The little Nordic country famed, among less positive matters, for giving the world a vivid synonym for traitor — Quisling — for its pro-Nazi regime during WWII, is seemingly obsessed with heaping contempt on Israel and its supporters. The latest example centers on renowned Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz’s lecture tour of Norway, during which he offered to speak for no fee at any university on the subject of international law and Israel. All refused.

As Dershowitz notes in his Wall Street Journal column, these same universities, having presented virulent anti-Israel speakers and advocated academic boycotts of Jewish Israeli academics are now boycotting pro-Israel Jewish speakers as well. The bigoted sentiment of some Norwegian professors is striking. Trond Adresen from Trondheim University has written:

There is something immensely self-satisfied and self-centered at the tribal mentality that is so prevalent among Jews…[They] as a whole, are charaterized by this mentality….It is no less legitimate to say such a thing about Jews in 2008-2009 than it was to make the same point about the Germans around 1938.

Fortunately, students at three universities organized enthusiastic meetings for the Harvard professor, attracting large crowds eager to hear the facts about Israel.

Norway expert Manfred Gerstenfeld contends the crude, exclusionary policies of the anti-Israel academics are a reality underestimated in their virulence by many policymakers in Israel. At the same time, Gerstenfeld notes, they don’t represent everyone in Norway. Siv Jensen of the opposition Progress Party expresses positive sentiments towards Israel — and even displays an Israeli flag on her desk.

The J Street Web site may want to update its myths and facts page, a section devoted to attempts to counter charges of anti-Israel activity, malfeasance, dubious fundraising, unsavory associations and the like. The question is how to explain away positive mention from the author of a book deeply hostile to Israel, in the view of some anti-Semitic. Stephen Walt, who himself has trouble with the facts, is marking the five-year anniversary of his The Israel Lobby with pride in the impact it’s had. Although he says “we didn’t expect groups like AIPAC to dry up and blow away” he’s encouraged by other developments. He finds it

gratifying to observe the emergence of J Street, to see groups like Americans for Peace Now and Jewish Voice for Peace become more vocal, and to see writers like Peter Beinart and David Remnick take public stances that are substantially different from ones they might have expressed a few years ago.

Some of those mentioned have always been extreme, but Walt is surely right about David Remnick’s shift. The New Yorker editor is far more radical, one-sided and, seemingly, obsessed with scrutinizing and blaming Israel than a few years ago.

Intensifying persecution of Egypt’s Christian minority has inched its way into the media. CNN’s coverage of the funerals of Christians killed in recent clashes captures the anguish of a beleaguered minority at a tumultuous time in Egypt.

Plus ça change, as they say. Here we go again. The New York Times once more essentially conceals an anti-Jewish incident. In a sting operation against NPR, officials of the radio network were caught on camera listening to anti-Jewish slurs about Jewish ownership of the media. A Times story on the controversy published March 8 on-line and in print on March 9 didn’t get around even to hinting at the anti-Jewish comments until the 20th paragraph of a 23-paragraph story:

The fake group members bring up topics like Jewish ownership of media companies in an apparent effort to get Mr. Schiller talking. They tell him that their group was founded “by a few members of the Muslim Brotherhood in America” and had donated money to Muslim schools. (“Facing Lawmakers’ Fire, NPR Sees New Setback”)

What the sting agents actually say is they wouldn’t be “too upset about maybe a little bit less Jew influence of money into NPR.” In response, Schiller observes that he doesn’t find “Zionist or pro-Israel” ideas at NPR, “even among funders. I mean it’s there in those who own newspapers, obviously, but no one owns NPR.”

The Times’ vaguely worded description is both incomplete and deceptive, giving no indication that NPR executives gave tacit approval to bigoted comments by their affable silence during much of the hoaxters’ commentary. Nor did reporters Brian Stelter and Elizabeth Jensen note that Schiller himself wasn’t just a listener, but interjected his own offensive statements in an apparent effort to curry favor.

Additionally, the paper entirely omits mention of the striking response of NPR executive Betsy Liley when the bogus Islamist donors call NPR “National Palestinian Radio.” She laughs saying: “Oh, is that right. That’s good. I like that.”

The Times offers no hint that such an exchange recalls the decades-long record of biased NPR coverage of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The obfuscation continues a long, dishonorable pattern of ignoring anti-Jewish rhetoric.

Karl Vick, Time Magazine, Jerusalem Bureau Chief

Apparently, Time Magazine has decided the way to save a waning magazine is to bash the Jewish state full tilt. A September 2010 cover emblazoned with a Star of David was memorably titled: “Why Israel Doesn’t Care About Peace.” A December 2010 article by the same author, Karl Vick, “Palestinians Contained,” offered more of the writer’s jaundiced and factually-challenged view of Israel, this time blaming Jews for Palestinian hostility.

Now comes a piece, laden again with bias, this one largely focused on Israel’s growing response to distorted attacks by NGO’s. Israel’s Knesset voted to establish a parliamentary committee to examine international sources of funding for Israeli organizations that “aid the de-legitimization of Israel through harming IDF soldiers.”

As Ronen Shoval, head of the Im Tirtzu organization that has exposed linkages between extremist NGO’s and the notorious Goldstone Report, writes in Ha’aretz:

During the past year, the vast majority of the public became convinced that the organizations that call themselves human rights groups actually belong to the extreme left and seek to force their radical values on others through foreign funding.

Much of the far left which supports the extreme NGO’s has risen in fury at the prospect of parliamentary inquiries into funding. Karl Vick’s story parrots the indignation of those who have previously dispensed biased, false attacks against Israel with impunity.

Among the more irresponsible statements was that of Oslo architect Ron Pundak:

Ron Pundak, a historian who runs the Peres Center for Peace, sees the current atmosphere of Israeli politics as the ugliest in the nation’s history. “It’s totally abnormal,” he says. “From my point of view, this is reminiscent of the dark ages of different places in the world in the 1930s. Maybe not Germany, but Italy, maybe Argentina later. I fear we are reaching a slippery slope, if we are not already there.”

His nasty rhetoric aside, Mr. Pundak is evidently aghast that many others think it’s a move toward getting off the “slippery slope” and onto solid ground to take a close look at the substance, sources and impact of certain NGO’s.

The real slippery slope is Time’s in abandoning any pretense of decent journalism.

An August 3, 2010 letter from Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas to the Norwegian Ambassador to Washington, Wegger Chr. Strommen, expresses concern about the rising incidence of anti-Semitism in the Scandanavian nation. He notes:

These reports are concerning, particularly as they have sometimes involved prominent members of Norwegian society.

Attached to the Brownback letter is a list by the Simon Wiesenthal Center of ten examples of biased attacks on Israelis and Jews by Norwegians. Among the perpetrators is Dr. Mads Gilbert, whose anti-Israel propaganda antics in Gaza during Operation Cast Lead CAMERA had followed.

In addition to various Norwegian ministers named as involved in blatant anti-Israel activity, the SWC list underscores the menacing environment for the tiny Jewish community in Norway — a mere 1300 people. Children are subjected to bigotry in schools, cemeteries have been repeatedly desecrated, a cantor was beaten, a community building shot at and in January 2009, according to Norwegian author Erik Eiglad, the largest ever anti-Jewish demonstration in history occurred — larger than during the Nazi era.

Americans, including the U.S. media, may want to know more about what’s happening in Norway!

Yasir Arafat and allies in Amman, Jordan in 1970 Black September crisis

The story line in the news pages of the Times is practically immutable — that resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict is the key to regional, if not global, peace and harmony. Central to this argument is the view that Muslims and Arabs are overwhelmingly concerned about the plight of the Palestinians and devoted to defending their rights and well-being.

History tells another story and the Op-Ed pages of the Times were host to a valuable column reminding readers of key facts rarely seen on the news side. Rather than being protected by fellow Arabs, Palestinians have often been treated badly. As Efraim Karsh, a professor of Middle East and Mediterranean studies at King’s College London, recounts in an August 1, 2010 column,

For example, it was common knowledge that the May 1948 pan-Arab invasion of the nascent state of Israel was more a scramble for Palestinian territory than a fight for Palestinian national rights. As the first secretary-general of the Arab League, Abdel Rahman Azzam, once admitted to a British reporter, the goal of King Abdullah of Transjordan “was to swallow up the central hill regions of Palestine, with access to the Mediterranean at Gaza. The Egyptians would get the Negev. Galilee would go to Syria, except that the coastal part as far as Acre would be added to the Lebanon.”

Nor did disregard for Palestinian interests end with the birth of modern Israel, but continued in the 1970’s with King Hussein’s killing and expulsion of thousands of Palestinians, and in the 1980’s with the Syrian and Christian Lebanese killings of 3,500 refugees in Lebanese camps. In the 1990’s, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were kicked out of Kuwait and thousands killed as punishment for their support for Saddam Hussein’s invasion of that nation.

Karsh notes that:

Their retribution was so severe that Arafat was forced to acknowledge that “what Kuwait did to the Palestinian people is worse than what has been done by Israel to Palestinians in the occupied territories.”

Palestinians — and the reporters and editors who tell their story in the Times and elsewhere — would all benefit by considering the facts of the past and their relevance to realities today.

Dr. Manfred Gerstenfeld

So unbridled is much of the Norwegian media in leveling false charges that a special award has been created by Norwegian businessman Stray Spetalen — himself a victim of bias. The Stray Spetalen Award recognizes the individual on the receiving end of the most outrageous, distorted, shoddy and unprofessional treatment by the Norwegian media.

High in the running this year is Manfred Gerstenfeld, a PhD in environmental studies who also holds an advanced degree in Judaism from the Dutch Jewish Seminary. Editor of Behind The Humanitarian Mask, a collection of essays about the Nordic countries’ attitudes toward Israel, Gerstenfeld notes in that work’s introduction:

[I]n recent years part of the societal elites, particularly in Sweden and Norway, have been responsible for many pioneering efforts to demonize Israel. Prominent among the perpetrators are leading socialist and other leftist politicians, journalists, clergy, and employees of NGOs. This demonization is based on the classic motifs of anti-Semitism, which often also accompany its new mutation of anti-Israelism.

(CAMERA is also all too aware of the astounding shoddiness of Sweden’s — and Scandanavia’s — largest newspaper, Aftonbladet, publishers of 2009’s blood libel charging Israelis shoot Palestinians to harvest and traffic their organs.)

As chronicled on Norway, Israel and the Jews Gerstenfeld’s unmasking of Norwegian biases against Israel and Jews has prompted near-hysterical media response:

Aftenposten’s Harald Stanghelle has called him “a blinded fanatic”. NRK’s Sidsel Wold has called him a “Norway-hater”. NTB has called him an “aging, right-wing Israeli”. He is known throughout Scandinavia for statements he has never made and beliefs he has never harbored. For the sin of writing a book on anti-Semitism and anti-Israelism in the Nordic countries, he has been vilified, ridiculed and demonized. If anyone is eligible for Stray Spetalen’s ‘media victim’ award, it is Manfred Gerstenfeld

The blog goes to say:

If you support the nomination of Manfred Gerstenfeld for Stray Spetalen’s “media victim award”, write a polite and informative e-mail to: [email protected] — secretary at Schjødt legal firm.

Will Hamas’ Al-Aqsa TV go the way of Hezbollah’s incendiary Al Manar TV — and be taken off the air in Europe? According to a June 15 AP story by Ibrahim Barzak, Al-Aqsa TV is to cease broadcasting by June 26 because it spreads incitement. He writes:

The Hamas station – best known for its children’s programs glorifying violence against Israel – is the centerpiece of a growing media operation of Gaza’s Islamic militant Hamas rulers. Losing the satellite provider will hamper the group’s attempts to spread its message and raise funds abroad.

As the Palestinian Maan News Agency’s June 24 report notes, the instruction to shut down Al-Aqsa in Europe came from a ruling by France’s Conseil Supérieur de l’Audiovisuel. Maan reported Al-Aqsa’s claim:

“We do not incite hatred or anti-Semitism, and we have the right to defend the Palestinian struggle,”

MEMRI proves otherwise, with yet another example of bigoted ranting on the network, this time reiterating the long discredited, bogus claims regarding Benjamin Franklin and his alleged criticism of the Jews.

The public square may have seen the last of Helen Thomas after her “Get the hell out of Palestine” message to Israelis embarrassed her employer, the Hearst Corporation, and the White House Press Association — which had allotted her a privileged position. But their quick action in distancing themselves from her has triggered furious reaction from a raft of Jew-haters. FoxNews reported on June 9:

The New York rabbi who videotaped veteran White House correspondent Helen Thomas telling Jews to “get the hell out of Palestine” says he has received numerous death threats and thousands of pieces of hate mail in the days since Thomas’ abrupt retirement.

Rabbi David Nesenoff said he is facing an “overload” of threatening e-mails calling for a renewed Holocaust and targeting his family — a barrage of hate he said he planned to report to the police on Wednesday.

As Irish author Conor Cruise O’Brien memorably observed, anti-Semitism is a “light sleeper.” Thomas seems to have goaded the monster to stir. FoxNews, for its part, laudably speaks out against the bigots.