Here is another article written by Bawer that people should read:
The Rise of European Islamo-Fascist Police
"...It was also in 2010 that thirty gays held a group walk across Grønland in defiance of the burgeoning presence of morality police there. One of the participants told a reporter that several of his gay friends who lived in Grønland had been “knocked down right outside their homes” by the enforcers of sharia. The point of the walk was to demonstrate that “many different people with various religions and sexual orientations can live together.” Alas, it takes more than a single stroll through Muslim streets to crush the morality cops’ power. In a June 2012 article, Somali-Norwegian writer Amal Aden reported that the cops had in fact spread beyond the capital to other Norwegian cities, including Kristiansand. And last October, Erik Torset, a gay man, and Jean Jacobsen, a transsexual, both of whom live in the heavily Islamic Oslo neighborhood of Tøyen, complained that Muslims who used to just taunt them and their friends were now attacking them physically. Muslims had thrown stones at Jacobsen; Torset, for his part, had ended up on crutches after a shop sign was torn loose and flung at his legs. Everyone in Oslo knows that the city’s Muslim neighborhoods are dicey territory for infidels, especially gays, but the head of Norway’s gay-rights organization told Aftenposten that (surprise!) he had no reason to believe that gay-bashings occur more frequently in Muslim areas than in other parts of town. Jacobsen, however, can’t afford to stick her head in the sand: she said she was considering moving out of Tøyen. This is how a neighborhood becomes a Muslim enclave, a no-go zone, a sharia realm – one assault, and one move, at a time.....
.....Norwegian newspaper articles on this topic are, needless to say, never complete without a comment or two from folks in authority eager to make light of the problem. Anne Myhrvold, principal of one of Oslo’s growing number of majority-Muslim schools (fewer than 4% of the kids have Norwegian as a mother tongue), said she’d heard about students being criticized for not wearing hijab, but she took the line that this is no different than being called fat or whatever. Lena Larsen, a convert to Islam who used to head the Islamic Council of Norway and is now at the University of Oslo (where else?), also dismissed the situation, insisting that it goes both ways – non-Muslims, after all, often cast suspicious looks at veiled women. (The difference, naturally, is that I have yet to hear of non-Muslims throwing rocks or shop signs at captives of hijab.)
Larsen isn’t alone in drawing a moral equivalence between Muslim morality police and non-Muslims who chafe at the sight of garments that betoken subservience. A couple of years back, Norwegian anthropologist Lorenz Khazaleh responded on his blog to some of the above-cited news stories. Contending that “it’s wrong to link social control and harassment to ‘foreign cultures’ or ‘Muslims’” – and especially wrong to paint a picture in which white Norwegians (Allah forbid) occupy the moral high ground – Khazaleh underscored the fact that “social control exists in every society.” In Norway’s small towns, for instance, “networks of old women” keep an eye on how local girls dress and behave. Then there’s the “white feminists who criticize Muslim girls’ dress code.” (Hmm…which feminists would those be?) Khazaleh seconded an inane observation by writer Erling Lae, who complained that since Norwegian pastors aren’t held responsible for their parishioners’ foolishness, why should imams be? And Khazaleh congratulated a noted sociologist for “remind[ing] us that the morality police have their good side” – for example, Christie argued, it’s good for an adult to stop a child he doesn’t know from crossing at a red light. (As if this be compared to threatening a comedian with death!)...."
Read the whole article: The Rise of European Islamo-Fascist Police
