It's time to revive a case I mentioned in April, when NRK aired a report accusing the Israeli embassy of supporting a secret network among Norwegian Christians to counter media criticism of Israel. A project I was involved with, two anti-terror meetings in Hamar and Bergen, was implicated as part of that network. NRK quoted Ester Kristoffer, one of the people behind the meetings, extensively to support this.

Viewers were led to believe that Kristoffer was working closely with the Israeli embassy to improve Israel's image in Norway, that she was using the anti-terror meetings to do this, and that this work was religiously motivated. This was dishonest and unfair. As I wrote about the anti-terror meeting in Hamar on June 5, we tried hard to keep the message bipartisan and religiously neutral, and we largely succeeded. Several major politicians spoke at the main event, and only the meeting against anti-semitism later in the evening had strong religious undertones.

That was a reflection of the Christian origin of the project. A Christian pro-Israeli group in Hamar got the idea of inviting bus drivers from Jerusalem to speak in Norway, but as other people joined up the idea gradually grew into a larger event about terrorism in general. The more religious/Israel oriented events were somewhat clumsily placed into a separate meeting about anti-semitism.

Many non-Christians joined the project, including me, and by the time NRK did their interview, (supposedly to investigate whether NRK had crossed a line in their criticism of Israel), we were all busy trying to create a bipartisan, non-religious meeting against terrorism. The only cooperation with the Israeli embassy that I know of concerned how to get the bus drivers to Norway. This turned out to be difficult, because we had placed the meeting on a Saturday, and from what I've been told the relationship with the embassy was stormy. In the end we had to move the bus drivers to a separate meeting the next day.

None of the above, none of the nuances and none of the actual agenda of the anti-terror meetings, made it to the NRK report. Reporter Eirik Veum identified Ester Kristoffer and the meetings as part of a growing network of Christians working with the Israeli embassy behind closed doors to combat criticism of the Israeli government. He came into this with an exciting story to tell, (keywords: "Christians!", "Israel!", "secret network!"), and he used selective quoting and clever editing to tell that story the way he wanted to.

There's been a few developments since April. Ester Kristoffer has complained to PFU, a respected ethics watchdog, and NRK has replied to that complaint. She will also sue NRK for 500 000 NOK in damages caused by NRK to the fund the meetings were intended to raise money for. The way finances look now, no such fund will be created. We barely even covered our expenses. It's not unreasonable to claim that NRK's report caused this.

Jan-Olav Arnegård, the project leader, has also complained to PFU.

I hope to post most of the PFU documents shortly. NRK is making some bold claims here, some of which I know are false. I also have a transcript of the news report itself. Nobody but us bloggers and a few conservative Christian newspapers care about this, so I want to be thorough. This isn't the first or the last time NRK deceives its viewers, but at least it will be well documented.

More to follow.

Thanks Bjørn. Stay on it.

While it is doubtful there will be either a true accounting or even a coming of NRK to the bar, on what happened in this case and others any time soon, at least there will be a record for such time as there might be. If it is the case (and I believe that it is self evidently so) that the media here (and in many places in the West) has crossed a tipping point, to the effect that an ideological myopia is effecting a significant and deliberate impact on the freedom of the citizenry it serves (as in that most precious of freedoms-the freedom to know and decide for oneself), then this frightening state of affairs can only be corrected by keeping truth alive.... somewhere. (Whew... long sentence!)

Some quotes to reflect my hope and my enthusiasm to that end. Indulge me.

"The whole truth is generally the ally of virtue; a half-truth is always the ally of vice." GK Chesterton

"In former days the free-thinker was a man who had been brought up in ancient ideas of religion, law, and morality, and only through conflict and struggle came to free-thought; but now there has sprung up a new type of "free-thinkers" who grow up disdaining to even hear of principles of morality or of religion, of the existence of higher authority, who grow up directly in ideas of negation in everything, that is to say... savages." --Leo Tolstoy

"Freedom had been hunted round the globe; reason was considered rebellion; and the slavery of fear had made men afraid to think. But such is the irresistible nature of truth, that all it asks, and all it wants, is the liberty to be visible." --Thomas Paine

I like the following:

"The reason we hold truth in such respect is because we have so little opportunity to get familiar with it." -- Mark Twain

"Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing happened." -- Winston Churchill

In contrast was the NRK was Giuliani last night at the Democratic convention -- typical NY Guiliani, who went 20 minutes over his alloted time:

"Terrorism didn’t start on Sept. 11, 2001. It started a long time ago and it had been festering for many years. And the world had created a response to it that allowed it to succeed.

"The attack on the Israeli team at the Munich Olympics was in 1972. That’s a long time ago, that’s not yesterday. And the pattern began early. The three surviving terrorists were arrested and then within just three months the terrorists who slaughtered the Israeli athletes were released by the German government. Set free. Action like this became the rule, not the exception. Terrorists came to learn time after time that they could attack, that they could slaughter innocent people and not face any consequences.

"In 1985, terrorists attacked the Achille Lauro and they murdered an American citizen who was in a wheelchair, Leon Klinghoffer. They marked him for murder solely because he was Jewish. Some of those terrorist were released and some of the remaining terrorists, they were allowed to escape by the Italian government because of fear of reprisals from the terrorists.

"So terrorists learned they could intimidate the world community and too often the response, particularly in Europe, would be accommodation, appeasement and compromise. And worse, and worse they also learned that their cause would be taken more seriously, almost in direct proportion to the horror of their attack.

"Terrorist acts became like a ticket to the international bargaining table. How else to explain Yasser Arafat winning the Nobel Peace Prize while he was supporting a plague of terrorism in the Middle East and undermining any chance of peace?

"Before Sept. 11, we were living with an unrealistic view of our world much like observing Europe appease Hitler or trying to accommodate the Soviet Union through the use of mutually assured destruction."

The complete speech as well as that of McCain is here.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/30/politics/campaign/RNC_SPEECHES.html

Bjorn, good luck to you and your group, but I have absolutely no confidence that you'll even get a fair hearing, much less that you'll get vindication. So far as I can tell from the Norwegian blogs I read, the intelligentsia in Norway that controls the press and government is too entrenched and too committed to their own worldview, and too convinced of their own goodness, to even contemplate that people with other viewpoints might have some valid things to say or to consider that "one of their own," like NRK, might unfairly malign someone.

Stuart: There's no group any more, just a few individuals who are trying to set the record straight.

I have faith in the value of telling the truth and exposing dishonesty. I have no idea how PFU will treat this, but what's important is that there are some people, even if it's just the readers of a small blog, who know what really happened, and that there's a permanent record of it. There are people in NRK who seem to be as ideologically entrenched as you say, but this is not true for everyone everywhere, and if it's true today it might not be tomorrow.

Veldig bra, Bjørn!Fant din web-site på www.tenkselv.no. Jeg har både sett NRK-programmet og vært tilstede på Hamar. Jeg synes det er nesten skremmende hvordan norsk media manipulerer virkeligheten!

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