Norge
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The Tragic Tale Of Ethnic Europeans Now Bullied In Schools By Muslim Gangs In Norway.
Over the past few weeks, Finansavisen [Financial Newspaper] has focused on immigration and its economic consequences. We have commented on several of these previously. Last weekend the journalists Kjell Erik Eilertsen, Ole Asbjřrn Ness and the photographer Iván Kverme left behind their calculators and computers and met with some of the individuals who are growing up in the new Norway. They decided to focus on the youngsters, Norwegian boys, who are growing up in the most immigrant-dense area of Norway — Groruddalen [Grorud valley] in Oslo. And they have produced an article that other media would probably refuse to print.
Groruddalen is an area that covers four neighborhoods: Stovner, Alna, Grorud and Bjerke. All the neighborhoods have an immigrant population approaching 50 percent.
Finansavisen has made contact with two young boys in the “valley”. One of them, Marius Sřrvik, has decided to go public, and his name and picture appear in the newspaper. The other one has decided to remain anonymous. Finansavisen refers to him as “Andreas”. One boy was interviewed twice and the other one on three occasions. They were given copies of the article to read through before it was published, and confirmed that they have been quoted correctly. In addition to this Andreas’ father has read the article and given the newspaper the approval to publish his son’s story.
Two different worlds in 35 minutes
When the decision to travel to Groruddalen was finally made, Finansavisen decided that the journalists should travel there in the manner that most of the youths choose, namely by riding the subway train. The trip from Smestad to Stovner takes approximately 35 minutes, according to Finansavisen, and I guess that during the journey they were shown two different worlds.
When they arrive in Stovner, they hear the voice of “Andreas”:
“A few weeks ago,” he says, “I was entering the schoolyard. They were attacking Lars. There’s a whole heap of them. They always attack as a group. They are dogs, they hunt in packs. They are beating him up. I run in between them and I punch one of them. Then someone comes rushing to and separates us, and yet again I’m being hauled off to the principal’s office, and yet again I am being told that even if they punch us we are not supposed to retaliate. Do you know how insanely provocative such a statement is?”
Finansavisen‘s description of Andreas leaves no room for doubt:
He is sixteen. He is angry. He’s scared. He is brave. He is tired. He wants to tell. He’s got the face of a boy and the eyes of a man.
“I would have gone public with my full identity had it not been for the fact that I have younger siblings. People need to realize what it is like to grow up here,” he says.
Home is a place somewhere in Groruddalen. That’s where he grew up. He spends one week at his mother’s place and the next one at his father’s place. His stepfather is nice. His father is great. His mother is great, but naďve.
That is not the problem. This area is what’s the problem.
“My mum told me that it would be good for me to grow up here. I would get to know the new Norway, get to know different cultures.”
Then we are introduced to Marius Sřrvik.
He is nineteen. He is articulate. He is brave. He’s scared. He is weak. He is successful. He has dropped out of school. He has a beard. He is too young to have beard. He is pretty in the eyes of young girls. He is only 19, but he has made four movies. He earns money. Right now he is staying with his mum.
He came to Groruddalen from Fredrikstad when he was one year old. Soon he’ll move back to Fredrikstad.
“They are to be pitied”
The boys have difficulties defining themselves, “the others” and animal metaphors are often used:
They both belong to an animal species that is rapidly diminishing in Groruddalen. They do what all animals do: Come up with survival strategies. Trying to find a way to show off their feathers in all its glory, run and hide when they are outnumbered.
Human nature: The wish to retaliate: revenge, vengeance, one day they might be the strongest, and not be outnumbered. Them. Against them. The others. Strangers with Norwegian passports. The ones they were told to be considerate of when they attended elementary school. Their species has as of yet not been officially labelled. For want of a better term, we chose to use the term that Marius uses to describe himself, a young ethnic Norwegian male.
“All the teachers told me, the principal told me, if I had an altercation with them I had to understand that they were to be pitied, that they came from countries where there had been war. I thought that he was joking. Their grandparents emigrated from Pakistan. So if I hit someone no one would scold me because my grandfather had been a member of the Norwegian Resistance Movement? But I believed in it.”
Duped by the school
The elementary school in Groruddalen is a pleasant experience for both of them in the beginning. They sing the songs, they believe in the songs, they live the songs. Then it starts to sound false, the childhood comes to an end, fifth grade:
“You discover who you are,” says Andreas.
“People are different; everything you have learned in school is wrong,” says Marius.
You have the ethnic Norwegian boys, and then there are the others. Faced with these two choices, the two boys chose different strategies:
Marius’ strategy
He doesn’t lower his head. He refuses to take any crap. He answers back. He’s loudmouthed. He is who he is. It does not matter. But that’s not why they target him. It is an autumn evening in seventh grade. He is playing tennis. When he leaves the court to collect some tennis balls they appear. They are seven or eight Somalis. The beat the crap out of him, he has to get new teeth put in.
Marius doesn’t slow down. He calls a Roma girl a gypsy, something that isn’t appreciated. When her brothers and cousins come for him, he hides in the principal’s office. It has begun.
Andreas’ strategy
He lowers his gaze, he wants to be like them, talk like them, he alters his language, limits his vocabulary, makes deliberate spelling mistakes — ‘an school’, kebab-Norwegian, buys a soft gun, wants to be like the older, tougher, cool Pakistani guys that have cars and money and no job, why not become a Muslim, become a brother?
He wants to be like them, but he doesn’t become like them, something inside him is resisting.
Fragments: the bad grades in the Norwegian classes, the bad friends, Islam, he notices how they view women, as an object, how they react when he tries to discuss Islam with them, how they talk about respect, but don’t show any respect, how they refer to Norwegians as f***ing Norwegians, whitey, potato; something inside him resists.
He withdraws. They notice that he withdraws. Then it starts.
Constant fear
We learn about the suffering of Marius:
He heads off to school an hour before it starts in the morning. He heads home before it finishes in the afternoon. More episodes, more threats. Fear is not an isolated event, but rather a continuous stream.
In tenth grade he goes to see the doctor and lies about having social anxiety. He is given a medical certificate so he can spend as little time as possible in school. He’s scared. Says that they always come in packs. Says that they always stare when he sees them on the subway when there are twenty of them, and when he gets a girlfriend they cry out to him:
“‘Hey Marius have you got yourself a girlfriend,’ and it’s not the words that are threatening, but the way they are being uttered, do you understand, how they look at me and my girlfriend who starts to cry, do you understand?”
NRK’s “concept” of “our valley”
We are being told that Marius’ fears have subsided, although they can still return:
It has been three years since he graduated from high school. He can still feel a twinge of fear whenever he meets the gangs on the subway, but he doesn’t give a ****, he has made four movies, he says what he thinks, he is who he is, the valley is what it is, he writes op-eds about life in Groruddalen and gets them published in VG and Dagsavisen, he is only nineteen but he has already had a heart attack and he has been interviewed twice by the producers of the Norwegian TV series ‘Dalen Vĺr’ [‘Our Valley’], Elisabeth Brun (see separate article) to find out if his story fitted in with the story about Groruddalen.
It did not.
“Your views do not fit in with our concept,” she said. That TV series is state-funded propaganda. A documentary where the angle has been determined in advance is no documentary, but a half-mockumentary where they have full control of what is being said. If you are going to tell a story about what a great place Groruddalen is, then you can’t talk to young ethnic Norwegian boys, because most of them will tell you that it is a horrible place.
Worried about murders
Andreas is also suffering, despite attempts at hiding it as much as possible:
He has withdrawn into himself, although he still has a Muslim friend from a very religious family. Let’s call him Omar. He tries to persuade Andreas to become Muslim. Omar tells him about the judgment and the hell that awaits all those who refuse to submit to Islam in time. Omar tells him that he needs to stop enjoying life, but rather prepare himself for the next life. Forsake. But Andreas says that he is wary of Islam; actually it’s more than that: he doesn’t like Islam, not the strictness, vengefulness, its view of women, all the talk about the chastity of women, hijab, not because they want to but because they have to.
They discuss. The discussions descend into verbal altercations.
“He told me that he was going to kill me. I threatened him back.”
Andreas allies himself with ethnic Norwegians in the motorcycle community for protection, a 1% club.
“Had it not been for them he would have killed me.”
Cowardly Muslims
Andreas doesn’t deny that he’s still scared. That he lift weights to gain strength. He also says that he’s contemplating carrying a knife, but that he fears the police knife controls. He says that he’s made deals with his friends, that they will all stand up for each other. Friends who also lift weights and that are into martial arts.
“Muslims don’t fight you on a one-to-one basis. If you meet them alone they are cowards. If I run into Omar alone, he will just walk past me. If I am alone and meet him in a crowd, the best outcome I can hope for is a beating.”
Marius has lifted his gaze. Now he can start to analyze it all.
“There is a hierarchy, where ethnic Norwegian boys are on the bottom rung on the ladder. They will be targeted unless they accede to their rules, if they don’t they become Norwegian immigrants. If a Norwegian boy gets into trouble, odds are that he has a small family and a tiny social network. Unlike a Pakistani or Somali boy, he doesn’t have a clan of brothers and cousins and uncles who come rushing to his aid in the event of a conflict. Most of the time the only thing he has is a single parent.”
Norwegian is weakness, Norwegian culture is on the way out
Andreas believes that the Norwegian culture is being squeezed out.
“Nobody wants to be a Norwegian here. Norwegian is synonymous with weakness. This is a feeling that is also being conveyed by the teachers.
“They are afraid. They don’t dare to speak out. You should have a look at the number of principals that have come and gone at Vestliveien school in recent years, and ask them why they left. They don’t have control, but they do everything to accommodate the Muslim students. In home economics classes everybody has to prepare halal meat. Immigrants do not have to attend ‘NyNorsk’ classes [literally New-Norwegian, which is a different dialect and a different way to write Norwegian — there are two forms of written Norwegian]. I have to attend these classes. The Muslim girls do not have to attend the physical activity classes; because of course they cannot undress in front of other girls. We have to adapt to their culture. They don’t have to adapt to ours.”
Andreas’ views on girls:
“There is one thing that annoys the hell out of me. They can start chasing Norwegian girls, but we cannot go after theirs. It’s something you learn early on. You just don’t go after a Pakistani girl, but Norwegian girls are available to immigrant boys. Norwegian girls prefer them. I don’t know why. I guess it must be that brown skin. That they are tough, that they have money despite not having jobs. They don’t see that they fight in packs, that they are cowards. I asked my best female friend if we could get romantically involved, and she told me that I have the right personality, but the problem was that I’m Norwegian. She wants to become involved with a foreigner.”
He believes that Oslo will eventually become Oslostan.
“It’s not going to happen straightaway, but it that’s the way its going. More and more Muslims arrive here from abroad, and many Norwegians convert. Personally I know of five converts. Here it’s all about Islam; Islam is strong, so why fight it?”
The betrayal and the silence
Andreas says that he feels betrayed. And his conversation with the journalists from Finansavisen is the first time that adults let him speak freely, the first time that he doesn’t have to hold back and place restrictions on himself. He says that he wants to become an actor. He wants to make a movie. Maybe a movie about the real “our valley”. He says that he wants to join the HV youth (the youth division of the National Guard). “He wants the uniform. He craves the authority that a uniform gives. No one messes with a soldier.”
Finansavisen’s reporters suggest that adolescence can be tough for everybody, and they wonder how much of it is actually about growing up in the valley and how much is trauma that many adolescents experience, such as differentness, loneliness and exclusion. They even ask them if they are paranoid — if there really is something to be afraid of. Maybe they have deliberately isolated themselves and gone into hiding and started worshipping imaginary horrors that have replaced reality?
The boys’ response is laughter:
They laugh. They smile. The journalists have not understood.
“It is not imagination when they shout after me, when they threaten me, when they hit me,” says Andreas.
“Are you afraid to walk around alone?”
“I’m not. Not any more,” says Marius.
“There are many places that I don’t go alone. Especially at night,” says Andreas.
We follow Andreas to the subway station.
“Do you see?” he says, and guides our attention to two immigrants. “Do you see how they stare back?”
He’s right. They do stare. We lower our gaze first.
Once again we hear the animal metaphors that permeates their language:
“They are like cats, says Andreas — cats never back down. They challenge you. I get so f***ing mad.”
The subway train arrives. We get on. After a few stop Andreas gets off. We lean back in our seats and try to let the rattle of the train carriage rock us into a kind of sleep. But sleep doesn’t come.
The subway ride from Stovner to Smestad takes approximately 35 minutes.
Epilogue: After having read the draft, Marius gave us a call.
“You can delete the statement that I can walk around safely.”
“Why?”
“I got beat up on the way home from the pub yesterday.”
http://gatesofvienna.net/2013/05/eve...ng/#more-28355
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Originally Posted by CircassianWine
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