This is going beyond my expectations: On leaving the police building in Oslo today, after reporting Shabana Rehman's lift-up stunt, Mullah Krekar attacked a journalist and took away his camera, saying "you are not allowed to take pictures of me". Thank you, Krekar. Thank you! Update: Read this, though.

A new report from Norway's International Peace Research Institute claims that Norway was an errand boy for Israel during the Oslo process. Leif Knutsen comments.

I've said this before, but Stanley Kurtz and those who take him seriously need to hear it again: Kurtz is deeply ignorant about Scandinavian politics and culture. Agree with his overall point about gay marriage if you like, but stop dragging us into it if you have any standards of intellectual honesty.

Brita Skuland: Bitterness and loss of prestige after the failure of the Oslo process controls Norway's Middle East policies.

Jan Haugland: How Europeans are raised to love the United Nations. "Norway's social-democratic state has even instituted the UN day (October 24) as a unique sort of public holiday for the schools. .. It is a day where .. children learn how great the UN is, and learn to sing its praise (sometimes literally)."

Dean Esmay remembers the Armenian genocide, which began for full on April 24, 1915.

Arafat Bombs, Europe Pays. (Via Jan Haugland, who has further comments.)

This is just odd: "Page 250: Karl Rove, a Norwegian-American, is obsessed with the "historical duplicity" of the Swedes, who seized Norway back in 1814. This nationalism manifests itself as hatred for Swedish weapons inspector Hans Blix." Huh? Can anyone who has read the Plan of Attack send me the text of that page?

Mullah Krekar's Norwegian autobiography, In My Own Words, is out, another installment in the mostly (and unfathomably) successful media spin campaign of this evil fanatic. The original title My Case was abandoned for obvious reasons.

Here's the text of an interesting CPA memo on the situation in Iraq, and on what has been done wrong so far. This is criticism the way it should be done - factual and specific - not the uninformed hysteria of the Norwegian media.

The server is a bit unstable today. If you get an Internal Server Error posting a comment, wait a few seconds and try again. Usually works.

Just finished the His Dark Materials series by Philip Pullman. This is sort of the anti-Narnia of children's fantasy, with a very clear anti-Christian message, not in a hateful way, but probably offensive (and rightly so) to believers. I'm not one. The first book is pretty close to perfect, and though the story doesn't tie up very well it's all worth reading.

If you want to learn how many Norwegians think about our welfare system, read this article by American Eric Drigni, who's currently living here and is somewhere between puzzled and impressed with the way we let the state giveth and taketh away. Gets a few facts wrong, (the old "nobody locks their bicycles" ploy, etc.), but the quotes are representative.

At least this Norwegian blogger is honest: The Anti-American Digest.

Unanimous European rejection of bin Laden's peace offer? Maybe not. "All offers of peace should be considered, without exception."

There's a PDA version of Wikipedia, the open-content but quite reliable free encyclopedia. The download is 150mb, so you'll need a memory card, but the geek factor is too high to resist. Is that an encyclopedia in your pocket, etc.

NRK headline: Russia asks US to calm down in Iraq. (Text of statement.) What, the punch line? That's it. Russia, which destroyed Chechnya for the fun of it, wants the US to excersise "restraint". Ho-hum!

The Bush administration has finally found a cause Norwegians can sympathize with: A war on porn. Now all they have to do is nationalize liquor sale, and Norwegian-American relations will be repaired in no time.

Bizarre moment of the week: Odd Karsten Tveit, NRK's old pro-Palestinian champion, speculating that the Shiah uprising marks the birth of an "Iraqi intifada". Yeah, that's what Sadr called it too.

I thought better of Hans Blix than this: "What's positive is that Saddam and his bloody regime is gone, but when figuring out the score, the negatives weigh more." Update: There's more in this Danish interview, (via document.no.)

Leif Knutsen asks what motivated people in Fallujah to kill and mutilate American soldiers.