As I explained below, believing Christians are a minority in Norway, and that minority is split between two traditions, a liberal tradition and a conservative tradition. The dominating liberal tradition has attached itself to social democratic concepts of tolerance and progressiveness, most clearly visible through the State Church. The minority conservative tradition holds still on issues that liberal Christians have either abandoned, are in the process of abandoning, or don't raise much fuss about, like women's limited role in the Church, and non-acceptance of homosexuality and abortion. Of the two Christian newspapers in Norway, Vårt Land, (circulation 28000, roughly aligned with the centre-left Christian People's Party), is the more liberal, and Dagen, (circulation 8600), the more conservative.

My experience with Dagen is limited to the three years or so we subscribed to it when I grew up, and my memories are not very positive. A series of articles it ran around 1990 had me deeply worried, at eleven, that by accidentally listening to rock music I could be possessed by Satan. It presented a millenarian view of world politics, seemingly unable to decide whether the EU were the anti-Christ, the Beast, or the Whore of Babylon, and its letters section was always open to the wacky rants of self-styled prophets.

So it's with some confusion I've found myself having political allies among Norway's conservative Christians, mostly on the Iraq war and the Middle East conflict. I ran across a book recently called Mediekampen om Israel (the Media Battle over Israel, October 2002) by Odd Sverre Hove, the current editor of Dagen. I wasn't sure what to expect. Conservative Christian support of Israel has both religious and secular elements, and needless to say I have no respect for the religious part. (I remember articles in Dagen boasting that God had promised Israel just about the entire Middle East region, and that this "Greater Israel" was soon to come true.) But impressively, this book is an about as secular critique of the Norwegian media's one-sided pro-Palestinian bias as I could have hoped for. There is no religion in this book.

Much of the book is based on a thorough investigation of the Middle East coverage on NRK TV in the fall of 2000, the first months of the second Intifada. Hove has done a massive job here, comparing every single mention of the conflict by NRK's foreign correspondent Lars Sigurd Sunnanå over an eight week period with what Hove considers to be reliable foreign sources, documenting minor and major discrepancies. In sum, the discrepancies can only be interpreted as a systematic underfocus on Israeli suffering and Palestinian responsibility, and a similarly overfocus on Israeli responsibility and Palestinian suffering. His conclusion:

1. In 29 news reports, NRK failed to mention that the Israeli shooting was a return of fire directed against terrorists who had first shot at the Israeli soldiers from inside groups of children and teenagers, and claimed instead that Israeli was shooting at children and teenagers who were merely protesting and throwing rocks. 2. NRK kept silent about the systematic planning of the intifada, with summer camps for children, bussing of children to about a 100 selected Intifada-places, transport of stone baskets and molotov cocktails, etc, and instead presented the intifada as a spontaneous, unorganized grassroot rebellion by the people. 3. In practice, NRK adjusted itself completely to Arafat's media strategy, and became a pure microphone service for the face Arafat wished to show to people in Norway. 4. NRK lied about, defended and excused the terrible lynching in Ramallah, 12.10.00. 5. NRK defended and excused the terrorist bomb against school children in a bus from Kfar Darom 20.11.00. 6. NRK systematically mixed reports and opinions, and presented judgments that were not supported by nuanced "pro and contra" information. 7. NRK did not separate self defense from terrorism in its judgments.

There is a similar, less systematic, investigation of the coverage in the other media. Hove's strength is in concrete examples of false accounts and stories ignored. His weakness is in analysis - in particular his insistence that the bias is a result, often without the journalist being conscious of it, of anti-semitism, or jødehat (hatred of Jews). I see no reason to drag anti-semitism into this. The Norwegian media is anti-Israeli in the same sense that it is anti-American - this is bad enough, but has nothing to do with the racism and personal hatred of anti-semitism. When Hove begins to talk about subconscious Jew-hatred, of journalists who hate Jews without being aware of it, he's stepping on very thin ice. At the very least, this is extremely difficult to argue convincingly. It is no surprise at all that what little coverage this book has gotten has focused precisely on these accusations of Jew-hatred, which are easily dismissed and serve as convenient strawmen for the rest of the book.

But faults aside, this book is an important document of pro-Palestinian bias in the Norwegian media. I don't expect to find myself and Odd Sverre Hove on the same side very often, but I do here, and I respect him for that. If you're in Norway, buy this book, and pay extra attention at Sunnanå's next NRK report. What isn't he saying, and why?

I have a suspicion (which I can't prove) that the Left is, if not essentially antisemitic, at least prone to antisemitism. In the comments of leftists, especially since 9/11, I've heard repeated again and again the accusation that a small group of international financiers, bankers and oil companies are dictating US and British policy in order destroy freedom and maximize profit. This is just a whisker away from the 19th Century socialists' claim that the world was run by a conspiracy of Jewish bankers (a belief that became the focus of German National Socialism). The idea that the international conspiracy was Jewish went out of fashion after World War II, especially since so many influential leftists were themselves Jewish. But I think I see it coming back. And it frightens me.

Some even suggest that Nazism and Communism are, in the end, just small variations on each other. I'm not sure I do, but it's an interesting speculation.

That aside, I must point out that there is a longer alliance between libertarians and traditionalist conservatives than many people suspect. Such alliances have come together before, over issues such as slavery.

The thing is that when certain people have absolute values, they are wonderful allies. They are also disturbing opponents, for the exact same reasons.

As a beleaguered traditionalist I'm delighted to have any allies I can decently get. The problem right now, it seems to me, is that for us traditionalists _the_ big fight is to save the traditional family. In our view, to take away the privileges that have always been granted to those who make the sacrifices necessary to build and maintain male/female, childbearing nuclear families would destroy our only real defense against the metastasis of the nanny state. Libertarians don't generally don't see moral issues like this as being of any importance in the defense of freedom. This is a serious and perhaps unbridgeable divide.

To grossly oversimplify: The political arena is not a line, it's a circle. You go too far to one extreme or the other, and you wind up in the same place. So rather than saying they left or right has a greater propensity toward anti-jewish prejudice, I would say any *extremism* tends to land you smack in the anti-jewish (and frankly, anti-a whole bunch of other people) camp.

I don't suppose this book is available in English? Or French?

CRL: No, but from what I see there's already an impressive literature on American media bias.

Lars: I can see that anti-Israelism and anti-semitism has things in common, but I suspect they have this in commom with most conspiratorial or strongly black/white worldviews. But anti-semitism has something in addition that anti-Israelism and anti-Americanism don't have, which is racism, and a focus on individual people, not just states. A true anti-semite would hate or suspect all Jews. An anti-Israelite is more than willing to welcome any Israelis who share their views, just like anti-Americans are. So yeah, there are similarities, but the differences are also important, especially because anti-semitism conjures up the image of Nazism. There are no politically significant Nazis in Norway, and anyone accused of anti-semitism will seize on that alone and easily disprove it, which is what the Norwegian media have done with this book.

And btw, what do you mean by the Left? Anti-Israelism covers everything in Norway from the far left to the centre right. Former Conservative PM Kåre Willoch is one of its most respected supporters. To call this a right-left issue is a bit misleading. It's more properly a conflict between the European worldview and the American one. On foreign policy, the Progress Party take an American view of the world. That's the reason Hagen supports Israel (and what he has in common with conservative Christians), not that he wants lower taxes than the Conservatives do.

I don't think that after the Holocaust and decades of anti-Semitism as Soviet state policy Europeans will ever soon be free of the suspicion that there is more to much criticism of Israel than concern over the appropriate boundaries of the West Bank.

There are only so many reasons for people in countries like Norway to be passionately concerned about the affairs of Israel and the occupied territories, when the vast majority of these people speak not one word of either Arabic or Hebrew, have no particular religious attachment to what traditionally has been called the Holy Land, and have been able virtually every day for the last fifty years to open their newspapers to stories of worse human carnage in other areas of the world. More people were killed in Gujarat last year in interreligious violence than in Gaza; more by far were killed in Algeria, in Congo, in ferry accidents in the Philippines. What do these places lack that the Mideast has?

In a word, Jews. Now, there are other possible explanations. The Soviet Union was pretty much anti-Israel, and lacking any change in its marching orders the Left in Europe may just be holding to that position as though on auto-pilot. The Palestinian cause has with good reason been identified with terrorism for over thirty years, and many European countries may see criticism of Israel as a cheap way to avoid becoming a target. These alternative possible explanations are not really more flattering to Europeans than the first one, though, and while none of them means the return of gas chambers is in Europe's future rejection of them all begs the question -- why care about this issue over so many others?

Conservative, liberal, left, right, and the horrible "Neo-con" are all just shorthand for a person/group main position[s]. I have also been surprised on occasion when someone whose main stance arouses revulsion manages to say something I agree with. But then, Adolph liked pets...


Lars - "The problem right now, it seems to me, is that for us traditionalists _the_ big fight is to save the traditional family. In our view, to take away the privileges that have always been granted to those who make the sacrifices necessary to build and maintain male/female, childbearing nuclear families would destroy our only real defense against the metastasis of the nanny state."

Hunh? Extending privileges is not the same as taking them away. When the vote was granted to non-real-estate-owning men and later to women, it was not taken away from such as Jefferson and Washington. When inter-racial marriages were finally regularized, it did not mean same-race marriages were voided. Gay men, gay women, "straight" people of any gender, white/red/whatever-color people, polygamists, polyganists, monogamists, singles - in any group there are people I cannot abide but more I like and respect. Please apply more "love one another", if with acknowledging that it is possible to love your child but still punish or even turn him/her in to the law if there is sufficient reason - but if one child must be punished, do you punish all the rest?

Lars, perhaps I should add that I dislike and disagree with the "nannies" on almost every issue. I smoke, am overweight, occasionally drink alcohol, have been known to spread a sheet on the ground in a park and nap, enjoy "porn" [remember Mae West and W C Fields struggling with the censors?], want Mark Twain on the open shelves of libraries... Lots more.

I don't think anti-semitism is an important ingredient of the left's anti-Israelism. What the radical left hates most of all is the western society they live in.

They see any use of violence by liberal democracies as renewed imperialism; the "evil white men" butchering poor helpless coloured people. Whatever the west does is wrong, in the view of the radical left. Whatever governments in the 3rd world does is right, and when they do something obviously evil, then it's still the evil capitalists in the west that is behind it. So of course the left blamed the genocide in Rwanda on the former colonial powers, and the western powers that failed to interfere, not on the murderers who slaughtered people with machetes and clubs.

Israel simply fits in there, as a product of the evil western world. Israel is a nation at constant war, so it uses military power a lot.

Add the component that everybody loves the underdog, and Israel is made to look very bad in the press when they send tanks against civilians. It is a very bad PR move, no matter how much sense it makes from a security point of view.

That actually makes sense, Jan. The easiest kind of guilt is guilt you feel over things someone else has done. If the things you feel guilty about were done 100 years or more ago, the guilt is easier still. For Norwegians with no history of colonization themselves at all it must be a snap.

As a Jew I won't give money to Holocaust Museums. Not after having visited the one, here, in LA. Because the museums have attached themselves to leftist politics. It's a real grab bag of crap when you're inside.

Pardon me.

My dad lost his family in the Holocaust. His sister and her beautiful 3 boys did not make it to America, because, basically, by the 1930's (and my dad's marriage to my mom), it was no longer possible to bring illiterate family members to America. My dad's sister never learned how to read and write.

But I knew one thing to be true, it's not just one Holocaust, there have been many. And, you might as well be illiterate when you visit these museums. Who play (like cripples) for your dollar.

And, I hate charities, too. WHile I'm on this rant. The healthiest of people get your money! Those in need (please separate out the pictures you see), do not.

Well, are you surprised?

If it were up to me I'd point out to the utter failures brought onto countries that just happen to have a record of hating Jews.

Spain went down the toilet after discovering all that gold in the "new world" because in 1492 the church decided it didn't want converts, and it didn't want Jews. OUT!

And, out the middle class went.

So? So lots of the hatreds from within different European populations came in jealous fits. Taught, you got it, to people's whose brains got sucked out of their heads by make believe religious promises ...

AND? And, you'd like to be a German standing in Germany AFTER the Allies finished their business and Hitler swallowed (or maybe he didn't) a bullet?

Today, a mole in a hole in Iraq is also coming to grips to the end of his power.

So you hear the word nazi and you're supposed to crap in your pants?

Grow up folks. They lost. "We" didn't. We, being the AMericans that instead of killing immigrants put immigrants for hundreds of years to work to build a collosus.

Geez. I wish I could teach this in a museum. Or a school. Or wherever people still get their underwear up in a knot over LOSERS!

When will we learn to laugh? Victory is an important concept to digest. Just as is the truth. To the dead it doesn't matter if they are trotted out for commercial purposes. But this stuff should matter to us very much. GOOD SANCTIFIED GROUND IS A PLACE WHERE YOU SEE CONSEQUENCES.

Stalin had followers. Hitler did too. Show me the CONSEQUENCES IN INVESTING IN THE LIKES OF HUMAN ENRONS? Riches? You see riches? You see the church being honored? Funny, literature is replete with Christian disasters: Plutarch, Dante, just to name a few. Nothing is worse than the ones who want to drape themseves in honest robes, aren't really honest.

Unlike Cyrano. When he died he could say his white plume wasn't sullied. He lived by the truth. And, then you begin to see you can recognize the difference between assorted shades of hokum. And, what you know to be true in your heart of hearts.

May my dad's sister, her children, her husband, and all the others, may their memories rest in peace. AMEN.

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