Back in May it was reported that every rape assault in the city of Oslo in the last five years had been committed by a person with a “non-Western” background – a Norwegian euphemism for Muslim. Now it turns out that there have already been twice as many rape assaults in Oslo so far this year as there were in all of 2010. At least one member of Parliament, André Oktay Dahl of the Conservative Party, calls the situation “critical” and is brave enough to acknowledge that many of the perpetrators come from cultures “with a reprehensible attitude toward women.”
The Conservative Party has proposed several measures to combat what is being described as a rape epidemic: more money for the police; more police in the streets and doing investigations; faster results from DNA tests; the introduction of volunteer auxiliary police. There is something to be said for these proposals. Policing in Norway is a scandal. This summer it was reported that police departments all over Norway were so short-handed that they were unequipped to deal with the armies of drunks staggering home from bars on weekends after closing time. It was also reported that only fourteen of 430 new graduates of Norway’s police academy had been offered jobs.
The scandalous fact is that Norway, for all its wealth, has chosen not to invest overmuch in law and order. The very idea is simply too reactionary-sounding for the ’68-ers and their heirs in the political and bureaucratic corridors of power. As I wrote elsewhere a few months ago, “Norway wastes millions of kroner ever year on ‘development aid’ that ends up largely in the pockets of corrupt African dictators; it pours millions more into the pockets of non-Western immigrants who have become masters at exploiting the welfare system; for heaven’s sake, the Norwegian government even funds anarchists. It’s not entirely misguided for a Norwegian citizen to feel that his tax money is going less to fight the crime that threatens his home, his self, and his business than to support criminals.”
So Norway needs more cops – there’s no question about that. At the same time, beefing up the police force wouldn’t even begin to address the problem that’s at the root of the country’s growing rape crisis: the presence in Norway, and especially in Oslo, of ever-growing numbers of people who have nothing but contempt for Western culture, who have absolutely no concept of respect for members of religions other than their own, and who have been brought up on the idea that women who dare to walk the street alone and without veils covering their faces deserve to be violated.
Not so very many years ago, Oslo was virtually a rape-free city, inhabited by people who had been brought up on civilized notions of mutual respect and tolerance. No longer. Over the years, the incidence of rape has risen steadily. A wildly disproportionate number of the perpetrators are “rejected asylum seekers” – which may sound puzzling unless you are aware of the perverse state of affairs whereby even persons officially rejected for asylum in Norway are still allowed to stay. And the increasing temerity of the rapists – who know very well that they will probably not be caught, and, if caught, will not be severely punished – is reflected in the fact that the most recent rape (in which two men assaulted a 21-year-old woman) took place virtually in the backyard of the Royal Palace.
Oslo is, of course, not alone in having undergone this cultural sea change: many major cities in Western Europe have experienced similar transformations. Yet it now appears that the incidence of rapes in Oslo has now eclipsed that in the other two Scandinavian capitals, Stockholm and Copenhagen. This is quite an achievement, given that Oslo has traditionally been the smallest and sleepiest of these three cities – the least cosmopolitan, the one that feels more like a safe small town than a European capital. In fact, it turns out that the incidence of rape in Copenhagen has been on the decline. It is perhaps not entirely coincidental that Denmark, for the last decade, has also been the country with the most sensible immigration and integration policies in Western Europe. (Nor is it coincidental that the other Scandinavian capitals have twice as many police per inhabitant as Oslo does.)
A glimpse of the official mentality that makes this steady rise in rape statistics possible was provided in an article that appeared in the Norwegian daily Dagbladet on October 25. It appears that in the summer of last year, the same paper ran a story about Abdi, a Somali immigrant, then 24 years old, who since coming to Norway as an asylum seeker had committed 14 robberies, been incarcerated, become a narcotic, and lived on welfare. On June 3, 2010, Dagbladet reported, an Oslo court had ruled that Abdi, who is not a Norwegian citizen, should be returned to Somalia. Now, however, that ruling has been overturned by an appeals court. Abdi’s lawyer was jubilant, saying that this decision “is important for many Somalis in this country.” (Of all immigrant groups in Norway, Somalis are among those with the lowest employment and highest crime rates.) The lawyer chided Norway for having shown “an ugly face in this case” by planning to return her client to Somalia, but she expressed hope that given the new decision Norway would “change its practice” – presumably meaning that no amount of unsavory activity would make it possible to kick an immigrant out.
The appeals court’s basis for its decision to let Abdi stay in Norway was that it might be dangerous for him to live in Somalia. Whether letting him stay in Norway might make life dangerous for Norwegians didn’t seem to enter into the court’s calculus. It’s not only the courts, to be sure, that are at fault in this sort of situation. In such cases, the media almost invariably step in and bombard the public with shameless propaganda designed to stir up sympathy for the miscreant in question. So it was with the Dagbladet article the other day, which sought to present Abdi as repentant, reformed, and reflective – indeed, almost sagacious and saintly. He was represented as having claimed that he has turned over a new leaf and that he now wants to help wayward immigrant kids to straighten out. He also supposedly said that he wants to study to be a sociologist (which, the more one thinks about it, sounds potentially even more dangerous than if he decided to persevere in his life of crime).
So it goes in Norway in the year 2011. Oslo is undergoing a rape crisis. There is a good deal of chatter about it and many proposals and counter-proposals for solutions. But until the authorities begin to take the welfare of law-abiding citizens as seriously as they take the welfare of criminal foreigners, the problem will only grow worse.
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About Bruce Bawer
Bruce Bawer is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center and the author of “While Europe Slept” and “Surrender.”
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