Norway still facing Islamist threat: head of populist right

The deadly twin attacks carried out by a rightwing extremist on July 22 should not overshadow the fact that Norway still faces a serious Islamist threat, the head of the populist right Progress Party told AFP yesterday. “All the debates that we had prior to July 22 will come back. All the challenges that Norway was facing and the challenges that the world was facing are still there. Al Qaeda is still there,” insisted Siv Jensen in an interview at her office in parliament. “The new thing is that we have been in a horrible way reminded of the fact that terrorism can come in many different forms, with different rhetorics behind it, with different crazy ideas behind it,” she said. In the five years since she took over as head of the anti-immigration party, Jensen has repeatedly cautioned against the “rampant Islamisation” of Norway, and yesterday she stressed that it was important to remain “aware of the threats that we had before July 22, because they are still there”. Jensen, 42, has however been careful to distance herself from the July 22 killer, Anders Behring Breivik, who described his murderous rampage as part of a “crusade” against Islam and multiculturalism. The 32-year-old targeted the ruling Labour Party, which he blamed for its multicultural policies, first bombing government offices before going on an 80-minute shooting spree on the nearby island of Utoeya, where the party was holding a youth summer camp. The attacks were the deadliest carried out on Norwegian soil since World War II, killing a total of 77 people, many of them teenagers. “I resent everything that he stands for. I resent his actions and will not be associated with this guy. Really, I will not,” Jensen insisted, refusing however to say whether she would tone down her negative rhetoric about Islam. Her anti-immigration party has grown over the past decade to become Norway’s second largest party and counted Behring Breivik as a member between 1999 and 2006. “I was really, really sad, sadder than I already was, when I realised that he had for a certain period of time been a member of my party,” she said, adding though that she had not managed to find anyone who could remember him. “He didn’t take part in any debate, he didn’t make much of himself, he was very quiet and nobody remembers him,” she said. In a message posted on the www.document.no debate forum in 2009, Behring Breivik aired his own grievances with Jensen’s Progress Party, which he said “thirsted to satisfy (society’s) multicultural expectations and the suicidal ideals of humanism”. The party, he said, merely contented itself with “two or three (anti-immigration) declarations before each election to make sure it won over the base”. “We are facing a guy with a very strange mindset and the ability to do horrible things to society,” Jensen said yesterday. In a country where “acts of terrorism” are punishable with no more than 21 years behind bars, the Progress Party has always been an outspoken proponent of harsher penalties. Jensen also distanced herself from Jean-Marie Le Pen, the former head of France’s National Front party, who wrote last week that the Norwegian government’s “naivety” was to blame for the mass killing. “As long as I’ve followed international politics, I’ve always resented everything that Monsieur Le Pen and his party have advocated,” Jensen said. In the aftermath of the attacks, Norway’s political parties have laid aside their differences in a show of national solidarity despite looming local elections on September 12. Jensen, who usually never misses an opportunity to butt heads with Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg, even had rare words of praise for the government chief. “Prime Minister Stoltenberg is someone that I fight verbally every day, but during this period of time, he’s also been my prime minister,” she said. But while Stoltenberg has been widely hailed for his handling of the crisis and has seen his Labour Party soar in the polls, Jensen’s Progress Party has seen support dwindle for some time. Opinion “polls go up, they go down and they change”, Jensen argued. “The important thing is not polls, the important thing is the election.”