Category Archives: Bruce Bawer

Islam’s clumsy move after Koran burn in Norway

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Some of you may remember the Norwegian koran burning and the subsequent day of rage set into motion by the OIC, primary reactions in Turkey and Pakistan. Of course. It’s a buyer’s market for outraged mobs in Pakistan. Its nearly the only growth industry.

One of the more propagandistically efficacious responses by muslims was to give away thousands of free Korans across Norway hoping to make those who burned one seem petty and mean spirited. Unlike the muslims of course, raping, killing and waging jihad across Norway.

Of course this leads to a problem for the muslims I would think.

The purpose of burning the koran was to raise awareness of what was in it and its anti-Western components most Western people refuse to admit exist, or matter at all if they do.

So one wonders how giving thousands of them to Norwegians, beyond the superficial optics of a seemingly benevolent act in the wake of what is made out to be an awful one can work for muslims.

For the answer we turn to Author, Bruce Bawer from his December 10 2019 article at Gatestone:

Norway: A Fake “Translation”

  • This 2013 Norwegian-language “Koran” is available online. A perusal of key passages, however, shows that it bears little or no resemblance to the actual Koran.
  • Let us hope that the word gets around that the book they are being handed is not really the Koran at all.

[…]

On the heels of this remarkable news came the announcement that three Norwegian Muslim organizations, in response to SIAN’s Koran burning, planned to hand out 10,000 copies of the Koran to Norwegians at stands in Oslo and, perhaps, Bergen. The idea, said Hamza Ansari, a member of the board of one of those organizations, the Oslo mosque Minhaj-ul-Quran, was to “demystify” the holy book. Another one of the organizations, the Islamic Literary Association, added that “the Koran teaches us to show love.” Which Koran, one wondered, were they talking about? Surely not the one I have read, which is full of injunctions to kill Jews and other infidels, among many other horrific mandates. Indeed, it turned out that the “Koran” in question is a 2013 translation into Norwegian that “contains explanations” intended to clarify the seventh-century text for twenty-first-century readers.

In fact, this 2013 Norwegian-language “Koran” is available online. A perusal of key passages, however, shows that it bears little or no resemblance to the actual Koran. Take this verse:

O you who believe! do not take the Jews and the Christians for friends; they are friends of each other; and whoever amongst you takes them for a friend, then surely he is one of them; surely Allah does not guide the unjust people. (5:51)

In the Norwegian “translation,” this verse reads as follows:

Is it a judgment of ignorance they want? And who is better at (judging) a judgment than Allah for a people who have the certainty of faith?

Please do click over and read the whole article by Bruce Bawer. It also explains more about how Norway is threatening indigenous Norwegian citizens that if they do not act as if burning koran (or insulting islam) is a crime, the government will damn well make it a crime.

And the logic is that burning a koran is an utterance of hate, and somehow that’s illegal unless of course, its hate of anything the state demands you hate. Anything that can be branded as nazi for instance, or classical. Standard directed 2 minutes of hate stuff. Whatever is under the rubric of Emmanuel Goldstein will, no doubt be made mandatory to hate, while any act or utterance that diminishes the authority of leftism or Islam will be a “hate crime”.

The most basic sleight of hand of the totalitarian, yet surprisingly to many of us, Astonishingly effective so far.

Postscript:

One of the very first books written in English in the modern era about the consequences of the importation of Islam to Europe and the West, was “While Europe Slept” by Bruce Bawer. It is still, over a decade later, one of the best ‘Red Pill’ books you can get on the subject. Any of you looking for a gift for a friend that would be at least receptive to reality enough to read a book on it, that would be an excellent choice.

UPDATE: Norwegians appear to be burning Korans all over the place now.

Bruce Bawer: The Islamization of Copenhagen

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Front Page Mag:

Bit by bit, it’s getting worse.

In recent years, life in the city of Copenhagen has hardly been free of, shall we say, problems related to Islam. But for the most part, the worst of it has been confined to Muslim neighborhoods such as Nørrebro. And residents of Copenhagen have at least been able to console themselves that conditions in their city were nowhere near as bad as those right across the Øresund Bridge in the now notorious Swedish burg of Malmö

Well, as an editorial in Jyllands-Posten acknowledged last week, “conditions such as those in Malmö…are beginning to appear in Copenhagen.”

In a news story that appeared on the same day as the editorial, Jyllands-Posten reported the latest example of these “conditions”: both the Israeli ambassador to Denmark, Arthur Avnon, and the head of Copenhagen’s Jewish community are now advising Jews in that city to stop wearing yarmulkes and Stars of David and speaking Hebrew loudly in public – even in neighborhoods that they think of as “safe.” Asked about this advice, Police Commissioner Lars-Christian Borg told Jyllands-Posten that Jews – and gays, too – should stay away from parts of the city where there is a recognized “risk of clashes and harassment.” (Nice euphemism for “Muslim neighborhoods,” that.)

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Anti-Wilders Mob Goes Mad

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Front Page Magazine:

October 29, 2012 By 9 Comments

The other day I wrote here about a Norwegian TV documentary – to use the term very loosely – in which Robert Spencer, the consummate Islam critic and expert, was expertly demonized.  The program showed him in Stockholm last summer, addressing an outdoor audience from a platform.  While he stood there in suit and tie, his demeanor entirely calm and reasonable, and delivered his talk – or tried to – a violent mob a few feet away spewed out its venom: “Fucking racists! No racists in our streets!”

Meanwhile a small army of riot police struggled to hold them back. It was not easy.

To look at those faces twisted with hatred – those human beings transformed into ferocious beasts, filled with savage indignation and, by all indications, prepared to tear their fellowman limb from limb – was to stare into the very heart of contemporary Europe’s darkness.  It’s one thing to read about the history of Europe from the storming of the Bastille to the present day; it’s another thing to see the most cataclysmic, psychopathic turning points of the last couple of centuries vividly mirrored, as it were, before one’s eyes.

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Amsterdam Gets a Harsh Lesson in Islam 101

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From Front Page Mag

By Bruce Bawer:

In January 2009 a Dutch court ordered Geert Wilders to be prosecuted for offending Muslims and inciting anti-Muslim hatred.  The complaint was based not on slurs, as such, but on factual statements made by Wilders, in his film Fitna and in various public venues, about Islamic beliefs and about actions inspired by those beliefs.  In June 2011, after a prolonged legal ordeal that cost Wilders greatly in time, money, and emotion, and that represented a disgrace to the tradition of Dutch liberty, he was finally acquitted.

In February of this year, the Islamic Students Association at the Vrije Universiteit (VU) in Amsterdam invited Haitham al-Haddad, a British sharia scholar, to participate in a symposium, but when some of al-Haddad’s sophisticated theological statements about Jews (the usual “pigs and dogs” business) and about other topics came to light, members of the Dutch Parliament spoke out against the invitation, a media storm erupted, and VU canceled its plans.  Whereupon a venue in Amsterdam called De Balie, which sponsors debates, talks, plays, and sundry cultural and artistic events (and whose café is a good spot to grab a late-morning coffee), stepped in and offered al-Haddad their stage.

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Norway Embraces Islamist Tyranny

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Nov 16th by Bruce Bawer.

Please click here for the whole article on Hudson

 

by Bruce Bawer
November 16, 2011 at 5:00 am
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Anti-Semitism in Norway, where I have lived for twelve years, is over the top. I have never quite gotten used to it. Every now and then I hear or read something that reminds me that I am living in Europe, in a country that was occupied by the Nazis, and where a lot of people were perfectly okay with that. I think it is fair to say that anti-Semitism in Norway is most virulent among the cultural elite – the academics, intellectuals, writers, journalists, politicians, and technocrats – although thanks to the media and schools, it has trickled down to many ordinary Norwegians, some of whom may never even have met a Jewish person.

This anti-Semitism manifests itself in various ways. When Obama became president, former Norwegian prime minister Kåre Willoch said things did not look promising because Obama had “chosen a Jew as chief of staff.” The chief rabbi of the Oslo synagogue reportedly receives a pile of hate mail every day. During the Gaza War, a major Norwegian newspaper had trouble finding Norwegian Jews who were willing to comment on the record about the war: they said they were scared of repercussions. Norwegian academics have sought to ban contacts with Israeli universities. Norwegian activists have encouraged boycotts of Israeli products. There is terrible anti-Semitic bullying in the schools. Every so often, a high-profile professor or activist or famous author will write a virulent op-ed or give an angry speech denouncing Israel and insulting Jews. Nothing could be safer for them to say; no one will seek to harm them physically or otherwise – as opposed to what would happen if, say, they made certain public statements about Islam. And they know this. Norway’s most respected newspaper cartoonist, Finn Graff, who has admitted that he never draws cartoons about Islam because he is scared for his life, has frequently drawn cartoons comparing Israelis to Nazis; he knows Jews will never harm him. These anti-Semitic op-eds and speeches and cartoons are never remotely fresh, witty, or original; all they ever do is recycle tired cultural-elite clichés. And their creators get nothing but praise from their colleagues, who celebrate them as courageous truth-tellers. It is much more acceptable to scream “kill the Jews” at an anti-Israeli protest than it is to criticize Hamas. Continue Reading →

Oslo’s Epidemic of Rape

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From Front Page Magazine

By Bruce Bawer

 

 

 

 

 

Posted By Bruce Bawer On October 28, 2011 @ 12:16 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 49 Comments

 

Back in May it was reported that every rape assault in the city of Oslo in the last five years had been committed by a person with a “non-Western” background – a Norwegian euphemism for Muslim.  Now it turns out that there have already been twice as many rape assaults in Oslo so far this year as there were in all of 2010.   At least one member of Parliament, André Oktay Dahl of the Conservative Party, calls the situation “critical” and is brave enough to acknowledge that many of the perpetrators come from cultures “with a reprehensible attitude toward women.”

The Conservative Party has proposed several measures to combat what is being described as a rape epidemic: more money for the police; more police in the streets and doing investigations; faster results from DNA tests; the introduction of volunteer auxiliary police.  There is something to be said for these proposals.  Policing in Norway is a scandal.  This summer it was reported that police departments all over Norway were so short-handed that they were unequipped to deal with the armies of drunks staggering home from bars on weekends after closing time.  It was also reported that only fourteen of 430 new graduates of Norway’s police academy had been offered jobs.

The scandalous fact is that Norway, for all its wealth, has chosen not to invest overmuch in law and order.  The very idea is simply too reactionary-sounding for the ’68-ers and their heirs in the political and bureaucratic corridors of power.  As I wrote elsewhere a few months ago, “Norway wastes millions of kroner ever year on ‘development aid’ that ends up largely in the pockets of corrupt African dictators; it pours millions more into the pockets of non-Western immigrants who have become masters at exploiting the welfare system; for heaven’s sake, the Norwegian government even funds anarchists.  It’s not entirely misguided for a Norwegian citizen to feel that his tax money is going less to fight the crime that threatens his home, his self, and his business than to support criminals.”

So Norway needs more cops – there’s no question about that.  At the same time, beefing up the police force wouldn’t even begin to address the problem that’s at the root of the country’s growing rape crisis: the presence in Norway, and especially in Oslo, of ever-growing numbers of people who have nothing but contempt for Western culture, who have absolutely no concept of respect for members of religions other than their own, and who have been brought up on the idea that women who dare to walk the street alone and without veils covering their faces deserve to be violated.

Not so very many years ago, Oslo was virtually a rape-free city, inhabited by people who had been brought up on civilized notions of mutual respect and tolerance.  No longer.  Over the years, the incidence of rape has risen steadily.  A wildly disproportionate number of the perpetrators are “rejected asylum seekers” – which may sound puzzling unless you are aware of the perverse state of affairs whereby even persons officially rejected for asylum in Norway are still allowed to stay.  And the increasing temerity of the rapists – who know very well that they will probably not be caught, and, if caught, will not be severely punished – is reflected in the fact that the most recent rape (in which two men assaulted a 21-year-old woman) took place virtually in the backyard of the Royal Palace.

For the rest please click through to Front Page Mag

 

Bruce Bawer: A Double Tragedy for Norway

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From Pajamas Media:

 

A Double Tragedy for Norway

Not only has it lost almost one hundred people to a senseless rampage, but legitimate criticism of Islam has been profoundly discredited by association with a murderous lunatic. Also read: Can the Left Resist the Temptation to Exploit the Norway Attacks?

July 23, 2011 – 2:35 pm – by Bruce Bawer

Living in Oslo during the past few years, I passed the government buildings downtown almost every day. I lived right up the road from them, only a five-minute walk; they were my gateway to downtown Oslo. Very often, when I looked over at these structures in which, I knew, the prime minister and all of the cabinet ministries had their offices, I shook my head in wonder at the utter lack of visible security. Almost never did I see a single armed — or even unarmed — guard. (The only exceptions were on the rare occasion when a blizzard of foreign flags and a motorcade parked on the sidewalk indicated that some president or prime minister was visiting from abroad.)

This lack of security was certainly not unusual for Norway, where the police don’t carry guns, and where the very idea of police carrying guns is widely looked upon as some holdover from an earlier stage of human evolution. But — hello — in front of the main office buildings of a Western European government? After 9/11? It seemed sheer madness. In recent weeks, passing grim-faced soldiers with machine guns at Amsterdam airport, and then outside the New York Stock Exchange, I thought immediately of those vulnerable-looking government buildings in Oslo.

When I first heard the news of the explosions at those buildings, my first thought, of course, was that it was a jihadist attack. But it wasn’t: it was a right-wing lunatic. It wasn’t jihad. It was a meaningless killing spree by a madman, like the ones at Columbine and Virginia Tech. A headline in one Norwegian newspaper today noted that the death toll in Oslo and at Utøya yesterday was higher than at Columbine and Virginia Tech combined. The Norwegian media have always reported on mass murders by lone gunmen in the U.S. as if they were things that could never happen in Norway: rather, they were symptoms of a sick society that Norwegians could never possibly understand. In Norway, they use the term “amerikanske tilstander” — American conditions. It never means anything good. Yesterday’s nightmare, from a Norwegian perspective, was the most American of American conditions.

Those of us who thought, in the first hours after the blasts in downtown Oslo, that we were witnessing yet another act of jihad can be forgiven. In a way, it made sense. 9/11, London, Madrid, Beslan, Bali, Mumbai — why not Oslo? Then again…Norway, although a member of NATO with troops in Afghanistan and Libya, was not exactly in the forefront of the struggle to defeat jihad. On the contrary.  Norway calls itself “the peace country.” For years, the Norwegian government and cultural establishment have striven to communicate to even the most extreme elements of international Islam that they want to be friends.  They’ve shown their good faith in a number of ways:

They’ve made a great show of treating Jews very shabbily. Jostein Gaarder, author of the international bestseller Sophie’s World, published an op-ed a few years back declaring his contempt for Israel and the Jewish people. When Gaarder came in for some criticism, many high-profile members of the Norwegian cultural elite rushed to stand shoulder to shoulder with him. If the cultural elite in Norway is more anti-Semitic than its counterparts in any other country in Europe, it has a great deal to do with the recognition that the more you like the Jews, the more you’ll antagonize the Muslims.

For the rest of this article please click through to Pajamas Media

Meanwhile, here is the video of Bruce Bawer speaking on Islam and it’s effects on Western Liberal democracy in Europe in Ottawa 2009

Thanks Snaphanen for sending me this

Bruce Bawer & Hege Storhaug in Ottawa on June 8, 2011

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June 8, 2011, 7 PM
Library and Archives Canada
395 Wellington
Admission $20 ($10 for students/seniors)

Please join us for an amazing evening when Bruce Bawer returns to Ottawa with his colleague Hege Storhaug to speak on the problems of immigration in Europe.

Hege Storhaug is the information director of Human Rights Service in Norway and the author of several books on immigration and integration, forced marriage, women in Pakistan, and related subjects.

Bruce Bawer is an internationally-acclaimed author, whose recent book is “Surrender: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom”. and here are some short reviews:

“Bruce Bawer has yet again written an excellent book….I truly hope that it will serve as an eye-opener for everyone.”
Geert Wilders

“Written with an urgency and clarity that makes it hard to stop reading and re-reading it. It should be studied by all who wish to understand the forces at work in the West that make an Islamic ‘House of Peace’ a brewing nightmare.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Bruce has translated Hege’s new book, “But the Greatest of These Is Freedom: The Consequences of Immigration in Europe.”

The authorized English translation of the explosive Norwegian bestseller about the consequences of immigration in Europe.

From Norwegian and Danish reviews:

“A necessary and brave book.”
Henrik Gade Jensen, JYLLANDS-POSTEN

“A sharp and necessary book, one of the most important of the season.”
Lars Saabye Christensen

“A painful but necessary book to read. It is the most important contribution ever to the Norwegian immigration and integration debate….It should be obligatory reading for everyone who works with foreigners in Norway.”
Tore Andreas Larsen, FREMSKRITT

“If Hege Storhaug’s revelations about how our country and other Western societies are being attacked by Islamic fundamentalists…are not taken seriously by the powerful politicians, we will, within a few years, see a different, illiberal European in which a mentality out of the Middle Ages will wield absolute power…..One of the most important opinion books that have come along in recent years.”
Oddbjørn Solstad, DRAMMENS TIDENDE

Fred Litwin
Free Thinking Film Society
www.freethinkingfilmfest.ca
(613) 261-9060

THE HUMANITARIAN RACIST NORWEGIAN LEFT SMEARS HUMANITARIAN BRUCE BAWER AS A RACIST

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Norway is a Scandinavian Orwellian nightmare, where racism assumes the mantle of humanitarianism, anti-Israelism/Jew hatred is championed by “philosemites”, truth is falsehood and injustice the rule of law.  Norway, having been so thoroughly corrupted over the decades by far Leftist governments, can’t tell the light of Summer’s day from the darkest of Winter’s nights. Simply put, Norway is a gross caricature of a western liberal democracy.

Enter Bruce Bawer. Here’s a man who has championed the rights of women, vocally defended the need to safeguard their rights, and the rights of all citizens of Norway, at the forefront of ensuring that children are not victimized, and yet, he’s being branded a “waycist”. It’s because of his insistence on naming the name “that shall not be mentioned”, the ideology of Islam, as being the prime motivating factor in the victimization of immigrants in Norway.

It’s not ethnic Norwegians who are victimizing young girls with female genital mutilation (FGM) or forcing the women folk, in most cases young girls, to be married, or forcibly keeping their females under lock and key, brutalizing gays or promoting rioting in the streets for whatever grievances real or imagined or overly represented in the crime rate, like in the rape statistics etc..

No, Muslims are the ones guilty of that, and saying so isn’t an act of racism, but the speaking of the truth. So now the Orwellian (and humanitarian racist) Norwegian state has cast its eye upon the next victim, for daring to utter the truth about its society. Finland has Jussi Halla-aho, The Netherlands has Geert Wilders, Austria has Susanne Winter, and now Norway has Bruce Bawer. Let Bruce fill you in on the situation.

H/T Fjordman
When it comes to the right to speak one’s mind about Islam, the record of the last few years makes it clear which direction the West is moving in. In France and Italy, Oriana Fallaci is put on trial for disparaging Islam. In Canada, Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant are hauled before “human rights commission” tribunals for criticizing Islam in print. In Australia, an Islamic organization sues two pastors for “vilification of Muslims.” In Britain, a Daily Telegraph columnist is arrested on charges of hate speech for having written negatively about Islam, and the Archbishop of Canterbury proposes that Parliament pass stronger laws against such speech acts. And in the Netherlands, Geert Wilders, the head of the Freedom Party, which performed so well in the June 9 general elections that Wilders may end up in the governing coalition, still faces trial for having made a film about the Koranic foundations of terrorism.

Then there’s Norway, where I live, and where the last few days have seen yet another dark development. By way of background, permit me to begin by quoting myself. On pages 230-31 of my book Surrender: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom I sum up the more alarming aspects of Norway’s Discrimination Law, passed in 2005:
It forbids “harassment on the grounds of ethnicity, national origin, ancestry, skin color, language, religion, or beliefs,” and, in turn, defines harassment as “actions, omissions, or utterances [my emphasis] that have the effect or are intended to have the effect of being insulting, intimidating, hostile, degrading, or humiliating.”

In other words, it’s illegal just to say certain things.

Defendants may be accused not only by the individuals whom they’ve supposedly offended but also by semiofficial organs such as the Anti-Racist Center and the Center against Ethnic Discrimination (both of which helped formulate the law, and both of which exist less to oppose real racism and discrimination than to oppose political incorrectness generally) or by the government’s Equality and Anti-Discrimination Ombud.

Which means that a handful of far-left organizations have been given enormous power to silence those they disagree with.

Violations of the law by individuals are punishable by fine; violations by individuals in concert with at least two other persons (such as a writer conspiring with an editor and publisher, perhaps?) can be punished by up to three years’ imprisonment — this in a country where murderers often get off with less. Moreover, the burden of proof is on the accused: you’re guilty until proven innocent.

And this in a supposedly free country.

Which brings us to the most recent developments. Over the years, I’ve had a close association with Human Rights Service (HRS), a small Oslo-based foundation that formulates and proposes government policies designed to combat the subjection and abuse of females in Muslim communities. I’ve translated materials for HRS and written pieces in Norwegian for the HRS website. Last fall, after suggesting that HRS expand its site to include articles in English by contributors from around Europe and elsewhere — so that writers from different countries could compare notes, as it were, about their experiences with Islam, immigration, and integration — I began working regularly for HRS, writing, soliciting, and translating pieces for their new international web pages.

Meanwhile HRS was going through a rough patch. Ever since its establishment in 2001, it has been despised by many people on the Norwegian left — the same folks who hate Israel and who feel warmly about Hamas. The two women who run HRS, Hege Storhaug and Rita Karlsen, have labored tirelessly against monstrous practices like honor killing, forced marriage, and female genital mutilation, and for doing so have won the lifelong gratitude of countless Muslim girls and women — but as far as their PC enemies are concerned, to condemn any aspect of Islam is to be an Islamophobe, pure and simple. Last summer, a couple of newspapers, the far-left Dagbladet and the Communist Klassekampen, waged a brutal and breathtakingly mendacious smear campaign against HRS, the obvious intent of which was to bring it down once and for all.

Read it all here.

“And this in a supposedly free country” -Bruce Bawer

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June 15, 2010 Pajamas Media

When it comes to the right to speak one’s mind about Islam, the record of the last few years makes it clear which direction the West is moving in. In France and Italy, Oriana Fallaci is put on trial for disparaging Islam. In Canada, Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant are hauled before “human rights commission” tribunals for criticizing Islam in print. In Australia, an Islamic organization sues two pastors for “vilification of Muslims.” In Britain, a Daily Telegraph columnist is arrested on charges of hate speech for having written negatively about Islam, and the Archbishop of Canterbury proposes that Parliament pass stronger laws against such speech acts.  And in the Netherlands, Geert Wilders, the head of the Freedom Party, which performed so well in the June 9 general elections that Wilders may end up in the governing coalition, still faces trial for having made a film about the Koranic foundations of terrorism.

Then there’s Norway, where I live, and where the last few days have seen yet another dark development. By way of background, permit me to begin by quoting myself.  On pages 230-31 of my book Surrender: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom I sum up the more alarming aspects of Norway’s Discrimination Law, passed in 2005:

It forbids “harassment on the grounds of ethnicity, national origin, ancestry, skin color, language, religion, or beliefs,” and, in turn, defines harassment as “actions, omissions, or utterances [my emphasis] that have the effect or are intended to have the effect of being insulting, intimidating, hostile, degrading, or humiliating.”

In other words, it’s illegal just to say certain things.

Defendants may be accused not only by the individuals whom they’ve supposedly offended but also by semiofficial organs such as the Anti-Racist Center and the Center against Ethnic Discrimination (both of which helped formulate the law, and both of which exist less to oppose real racism and discrimination than to oppose political incorrectness generally) or by the government’s Equality and Anti-Discrimination Ombud.

Which means that a handful of far-left organizations have been given enormous power to silence those they disagree with.

Violations of the law by individuals are punishable by fine; violations by individuals in concert with at least two other persons (such as a writer conspiring with an editor and publisher, perhaps?) can be punished by up to three years’ imprisonment — this in a country where murderers often get off with less. Moreover, the burden of proof is on the accused: you’re guilty until proven innocent.

And this in a supposedly free country.

Please click here for the rest: