Sharon is making his brief visit to Norway on Wednesday, (landing in the remote town of Molde, the PM's home town, thus limiting the number of protesters and avoiding association with the Oslo process), and has been interviewed in Aftenposten. As Brita Skuland points out, Sharon makes a rather curious mistake in the interview. He seems to think there are people in Norway who don't hate him, and aims his replies towards this newly discovered section of the populace:

- You may be met with protests. How do you feel about that? - First, I would like to point out that Israel has considerable support among Christians (in Norway), there are several houndred thousand. I agree that we have problems now, because many of them may believe that I will lead a process that will end with our withdrawal from the crib of the Jewish people, Samaria and Judea, and that I may accept a solution that divides Jerusalem.

Several houndred thousand? Hardly. There's well over that amount of believing Christians, but Christianity in Norway is split between a liberal majority, which takes its political (and sometimes religious) cues from social democrats, and a conservative minority, whose political worldview is closer to that of American religious conservatives. Some conservative Christians are so eager to support Israel and all that is Jewish that they appear more Jewish than the Jews themselves. Sharon couldn't ask for any more reliable allies. But they number nowhere near houndreds of thousands.

Two new surveys underline this. In one poll, 36% replied that the Bondevik government was too pro-Israeli, the same number believed Bondevik's attitude was just right, 25% had no opinion, and only 3% believed it was too pro-Palestinian. In another poll on which side was the most to blame for the Middle East conflict, 61% put the blame on Israelis and Palestinians equally, 23% primarily blamed Israel, while only 4% primarily blamed the Palestinian side.

These are pretty remarkable numbers. For the record, I would had no opinion on the first question, (as I'm not aware that Norway has had much of a Middle East policy since the Oslo process fell apart), and would have replied Palestinian to the second. Of course there's blame on all sides, and it's possible that Sharon is the wrong man for peace, (though perhaps the right man for a war), but if Sharon is an obstacle to peace, he'll be out of the office soon enough. It's the Palestinian terrorist groups (including those controlled by Arafat) who are the most dangerous, and who must be neutralized in one way or another for any peace to be possible. In the case of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, I currently see no options other than the destruction of its leadership, whether by Palestinian or Israeli hands.

The complete lack of sympathy for this viewpoint in Norway must be explained partly with the anti-Israeli mood of the media, led by NRK's Lars Sigurd Sunnanå. I'm not sure how many Norwegian foreign correspondents there are in the Middle East, but I suspect that they are few, and that the openly pro-Palestinian Sunnanå has quite a bit of influence over how the conflict is presented in Norway. (The other correspondent I know is in the area is Dagbladet's Line Fransson, hardly any less pro-Palestinian.) It is of course NRK's editorial right to present the conflict as it likes - and it is my right as NRK's owner to believe that it ought to be split up and privatized, and that at the very least Sunnanå should be dismissed for extreme bias in the face of complexity.

The numbers also put Carl I. Hagen's open and lonely support of Sharon in an interesting perspective. (His only political allies outside his party are in the miniscule conservative Christian wing of the Christian People's Party). As with the war in Iraq, it is timely to ask whether a cynical populist would risk his neck for such an extremely unpopular cause. I don't think so, which goes to show that there is more principle to Hagen's politics than he is usually credited for.

I agree with you, Bjørn. Actually, I would go as far as to say that Hagen is the most principled of all political party leaders in Norway.

I used to vote Høyre (I am now living in the US and vote Republican of course), but in the Norwegian arena of politics, I see myself more and more aligned with Frp and Hagen.

All I know of NRK is what I read here. But I nonetheless have a [biased] opinion, to wit -

Be as biased as you choose in labelled editorials and opinion pieces, but try to keep it out of the news even if you must hire someone with views quite different to write up what that person sees as editorial/opinion/bias in regular coverage. One example, if you refer to suicide-killers of women and children as other than terrorists, do not turn and call regular troops terrorists for responding to being fired upon in the news presentation. The BBC does this sort of thing nowadays, and is being criticised for it world-wide - not just in Israel. They had to retract almost the entirety of their accounts of the Pvt. Lynch rescue when their "facts" turned to be only in their own imagination, and other "news" coverage as well. Ditto CNN. Do not fall into this trap, easy as it is to do.

I do not know where John Anderson of the state bordering mine gets his view that the BBC is discredited in the States for its coverage of the news from Israel: their morning radio programme has a wide and approving audience which accords its reporting of Israel's treatment of the Palestinians the imprimatur of balance and evenhandedness. As for the Private Ryan affair, almost everyone except the Pentagon's spin doctors now recognises that what actually took place in her capture and release was distorted into a cheap publicity stunt.

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