken a sharply negative turn.  More women are wearing hijab, if not burkas; and there has been a rise in what the Aftenposten article’s headline called “[m]oral control in Oslo’s immigrant streets.”  For example, a young social worker who was chowing down on a somosa one day on his way home from work through a Grønland street was confronted by two aggressive young men who demanded of him in a bullying tone: “Don’t you know it’s Ramadan?  You should know better!”

Once upon a time, gays in Oslo thought of “multicultural” Grønland as gay-friendly.  No more.  In the fall of 2009, a gay couple walking in Grønland were kicked and yelled at by a man who told them that they were in a Muslim neighborhood where their kind was unwelcome.

This was not an isolated incident: as Stokke and Lundegaard wrote, “many others…experience an at least equally strong sense of control” in Grønland by self-appointed moral police.  Muslim girls who would prefer not to wear hijab, for example, do so in Grønland simply to avoid being rebuked.  The Aftenposten article quoted Fatima Tetouani, who when she moved in 2000 from Morocco to Oslo to live with her Norwegian husband, “expected a Western, open society.”  “But Grønland is more Muslim than Morocco,” she told Aftenposten.  “I had never seen a burka before I came here.  And I had never experienced nasty looks if I ate or drank a cup of coffee during Ramadan.”

Tetouani’s son had been scheduled to attend a school where over 95 percent of the students were non-Norwegian speakers.  She said no.  “All the girls were covered.  I felt like I was in a mosque.  My son will not be bullied because he has a father who eats pork and is not circumcised.”  Tetouani had worked at a local day-care center, where she heard an Algerian mother chastize her son for playing with Norwegian children: “You know they eat pork and are going to hell!”  Tetouani’s verdict was blunt: “they are trying to take over this neighborhood.”

While Tetousani from Morocco was clear-eyed about what was going on in Grønland, Michael Hartmann from Bergen, after five years in the neighborhood, was still in something of a fog.  The self-described anti-racist, who “moved to Grønland precisely in order to experience the cultural diversity,” was now being regularly tormented by his neighbors for being gay.  This left him disillusioned; he feared being beat up.  “I was very naïve when I came here,” he admitted.  But somehow, it appeared, he still didn’t get it: “We can’t give up the diversity.  As minorities we really should be standing together and helping one another.”

Hans Rustad, on his indispensable website, document.no, described the Aftenposten article as “pathbreaking,” and predicted that it would have repercussions in the offices of government, academia, and the culture generally.

But nothing has changed.

Cut to late 2011.  While Oslo has been undergoing a wave of violent rapes, robberies in Grønland have been skyrocketing.  A recent article in Aftenposten reported on this year’s 351^st victim of a robbery in Grønland.  Musician Sturla Nøstvik, reported Arild M. Jonassen, was on his way home from a late-night gig when a pistol was slammed against his forehead.  Two men demanded his wallet and iPhone.  Blinded by blood, the gun at his back, he was forced into an underground passageway, thorough a hole in a fence, and into a clump of bushes; along the way he was struck several times by his attackers, who in bad Norwegian and bad English demanded the pin codes to his bank cards, after which one of them went off to empty his accounts.  They then threatened to kill him and his girlfriend if he reported them to the police; then they said that if he did report them, he should say they were not dark-skinned but white.  Sturai, who is now blind in one eye, came to Oslo 14 years ago from a small town up north, and had always felt safe; now he hardly dares go out after dark.

This is a city which in living memory was one of the safest and most civilized urban centers on the planet.  Now all is changed, changed utterly.  This practice of dragging victims off the sidewalk, through fences, and into thickets or whatever while emptying their bank accounts is now commonplace, according to Oslo police.  “We have lost the city,” Nøstvik was told by the officers who handled his case.  The night he was attacked, they informed him, they had only two patrol cars out in all of downtown Oslo.

A few weeks back, the wave of rapes in Oslo inspired a torchlight rally and the formation of after-dark civilian patrols intended to make the streets safe for potential rape victims.  But the rapes have continued.  So have the robberies.  Norwegians, like so many other Western Europeans, are up against a veritable army of culturally alien men living in their midst who have no scruples when it comes to raping native women or robbing native men.  There is, after all, no crime – no shame – in attacking the infidel.  The nature of the set of beliefs by means of which these perpetrators justify their violent offenses is perfectly clear.  But the Norwegian response to these marauders is still, all too often, that of Michael Hartmann: “We can’t give up the diversity.”  Unfortunately for them, the “diversity” to which they are so devoted involves seeking a modus vivendi with a brutal, inflexible ideology that has marked their own society, culture, and moral code for annihilation.

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