RUTHFULLY YOURS

Norway is the happy beneficiary of North Sea oil; yet for decades, oil profits have piled up a government fund while Norwegians have paid the highest gasoline prices in the world.

For years, Statistics Norway, the government agency charged with producing reliable data on every imaginable social and economic metric, has refused to make public certain “sensitive” information relating to Norway’s Muslim population, such as the actual numbers of immigrants entering the country through “family reunification.”

Is there any hope that a second Solberg government including FrP will accomplish any more in the way of curbing immigration than the first Solberg government did? At the moment, there seems little reason for hope.

Those of us who are concerned about Norway’s rapid Islamization took great hope from the 2013 parliamentary election. What mattered was not that it resulted in the formation of a right-wing coalition government. What mattered was that the coalition government, for the first time ever, included the Progress Party (FrP).

From its founding in 1973, FrP was an outlier among Norway’s major parties, of which there many. A quick survey: The Labor Party (Ap), the most powerful party during the postwar era, is the home of the cultural establishment; LO, Norway’s equivalent of America’s federation of trade unions, the AFL-CIO, is essentially a branch of Ap, and NRK, the government-owned broadcast corporation, is often described by critics as the voice of the Labor Party.

The other left-wing parties are the Socialist Left (SV) and Red parties, both of which are basically Communist, and the eco-alarmist Greens (MdG). The “bourgeois,” or supposedly non-socialist, parties include the Conservatives (H), for business people; the Christian People’s Party (KrF), for devout Christians; the Center Party (S), for farmers; and the Liberals (V). This division between socialist and non-socialist is something of a fiction: pretty much all of these parties support high taxes, big government, and the welfare state. Norway is the happy beneficiary of North Sea oil; yet for decades, oil profits have piled up a government fund while Norwegians have paid the highest gasoline prices in the world.

FrP, however, has always been different. It is the country’s closest thing to a classical liberal or libertarian party. It believes in individual liberty, the free market, low taxes, small government; it is strongly pro-American and pro-Israel; and it has long warned against the dangers of Muslim mass immigration. For all of these reasons, it has been routinely demonized by other parties and by the media, which depicted it, with breathtaking mendacity, as a gang of bigots, fascists, and right-wing extremists.

For a long time, the other parties vowed never to allow FrP into a government coalition or to work with it in any meaningful way. But after Carl I. Hagen, the firebrand who ran the party from 1978 to 2006, handed the reins to Siv Jensen, she strove to moderate the party’s image and woo other party leaders. As a result, after the 2013 election, the Conservatives invited FrP to form a coalition government, with support from the Liberals and KrF (the latter of which still refused to be a formal part of any government including FrP).

Those of us who had been wringing our hands over Muslim mass immigration cheered FrP’s rise to power. We braced for dramatic change in immigration and integration policy – among other things.

In Sir Henry Wotton’s famous formulation, an ambassador is a man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country. In the case of Susan Rice, a UN ambassador is a broad sent to lie to her country for the good of her man — President Obama. Happily, it worked. Nine months after going on five Sunday talk-shows and pinning Benghazi on some unseen YouTube video, Miss Rice was promoted to National Security Advisor. The Administration’s designated fall-guy, the director of that unseen video, was thrown in jail for a year, and now lives in a homeless shelter.

My own view of Benghazi has been consistent since my column of September 14th 2012, three days after the attack and two days before Susan Rice peddled to the nation an agreed story she and the President and the Secretary of State knew was utterly false. Unlike her September 16th TV appearances, my September 14th column still holds up:

As I say, I’m inclined to be generous, and put some of this down to the natural torpor and ineptitude of government. But Hillary Clinton and General Martin Dempsey are guilty of something worse, in the secretary of state’s weirdly obsessive remarks about an obscure film supposedly disrespectful of Mohammed and the chairman of the joint chiefs’ telephone call to a private citizen asking him if he could please ease up on the old Islamophobia.

Forget the free-speech arguments. In this case, as Secretary Clinton and General Dempsey well know, the film has even less to do with anything than did the Danish cartoons or the schoolteacher’s teddy bear or any of the other innumerable grievances of Islam. The 400-strong assault force in Benghazi showed up with RPGs and mortars: That’s not a spontaneous movie protest; that’s an act of war, and better planned and executed than the dying superpower’s response to it. Secretary Clinton and General Dempsey are, to put it mildly, misleading the American people when they suggest otherwise.

One can understand why they might do this, given the fiasco in Libya. The men who organized this attack knew the ambassador would be at the consulate in Benghazi rather than at the embassy in Tripoli. How did that happen? They knew when he had been moved from the consulate to a “safe house,” and switched their attentions accordingly. How did that happen? The United States government lost track of its ambassador for ten hours. How did that happen? Perhaps, when they’ve investigated Mitt Romney’s press release for another three or four weeks, the court eunuchs of the American media might like to look into some of these fascinating questions, instead of leaving the only interesting reporting on an American story to the foreign press.

But the court eunuchs never did take an interest, and it would be foolish to expect them to now. Nevertheless, if Washington had a healthy media culture, the Ben Rhodes email outlining the Administration’s four goals for Susan Rice’s telly marathon would be devastating:

*To convey that the United States is doing everything that we can to protect our people and facilities abroad;

*To underscore that these protests are rooted in an Internet video, and not a broader failure of policy;

*To show that we will be resolute in bringing people who harm Americans to justice, and standing steadfast through these protests;

*To reinforce the President and Administration’s strength and steadiness in dealing with difficult challenges.

All four “goals” are bunk, but the second was an explicit lie.

Who was this colossus of Rhodes? He’s not part of the State Department or the “intelligence community”; Ben Rhodes was a political guy in the White House. And it was the political guys who called the shots, rather than the diplomats or spooks or military or anyone else who knew what actually happened that night in the Libyan town of Benghazi, as opposed to the stage-set “Benghazi” the White House constructed and dressed with lies. Rhodes & Co “politicized” Benghazi because that’s all these fellows know how to do:

To ‘politicize’ means ‘to give a political character to.’ It is a reductive term, capturing the peculiarly shrunken horizons of politics: ‘Gee, they nuked Israel. D’you think that will hurt us in Florida?’ So media outlets fret that Benghazi could be ‘bad’ for Obama — by which they mean he might be hitting the six-figure lecture circuit four years ahead of schedule. But for Chris Stevens, Sean Smith, Glen Doherty, and Tyrone Woods, it’s real bad. They’re dead, over, gonesville. Given that Obama and Secretary Clinton refer to Stevens pneumatically as ‘Chris,’ as if they’ve known him since third grade, why would they dishonor the sacrifice of their close personal friend by peddling an utterly false narrative as to why he died? You want ‘politicization’? Secretary Clinton linked the YouTube video to the murder of her colleagues even as the four caskets lay alongside her at Andrews Air Force Base — even though she had known for days that it had nothing to do with it. It’s weird enough that politicians now give campaign speeches to returning coffins. But to conscript your ‘friend”s corpse as a straight man for some third-rate electoral opportunism is surely as shriveled and worthless as “politicization” gets.

In the vice-presidential debate, asked why the White House spent weeks falsely blaming it on the video, Joe Biden took time off between big toothy smirks to reply: ‘Because that was exactly what we were told by the intelligence community.’ That too is false.

That’s from my column of October 11th 2012, after an extraordinary month in which the three most senior figures grew ever more brazen in their dishonesty, President Obama shoring up his fake narrative by warning the UN General Assembly that the future must not belong to those who slander the Prophet of Islam. The future’s in no danger of belonging to him: that guy’s in a California jail cell. The night of September 11th in Benghazi didn’t belong to him, either – until Obama and Clinton decided he deserved the credit.

At 8:30 p.m., when Ambassador Stevens strolled outside the gate and bid his Turkish guest good night, the streets were calm and quiet. At 9:40 p.m., an armed assault on the compound began, well planned and executed by men not only armed with mortars but capable of firing them to lethal purpose — a rare combination among the excitable mobs of the Middle East. There was no demonstration against an Islamophobic movie that just got a little out of hand. Indeed, there was no movie protest at all. Instead, a U.S. consulate was destroyed and four of its personnel were murdered in one of the most sophisticated military attacks ever launched at a diplomatic facility.

This was confirmed by testimony to Congress a few days ago, although you could have read as much in my column of four weeks ago. Nevertheless, for most of those four weeks, the president of the United States, the secretary of state, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, and others have persistently attributed the Benghazi debacle to an obscure YouTube video — even though they knew that the two events had nothing to do with each other by no later than the crack of dawn Eastern time on September 12, by which point the consulate’s survivors had landed safely in Tripoli.

In Sweden, it’s old news: as Aftenposten reported a couple of years ago, the politicians in charge of local affairs in Stockholm had decided to offer returning ISIS members instant jobs, welfare handouts, and free homes.

This, mind you, at a time when one-fifth of young Swedes can’t find work, when schools, hospitals, and retirement homes are in decline because immigrants are taking too big a cut of the funds appropriated for social services, and when it’s virtually impossible to find a flat in the Swedish capital.

Erik Slottner, an opposition politician, called the new policy “a reward for criminals.” But Ewa Larsson, a Green Party member who’s in charge of social services in Stockholm, answered that charge by making a distinction between addressing criminal acts – which, she maintained, is the job of the police – and providing social services, which is her wheelhouse.

Fair enough. But why should returning members of ISIS be entitled to move to the front of the line when it comes to collecting free stuff? The closest Larsson came to offering a justification for the policy was to say this: “No human being is born as an extremist.” There it is again: the nobody’s-really-guilty Nordic mentality that will spell the death of Sweden.

Larsson isn’t alone. Last year, Anna Sjöstrand, a local official in Lund, Sweden, told a reporter that the question of how to treat returning ISIS members needs to be “undramatized” so that public officials can examine it in a practical way. She framed the issue as follows: “Here’s Kalle who has this problem and what does Kalle need in order to feel good and to remove himself from that environment?”

OK, let’s break that down. “Kalle” (not “Muhammed”?) has a “problem” (he’s butchered any number of men, women, and children in the name of Allah, but is feeling a little worn out and has decided to look into other lifestyle options). What he needs now, above all, is to escape that “environment” (ISIS as abusive family?) and “feel good.”

And what does Kalle need? Sjöstrand explains: “It could be a residential set-up, financial help, education – it’s about investigating and looking at what the individual requires in order to quit [ISIS].” In short, it’s all about what “Kalle” needs.