The weight of words: the freedom of expression debate in Norway

Abstract

A confluence of interests and forces among Norwegian political, media and legal elites since the Rushdie affair and the ‘Mohammed cartoon crisis’ have created conditions in which minority protections against racist and discriminatory speech as guaranteed by Norwegian law, and Norwegian obligations under international law, have been rendered all but ineffective – in the name of stronger protections for freedom of expression. In the event, Islamophobia and anti-Muslim racism have not only often gone unchallenged, but have been amplified and disseminated both through the extreme rightwing presence on the internet, and in mainstream and respected Norwegian print media. The ideology of Anders Breivik, perpetrator of the massacre of 22/7/2011, was not isolated, but forms part of a larger and by many accounts growing phenomenon. Successive government commissions on freedom of expression in Norway have only exacerbated this tendency. This article explores the philosophical and political underpinnings of the freedom of expression debate in Norway and warns about the threat to liberal democracy and equal citizenship from the sanitising and mainstreaming of virulent far-right racism and extremism.

Keywords

22/7/2011 anti-Muslim racism Breivik cartoon crisis Fjordman freedom of expression hate speech Islamophobia John Stuart Mill Norwegian media Rushdie affair

In late-modern Norway, it appears that nothing is more sacred than freedom of speech. In a representative sample taken from a 2010 poll, 96.1 per cent of Norwegians agreed that freedom of expression characterised Norwegian society to a ‘very high’ or ‘high’ degree and it was ranked far higher than any other characteristic of Norwegian society, such as, for example, socio-economic or gender equality,¹ seeming to indicate that freedom of expression has become a central doxa in Norway, or part of that ‘which goes without saying’.²

Key media editors pre-22/7/2011 (the Breivik massacre) declared with pride that they were freedom of expression fundamentalists (ytringsfrihetsfundamentalister). With reference to both the Rushdie affair (1988–1994) and the cartoon crisis (2005–2006), those in Norway who argue that there are definite limits to freedom of expression under international human rights conventions have been accused of wanting to exempt ‘religions’, particularly Islam, from a ‘critique of religion’ with reference to either blasphemy laws or the so-called ‘defamation of religion’. This is a ‘slippery slope’ argument, most famously advanced by the late legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin (1931–2013), in which ‘a purpose to protect human beings’ turns into a ban on criticising ‘any belief’.³

The existing legal protections against racist and/or discriminatory speech are ultimately aimed at protecting individuals, not groups.⁴ Norway, like most other western countries, upholds such restrictions on freedom of expression. While these restrictions comprise legal protections, they offer no protection whatsoever against ‘insult’, ‘blasphemy’ or the dubious concept of ‘defamation of religion’. This is something that is often confused even among specialist academics. It is not, and cannot be the duty of a liberal and democratic state to protect individuals or groups against feelings of ‘offence’, which, after all, may arise from the flimsiest of pretexts.⁵ This distinction is in fact well established in Norwegian law as well as in the practice of the Norwegian Supreme Court. The blasphemy provisions of the Norwegian Penal Code, § 142, which make it a criminal act to ‘by word or deed publicly insult or show contempt for any creed whose practice in the realm [of Norway] is permitted’, while still on the statute books, have not been used since the 1930s. In terms of the application of the so-called ‘racism’ paragraph § 135 (a) of the Norwegian General Penal Code, the Norwegian Supreme Court has in fact since 1981 maintained a distinction between ‘defamatory’ speech against ‘religion’ and racist and/or discriminatory speech against individuals.

Dworkin, a strong defender of US First Amendment interpretations of freedom of speech in their most absolutist formulations, contended that since free expression is a necessary condition of political legitimacy in any democratic society, we risk unduly interfering with political legitimacy and undermining liberal democracy if free expression is curtailed. In his view, the right to ‘shock, mock and ridicule’ is to be upheld more or less without regard to the consequences. At a New York Review of Books/Fritt Ord Conference on ‘Challenges to Multiculturalism’ at Literature House in Oslo, approximately one year after 22/7, Dworkin asserted that the incidence of hate crimes in the US had fallen in recent decades, as well as in countries in Europe that had no legislation against ‘hate speech’ or in which such legislation was not applied. The implication for Dworkin was that the best remedy against hate crimes is for a state to abandon legal protections against ‘hate speech’. There are a number of problems with such an assertion. First, in most countries, we do not have anything like a reliable historical statistical baseline for diachronic comparisons of hate crimes. In Norway, police authorities have only registered and published data on such crimes since late 2006, after gay rights groups brought public attention to the phenomenon.⁶ Since published police records on the incidence of hate crimes in Oslo began in 2007, there have been more hate crimes targeting individuals on the basis of their ethnicity and/or religion than hate crimes targeting individuals on the basis of their non-heterosexual orientation, yet in the mainstream Norwegian media, the latter receive by far the most attention.⁷ In 2010, the Oslo Police admitted, in its report on hate crimes in the capital, that due to lack of knowledge about the existence of this reporting category of crime, it is likely that a number of such crimes are not registered by police as hate crimes, so they may be underreported. Second, a problem with using statistics on the incidence of hate crimes as a basis for comparisons within, as well as between, nation-state jurisdictions is the variation and inconsistency not only in what is categorised as a ‘hate crime’, but also in police registration of such crimes. Moreover, the propensity for victimised individuals to report hate crimes varies a great deal between and within different national contexts, rendering cross-country comparisons virtually impossible.

It has become commonplace in Norway to argue that the strong presence of rightwing populists in democratic arenas (locally and nationally) has functioned as a ‘safety valve’ preventing greater levels of extreme rightwing violence in Norwegian society. Academic proponents of this hypothesis (never proven as such) often refer to the work of the Dutch-German political scientist Ruud Koopmans, who, basing his conclusions on findings from Austria and Germany in the 1990s, argued that the presence of radical rightwing parties actually reduced the potential for extreme rightwing and racist violence.⁸ Yet the available research on the subject is by no means conclusive.⁹ In Norway, the number of reported racist incidents rose from 140 per annum in 1987 (when the Progress Party made its electoral breakthrough) to 200 per annum in the following ten years, arguably lending more credence to the view that populist rightwingers may act more as ‘voice amplifiers’ than as a ‘safety valve’.¹⁰

Freedom of expression in contemporary Norway occupies a privileged place in a hierarchy of ranked human rights. In an interview with a Norwegian newspaper a mere week after 22/7, the chair of the influential Norwegian Freedom of Expression Foundation Fritt Ord, Georg Fredrik Rieber Mohn, a former Norwegian attorney-general and magistrate in the Supreme Court, stated that ‘freedom of expression was, in a certain sense, supra-ordinate to other human rights’.¹¹ A similar view has been articulated by a former op-ed editor at Aftenposten, and since October 2013 secretary to the Minister of Culture from the Conservative Party (Høyre) Knut Olav Åmås.¹²

But such a hierarchy does not in fact exist in the conventions and treaties concerning human rights. The United Nations Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) 1948, The European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) 1950 and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) 1966 all give great leeway for individual states to define their own legal and social parameters for freedom of expression and its limits. Furthermore, academics who have in recent years studied and analysed the practice of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) in Strasbourg have concluded that in cases concerning hate speech and freedom of expression, the Court often invokes the principle of individual states’ ‘margin of appreciation’.¹³ This gives states bound by the ECHR and the findings of the ECtHR room to define for themselves which kinds of hate speech they want to deem liable to criminal punishment, with reference to each state’s own historical and societal context.¹⁴

From their position of privilege, Norwegian liberal media editors more often than not appear to hold virtually absolutist positions on freedom of expression. But a quantitative survey from 2013 points to a disconnect between such elites and the population at large on this issue. In a report commissioned by the Fritt Ord Foundation, liberal media editors and some newspaper reporters¹⁵ must have seen evidence of their own failure to ‘civilise’ the Norwegian general public into holding the same absolutist conceptions of freedom of expression as themselves. For only 21 per cent of this nationally representative sample considered freedom of expression to be the primary aim that Norway should pursue in the next ten years. Fifty-seven per cent of those surveyed considered upholding law and order to be the country’s overriding aim. And 89 and 90 per cent respectively considered that incitement to violence or threats against individuals and groups should be punishable under law; 73 per cent considered surveillance of individuals holding extreme views to be acceptable; and 36 and 32 per cent respectively of those surveyed considered it acceptable to limit the rights of religious extremists and racists to hold open public meetings and demonstrations.¹⁶

While various forms of racist and/or discriminatory speech directed at Muslims and other minorities in Norway appear to have continued unabated after 22/7 and, according to some accounts, have worsened,¹⁷ as have threats against politicians and public intellectuals on the internet,¹⁸ the mainstream media’s attention to and moderation of hate speech in newspaper discussion forums, whether on the internet or in print, has seen some modest improvement. Aftenposten’s former, highly influential, op-ed editor, Knut Olav Åmås, had argued in August 2011 after the 22/7 terror attacks, that the limit to freedom of expression was ‘racism, hatred directed against individuals and groups, as well as incitement to criminal acts and violence’.¹⁹ Åmås here seems to endorse the view that as long as contributors of op-ed pieces to Aftenposten do not explicitly advocate racist views and incite violence in the present, then their past and consistent record of doing so matters little. It is therefore not surprising that Aftenposten went on to facilitate the debut of Anders Behring Breivik’s main ideological inspiration, Peder Are ‘Fjordman’ Nøstvold Jensen as an op-ed contributor to Norway’s largest and most influential newspaper in April 2013, in a piece in which ‘Fjordman’ proclaimed that ‘the media attempts to scare people [like me] to silence by stigmatising [brennmerke] certain opinions which the ruling elites disapprove of’.²⁰ In the years preceding 22/7, the same ‘Fjordman’ had propagated racist and Islamophobic views, called upon Europeans to ‘arm themselves’ against Muslims and recommended ethnic cleansing against Muslims on various extreme rightwing websites.

In recent years, extreme and populist rightwingers in Norway and Europe have found common cause with Islamists in turning away from social tolerance and advancing conceptions of unrestrained freedom of expression. Neither tendency is necessarily consistent in supporting unrestrained freedom of expression, though. For whereas many Islamists want to prohibit forms of speech deemed offensive to Muslims through law or a resort to violence and intimidation, extreme and/or populist rightwingers have argued for banning the Qur’an (Geert Wilders in the Netherlands), prohibiting Lutheran Christian bishops from criticising Norwegian asylum policies or withdrawing state support from anti-racist civil society organisations. It is in this polarised social climate that both trends reap support and legitimacy. The aim of racist and/or discriminatory speech, whether it be directed against Muslims, Jews, the Roma, gays or women, is to undermine the assurance that such individuals are entitled to enjoy a degree of equality in a liberal and democratic society. It also serves to provide a focal point for the proliferation and co-ordination of the social attitudes and behaviour expressed in and through such speech; an invitation to others to join forces and demonstrate that they are not alone in their bigotry.²¹

It has become something of a liberal platitude to cite the great US Supreme Court Judge Brandeis to the effect that the answer to ‘hate speech’ is ‘more speech’. This raises the question of whether one expects those targeted, threatened or vilified by such speech to engage in ‘counter-speech’ regardless of the circumstances. For racist and/or discriminatory speech is not, per se, motivated by any attempt to further the cause of democratic deliberation: ‘Racist speech does not function as an invitation to conversation. It does not offer reasons or arguments with which its audience can engage; and the visceral hostility it expresses effectively forecloses, rather than opens, the opportunity for further discussion.’²²

Empirical research on the responses to ‘hate speech’ by the targets of such speech in the public sphere suggests that individuals are unlikely to respond with ‘counter-speech’ since they often fear that, if they respond, the consequence may be violence.²³ Take, as an example, a recent case of ‘hate speech’ directed against a Norwegian Muslim which illustrates the problems that the remedy of ‘more speech’ or ‘counter-speech’ simply fails to address.

In November 2012, a young Norwegian convert to Islam, Per Yousef Bartho Assidiq, who for some years had been active in Norwegian media debates, reported various Facebook posts that he had received from ‘white’ Norwegian rightwingers. In the posts, Muslims like himself were referred to as ‘vermin’ (skadedyr), ‘rats’ (rotter), and the Norwegian government as ‘quislings’. As for himself, he was warned that he would one day be ‘fucked in the arse (rævpult) well and thoroughly before we throw you to the pigs’. After the Oslo police failed even to open an investigation into the threats, Assidiq posted a selection of the Facebook posts on his personal blog and also recounted his story in a newspaper where he reiterated the threats, abuse and intimidation he had been exposed to. My own research into young Norwegian Muslims who are active in the media and the blogosphere suggests that Assidiq’s experiences are far from unique.²⁴ Unlike Assidiq, however, many young Norwegian Muslims refrain from active media engagement, precisely to avoid the prospect of similar harassment and, intimidated by threats received on these sites, a number of active participants have withdrawn into relative silence.

Far-right organisations have consciously chosen to use the media to disseminate their views and influence public opinion. And this, in part, was made possible by the increasing commercialisation of the Norwegian media in the 1980s and 1990s; the development of a largely unregulated blogosphere in the 1990s and 2000s; the media saturation of the high-profile Rushdie affair in Norway from 1989 to 1994; followed by the ‘Mohammed cartoon crisis’ of 2005–2006. These developments were not just local or national but global, and cannot be understood in isolation, particularly from developments in Scandinavia and Europe.

Actual cases concerning racist and discriminatory speech coming before the Norwegian Supreme Court have shown a certain inconsistency in the application of the relevant law (§135 (a) of the Norwegian General Penal Code). But of these, the acquittal in 2002 of Norwegian neo-Nazi leader of Boot Boys, Terje Sjølie, for anti-Semitic and anti-immigrant statements appears important in terms of the precedent it set. A divided Norwegian Supreme Court concluded that freedom of expression overrode guarantees of protection against hate speech for minorities. At that time, the Norwegian attorney-general, Tor-Aksel Busch, who prosecuted the case, warned that the verdict would set precedents with regard to Norwegian minorities’ protection against racist and discriminatory speech; not so much in terms of the actual application of the law by the courts as in the number of subsequent reports to police and prosecutions under § 135 (a). Hate crimes in Norway are – as elsewhere – underreported and victims of such crimes are known to sometimes be reluctant to report such crimes to the police.

The Sjølie verdict came under strong criticism from both the UN CERD Committee and the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI), leading, along with the recommendations of a Government Commission on Legal Protection Against Ethnic Discrimination in 2002, to a number of changes to anti-discrimination and anti-racism legislation. In 2005, the maximum penalty for crimes under § 135 (a) was increased from two to three years’ imprisonment; gross negligence (rather than actual intent) became sufficient in order to penalise racist and/or discriminatory speech; it was no longer necessary that statements of a nature which infringed upon § 135 (a) be made in public; and not only hate speech, but also actions, could be penalised. In the revision of the Norwegian General Penal Code in general adopted by Parliament in 2009, it was decided that § 135 (a) should become § 185 (a), and that racist and/or discriminatory speech based on targeted individuals’ ‘reduced functional ability’ (i.e. potentially covering both reduced physical and/or mental capacities) be included in the remit of the law.

This revision has, at the time of writing in 2013, yet to take effect. The paradox is that in actual practice Norway appears to have had fewer prosecutions under the existing provisions of § 135 (a) and the protection against racist and/or discriminatory speech seems weaker than ever.²⁵ Laws that are merely symbolic and seldom, if ever, applied, soon lose both their effectiveness and legitimacy.²⁶

Freedom of speech in the era of the internet

There is, however, ‘no such thing as free speech’.²⁷ Freedom of speech is in other words not an absolute, and never has been, even in the US, which arguably has fewer restrictions on free speech than any other country in the world. Nor does universal recognition of freedom of speech require uniform legal solutions or interpretations. That there is a balance to be struck between valuable and offensive speech is hardly a novel insight or one peculiar to the age of the internet. Yet Norway’s 22/7 brought a growing realisation in and among Norwegian media, political and legal elites that an absence of regulation and moderation presents particular challenges. ‘The digital reality presents us with new challenges. Things are said on the internet that we would be hard pressed to accept in an ordinary conversation, or in a print newspaper. But nevertheless, we do not confront this as forcefully as we do in regular debates’, said Norwegian Labour Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg in an interview in December 2011, in which he pledged a continued struggle against rightwing extremism and ‘hatred of Islam’.²⁸

John Stuart Mill’s 1859 treatise On Liberty is often regarded as a foundational text for modern champions of freedom of speech. Here, Mill argues that a ‘collision of opinions’ is a prerequisite for arriving at ‘truth’ in liberal and democratic societies, which is itself a prerequisite for ‘the mental well-being of mankind’.²⁹ Mill was certainly no absolutist: freedom of speech is limited by his general ‘harm principle’, which implies that using a freedom of speech that implies an incitement to violence against individuals or groups is not permissible. And Mill holds that speech that is not ‘part of an argument aimed at truth’ deserves no particular protection.³⁰ He is certainly aware that freedom of speech may be misused to suppress facts or arguments, to misstate a case or to misrepresent an opponent’s opinions. Yet as long as this is done ‘in good faith’, the law has no reason to interfere with it.

It is important to note that, for Mill, freedom of speech is primarily an instrument of the weak (‘the comparatively defenceless’) and as such, is an instrument in the defence of individual liberty against the state or powerful elites. This conception is in fact a salutary reminder to those Norwegian elites who – in arguing for the value of freedom of speech – consider it an Enlightenment ‘cultural patrimony’ that defines us (the proponents of ‘secular reason’) as against them (the forces of ‘religious unreason’) and in doing so leaves us ‘with the ideological comfort of fighting on the side of the powerful’ while presenting ourselves as members of a ‘beleaguered and courageous minority’.³¹ Whilst readily admitting that ‘men are not more zealous for truth than they are for error’, Mill still contends that man is ‘capable of rectifying his mistakes, by discussion or experience’.³² The problems of the Millsian conception of freedom of speech and its limits in the digital age thus relate to the appropriateness of its rationalistic bias in our time.

In the halcyon days of the development of the internet, technological optimists often argued that it would lead to a democratic pluralisation of ideas and opinions in which more people would be able to have a voice and be heard. Now, having a voice is no guarantee of being heard, as millions of bloggers, tweeters and Facebook users have discovered. In the light of available evidence from recent years, it seems difficult to avoid the conclusion that these platforms have provided avenues for the creation of new counter-publics and sub-publics with their own peculiar dynamics. These new publics are, to a large extent, unedited, unmediated and uncensored; they often represent a subculture in which invective, harassment and personal attacks predominate. And more often than not, people of minority backgrounds – whose voices are at the outset disadvantaged – are targeted.

But perhaps a more serious challenge is that these new publics, combined with the potential for anonymity and the creation of fictive identities, often contribute to a selective reinforcement of group-think, extremism and polarisation.³³ ‘Group influences create ideological amplification’ writes legal scholar Cass Sunstein.³⁴ And in the context of debates on multiculturalism, immigration and Islam in Europe, Dilip Gaonkar and Charles Taylor warned in 2006 that ‘block [group] thinking’ concerning Islam and Muslims appears to have an ‘explosive potential’; it ‘fuses a varied reality into a single indissoluble unity, and … does so on two dimensions: first, the different manifestations of Islamic piety or culture are seen as alternative ways of expressing the same core meanings; and second, all the members of this religion or culture are seen as expressing these core meanings’.³⁵

This underlying logic is expressed in Breivik’s tract as well as in the internet musings of ‘Fjordman’, from which he drew inspiration. Central to their Islamophobic worldview is the assumption that Muslims are essentially one and the same, bound to and over-determined by Islam, with aspirations marked by a will to power over Europeans. Muslims are to be feared by Europeans by virtue of their sheer existence and their potential numbers, and Islam is inherently violent and conflictive. The insight that humans are predisposed to seek confirmation of convictions, thoughts and ideas already held is not particularly novel. Freedom of speech in the context of democracy is, as a modern conception, intended to counteract this human proclivity. But digital technology seems in fact to be drawing us the other way. ‘Democracy requires citizens to see things from one another’s point of view, but instead we are more and more enclosed in our own bubbles. Democracy requires a reliance on shared facts, instead we are being offered parallel but separate universes’, writes Eli Pariser.³⁶ Pariser investigates how prominent internet search engines and popular networking sites have increasingly become able (and willing) to customise information based on personal preferences, thus ensuring that our access to information on the internet contributes to reinforcing and maintaining whatever ‘filter bubble’ we live with. If you sincerely believe in the prospect of the impending ‘Islamisation of Europe’, trawling certain websites will confirm this view down to the most minute details and offer remedies – from democratic to undemocratic, peaceful to violent. That is, in fact, what Anders Behring Breivik did in the months and years preceding 22/7.

The impact of the Rushdie affair

After the failed (and as yet unresolved) assassination attempt on Rushdie’s Norwegian publisher, William Nygaard, at his home in Oslo, in October 1993, the Norwegian Minister of Culture, Åse Kleveland of the Labour Party, resolved to appoint a Commission to investigate the conditions of freedom of expression in Norway and the Nordic countries. Its three members were Toril Brekke, Peter Norman Waage and Bernt Hagtvet; Brekke and Hagtvet had both been central in the campaign of support for Rushdie; Hagtvet was a political scientist who appeared to share their presuppositions. Indeed, Norway’s support for Rushdie between 1988 and 1994 had revealed an emerging consensus among a coalition of Norwegian writers, publishers and publicists, newspaper editors, politicians and academics. Norwegians were central to the international mobilisation of support for Rushdie; the Norwegian translation of The Satanic Verses was its first anywhere in the world;³⁷ Norway was, at the initiative of the Norwegian Writers’ Union and the Norwegian PEN Association, the first country to establish a national Rushdie Committee; and Norwegian publishing director Sigmund Strømme was on the board of London-based Article 19, which organised the international mobilisation in support of Rushdie.

Four days after Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini’s so-called fatwa against Rushdie, on 18 February 1989, a body of Norwegian Muslim leaders established the Islamic Defence Council (Det Islamske Forsvarsrådet) in Oslo. The council, which consisted of an ad-hoc coalition of Norwegian-Pakistani Sunni Muslims and a sprinkling of Shia Islamists supportive of the Iranian regime, made it clear that they wanted to use Norway’s blasphemy laws to prevent the publication of a translation of Rushdie’s novel and the import and distribution of copies of the English original. In Oslo on 26 February 1989, about 3,000 Norwegian Muslims protested against the publication of the novel in Norway.

The Rushdie affair not only shifted public and media discourses whereby minority ethnic Muslim Norwegians would no longer be identified by national origin but by religious affiliation, but it also led to a particular ‘framing’ of the question of freedom of expression and its limits in the Norwegian context. That framing was then reinforced by the cartoon crisis of 2005–6. And this framing locates Muslims, rightly or wrongly, as the main threat to artistic or political freedom of expression in Norway.

The 1993 Commission’s report

The Commission’s report was published in 1994 as a sixty-three-page pamphlet entitled The Dangerous Freedom of Expression (Den farlige ytringsfriheten), which framed the problematic in question and its recommendations in ways that were relatively novel in Norway. It advances the view that the principles of freedom of expression constitute one of ‘our’ ‘fundamental rules for ordered co-existence’. One notes here an early hint of how ‘our’ de-historicised and de-contextualised ‘values’ are seen to be under threat from an extra- or sub-national ‘them’. The report is unsurprisingly (in light of the national repercussions of the Rushdie affair) blunt about precisely which groups in Norway present contemporary threats to freedom of expression.

The report refers to the case of an ‘Iraqi refugee in Norway’ who had recently published what it describes as ‘a series of very critical articles about Islam in the local press’. He had, the report argues, become ‘a mistaken victim of Norwegian “political correctness”, which places concerns for the group over the concern for the individual’. On the basis of this example, the report’s authors go on to argue that freedom of expression is properly conceived of as linked to the individual. They contend that from ‘a liberal and democratic point of view’, Norwegian society has every right to insist on its ‘own rules of freedom of expression being respected within the ranks of ethnic groups who lack this tradition of rights’.³⁸ In very few words, the authors imply that Muslims in Norway – by virtue of their real or purported identification with Islam – lack a religious and historical tradition in which freedom of expression is valued, and that Norwegian society (as represented by the state) will, therefore, have to teach them to value such freedom. Throughout, the authors cite J. S. Mill’s On Liberty (1838) extensively and approvingly. They are especially interested in Mill’s concept of the ‘yoke of public opinion’ but invoke this concept for a particular purpose: to provide a rationale for advancing and legitimating a Millsian ‘free marketplace of ideas’ within minority groups in Norway in particular. It is the mavericks and the dissenters – as exemplified by the unnamed Iraqi refugee – who have a particular need for freedom of expression.

In fact, the Iraqi refugee in question is Walid al-Kubaisi, a central ‘Eurabia’ theorist in Norway who had at the time close personal relationships with two of the commission members (Hagtvet and Waage).³⁹ The choice of example can, therefore, hardly be seen as coincidental.

The Commission recommended, among other things, that the Norwegian state should develop compulsory courses concerning laws, rights and duties for those granted citizenship or leave to stay in Norway (in other words, to teach immigrants values such as freedom of expression); that the blasphemy paragraph in the Norwegian penal code be abolished; and, central to the Commission on Freedom of Expression, that Paragraph 100 of the Norwegian Constitution be amended to guarantee the explicit protection of freedom of expression.

The 1996 Commission on Freedom of Expression

In August 1996 – again as a result of the Rushdie affair – a Commission tasked with ‘a fundamental reflection upon the place of freedom of expression in our society’ was appointed by the Ministry of Justice and Police in Norway. The eighteen-member Commission was chaired by Professor Francis Sejersted, a historian of Norwegian social democracy affiliated to the Norwegian Conservative Party (Høyre), chair of the Norwegian Nobel Peace Prize Committee from 1991 to 1999, and chair of the Norwegian Fritt Ord Foundation from 2000 to 2011. The Commission held open consultative meetings in various Norwegian cities for three years, from 1996 until it presented its report and recommendations in 1999.

The Commission’s 1999 report Freedom of Expression Must Take Place (Ytringsfrihed bør finde sted) is, if anything, a thorough and extensive discussion of the available academic literature on freedom of expression, both internationally and nationally. One can detect a series of rationalistic presuppositions from the manner in which its authors conceptualise both freedom of expression and its limitations. In keeping with arguments made by a long line of western philosophers from Karl Popper to Ronald Dworkin, the Commission contends that freedom of expression is ‘a constitutive element of democracy’. Not only that, but the Commission seems to imply – pace the unranked nature of freedom of speech in relation to other human rights under international human rights conventions and treaties – that ‘freedom of expression in its essence is not a concern which may give way to other concerns. It is constitutive of society, [something] which implies that if one infringes on it, the very order of society is threatened’.⁴⁰ The report sketches a teleological historical development whereby the institutionalisation of the modern public sphere, the simultaneous delineation of both a public and a private sphere, democracy and the differentiation of political power are all factors leading to greater freedom of expression for individuals as a protection against encroachment by the state.

However, the reader is cautioned against understanding this trajectory as a simple linear progression. Negative examples in this respect are provided by the eighteenth-century Norwegian state, and of course by the Quisling regime, installed by the Nazis from 1940 to 1945, which ‘abolished’ freedom of expression and introduced censorship. The argumentative thrust of the 1999 report undoubtedly favours expanding freedom of expression as both a societal and legal virtue. But, in line with the often grandiose proclivities of both state and civil-society actors in post-second world war Norway, the report invokes ‘ambitions to lead the way in the defence of human rights and democracy’ as an argument for enshrining greater protections for freedom of expression through a constitutional clause. For in this manner, the authors contend, ‘it will provide us with an opportunity to refer to our own constitution as a potential standard for freedom of expression in other countries’.⁴¹ Individual reason and self-restraint, the report seems to argue, will ultimately mean that freedom of expression is an unmitigated good for both individuals and society, and that those few who set out to do harm with ‘fighting words’ (denigrating or derogatory utterances about their fellow human beings) will be contested and exposed.

Notwithstanding the report’s concerns with the increasing commercialisation of the media and the increased use of media and market strategists among corporate actors, by and large it confirms the self-satisfaction of the Norwegian media with its function of providing a system of checks and balances on various forms of power in Norwegian society. The report’s blindness to power and the power differentials in the capability of individuals of various backgrounds to exercise their freedom of expression extends to the very powers of the Commission to define the future legal and societal parameters relating to freedom of expression: ‘The political process should take place before an open stage’ – the report proclaims – for ‘power should have a face’.⁴² But those expecting some meta-textual reflections on the social, political and legal power wielded by academics and intellectuals aligned to technocratic power in late-modern social democratic Norway (such as the praxis of the Commission’s own members) will search in vain for it here.

The report is clear about freedom of expression being first and foremost an individual right. It states that freedom of expression is primarily a freedom for unpopular expressions and that special protection for political expressions is central to the very idea of freedom of expression. To the extent that freedom of expression has stronger limitations in Norway than in other societies, it reflects Norwegian egalitarianism and consensus-seeking. Societal pressures to conform (konformitetspresset), whereby individual actors in the public sphere who fear social sanctions censor themselves, are conceptualised in the report as a pre-eminent threat to freedom of expression.

The report has a clear view on the public arena, reflecting some of the authors’ rationalistic presuppositions: a ‘democratic principle’ (demokratiprinsippet), whereby publicity is the basis for a check on both public and private powers, presupposes that publication or the threat of it occasions decency (anstendighet) and reasonableness (rimelighet). It is for the media to ensure such decency and reasonableness. ‘Demands for limitations to freedom of speech (including freedom of information) are surprisingly often reflective of [an] almost irrational fear.’⁴³ Having thus deemed those who advocate such limitations as both irrational and pathological, the report contends that ‘our democratic system, including the right to vote and freedom of expression, is based [on] the conception (forestilling) that the public sphere is by and large populated by mature, adult and decent human beings’.⁴⁴ One need, in other words, not doubt the controlling and self-disciplining function of the media and the discerning consumer-subject.

More than ten years later, it is clear how often this conclusion is being negated. Racist and/or Islamophobic statements have become ubiquitous in op-ed articles in mainstream print media, as well as in social media. A preliminary study of the online ‘free comments’ sections of mainstream Norwegian newspapers from 2010 undertaken by the Norwegian Center Against Racism indicates that very little editorial control over these sections was exercised and that racist utterances from presumably ‘mature, adult and decent human beings’ were widespread.⁴⁵

One could hardly expect the Commission’s 1999 report to predict future developments in the online world; still, it is full of praise for ‘the anarchy’ which the internet brings. In light of what we now know about the impact of the internet in the radicalisation of a number of terrorists (whether radical Islamist or extreme rightwing), this seems rather sanguine. Despite its contextual importance, the Rushdie affair remains a largely unarticulated presence throughout the report; when it is referred to, it is in the context of blasphemy legislation, which the Commission recommends abolishing. The report notes that the Rushdie affair ‘manifests the problem of blasphemy in multicultural societies’ and ‘reflects tendencies which require critical vigilance on behalf of freedom of expression’.⁴⁶ Pressure for the reactivation of the blasphemy paragraph, the report asserts, originates from the expansion of ‘originally foreign religions’ as well as ‘the new identity politics’.⁴⁷ For ‘foreign’ religions, read Islam; for ‘identity politics’, read public assertions of Islam by practising Muslims.

The report contends that the preconditions and possibilities for minorities in Norway to partake in ‘open and enlightened’ conversation provide a ‘test case’ for the conditions of freedom of expression. Though it notes that both an infrastructure of law and support are needed to ensure the possibilities of expression for minorities, the Commission made ‘no specific recommendations’ on this point.

Racism vs freedom of speech

Even when the report refers to the various ‘others’ of the Norwegian state and/or society, we still do not get anything like a philosophical reflection on the limits of reason in combating the various forms of racism and xenophobia expressed in the public sphere – nor do we hear about the societal power differentials that define what are considered permissible and non-permissible forms of speech. In 1997, under §135 (a) of the penal code, the late Jack Erick Kjuus, a lawyer and politician aligned with the Norwegian extreme Right was convicted of racism. This conviction is noted in the Commission’s report since, at the time it was written, it constituted the central and most recent (and therefore, precedence-setting) verdict under this statute.

The Norwegian Supreme Court upheld the lower court’s conviction of Kjuus. In 1995, ahead of the 1997 parliamentary elections, Kjuus had distributed pamphlets in Oslo for his party the White Electoral Alliance (Hvit Valgallianse), calling for the forced sterilisation of children who, although resident in Norway, had been adopted from non-western countries, as well as the forced sterilisation of the ‘non-western’ sexual partners of white Norwegians, together with their offspring. Kjuus was sentenced to sixty days’ imprisonment and a fine of 20,000 Norwegian kroner (NOK) by the (divided) Supreme Court. The case led to the mobilisation of support for Kjuus’ right to freedom of expression, especially from a number of Norwegian newspaper editors and academics.

Among those who testified in defence of the rights of Kjuus was Sigurd Skirbekk, a professor of sociology at the University of Oslo and an older brother of Commission member Professor Gunnar Skirbekk. Sigurd Skirbekk, politically aligned with the Norwegian Centre Party (Senterpartiet) had by then been known for years for his xenophobic and anti-immigration booklets. The report’s discussion of the Kjuus verdict implies that its authors – although possibly not every member of the Commission – were sympathetic to the views of the dissenting Supreme Court justices in the Kjuus case. They had argued that he should be acquitted because, as a politician (however small the party), his utterances about adopted children formed part of his political speech, expressly protected in the Constitution.

On racist expression in the context of free speech, the Commission’s suggestions fall into line with its arguments concerning freedom of expression. Without reference to secondary literature or empirical data, the report contends that ‘publicity has provided the best form of control, and the best protection for underprivileged groups regardless of who were in power’.⁴⁸ The historical record, however, does suggest that publicity, in many instances, has not necessarily had such salutary effects for the underprivileged. See, for instance, Nazi Germany, the civil wars in Rwanda, and the civil war in Bosnia. ‘Fighting words’ – which in each case preceded ‘fighting actions’ – offered limited protection for those who became victims of ‘crimes against humanity’. One member of the Commission, documentary filmmaker Maria Fuglevaag Warsinski, dissented from the majority’s view during internal meetings and hearings, and opposed the position of ‘no state interference with the freedom of expression’ on the basis of her experience while reporting the atrocities of the Balkan wars. But, according to the report, freedom of expression is basically a form of protection from discrimination; when discriminatory attitudes are expressed in public, rather than being subject to prosecution, they may be contested through public criticism. The Commission does raise the possibility that ‘the public correction [of discriminatory attitudes] may not in all areas function according to the ideals referred to’ and that this situation may in fact lead to such attitudes becoming more ‘widespread (alment utbredt)’.⁴⁹ Except for noting that there may be ‘valid reasons’ (gode grunner) for a law that might counter attempts from agitators who repeatedly promulgate discriminatory attitudes, the report does not offer any further reflections.

The report stopped short of advocating the abolition of the racism paragraph, § 135 (a) of the Norwegian penal code; it did, however, advocate the abolition of protection against racist and/or discriminatory speech based on religious faith. Criteria relating to religious faith, we learn, stand in opposition to other criteria in that there is an element of personal choice or will (to have a religious faith in the first place). Yet though one may actively ‘choose’ one’s religious affiliation as an adult living in a liberal and secular society, one certainly does not ‘choose’ to be born as a child of Christian, Muslim or Jewish parents. Furthermore, the report’s authors argue that the inclusion of these criteria in the racism paragraph is detrimental to the right of free and open critique of religion and culture.

The Commission’s views on the racism paragraph were, however, contested by the 2002 Commission on Legal Protections Against Ethnic Discrimination, which argued that the Freedom of Expression Commission offered little in the way of concrete guidance and recommendations to Norwegian courts on how to balance freedom of expression and protections against racist and discriminatory speech.⁵⁰ It indicated that the Sejersted Commission had an unbalanced view of the value of contrary expressions in the public sphere. Where Sejersted’s Commission recommended strengthening legal protections for freedom of expression, the Holgersen Commission recommended strengthening legal protections against racist and/or discriminatory speech. In terms of legal statute, it would seem over the following years that the views of the Holgersen Commission prevailed, but actual legal practice with regard to the racism paragraph suggests that the Sejersted Commission’s views prevailed.

Conclusion

A confluence of interests and forces among Norwegian political, media and legal elites since the Rushdie affair created conditions in which minority protections against racist and discriminatory speech as guaranteed by Norwegian law, and Norwegian obligations under international law, have been rendered all but symbolic – in the name of stronger protections for freedom of expression. It is not entirely coincidental that some of the strongest defenders of absolute freedom of expression and its limits in Norway (as elsewhere in Europe) are found in Islamophobic circles and networks. A recent case in point is that of Hans Rustad, editor of Document.no, Breivik’s favourite Norwegian blog, who travelled to Malmö in Sweden with the Danish director of the International Free Press Society, Lars Hedegaard, to establish a Swedish Free Press Society. For the struggle in which far-right Islamophobes across the political-discursive continuum are engaged is centrally a struggle over the very definition of the terms in which debates on Islam, Muslims and integration in western European societies are set, through which the notion of an invariable homo islamicus who intrinsically ‘hates the West’ is generated and maintained.⁵¹ This is a struggle that ultimately entails ‘world-making’ and ‘world-unmaking’ and, as such, involves fundamental liberal values relating to formally equal rights to citizenship, individual dignity, tolerance for others and freedom of religion and conscience for minorities in post-second world war Europe. The invocations of freedom of expression by contemporary European Islamophobes of the counter-jihadist variety are, more than anything, strategic; the freedom of expression that they call upon liberal elites to support is the proverbial ‘freedom for thought that they like’, not the freedom of expression of all minorities alike. In one of the most absurd statements on what led to Breivik’s terrorism of 22/7, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, on receiving the Axel Springer Award in Germany in May 2012, alleged that Breivik had engaged in terror because ‘all outlets to express his views’ had been ‘censored’ in Norway.⁵² But there is no public record of Breivik having been censored anywhere before 22/7; he did in fact publish extensive commentaries on various rightwing blogs across Norway, Scandinavia and Europe in the preceding years, and the staggering number of counter-jihadist blogs and websites available online attest to his views being expressed in a number of places.

In the Scandinavian context, support for populist or extreme rightwing views on Islam and Muslims has much to do with language and representation, and the notion that knowledge in and of itself is a sufficient antidote against contemporary Islamophobia in Norway and western Europe is flawed. The promoters of Islamophobia are often highly educated. But through the internet blogosphere and their own book publications, they aim at a popular market that is often relatively illiterate regarding Islam and Muslims. They have managed to create a parallel universe in which any opposing or contradictory views, opinions or empirical fact are systematically filtered out. Though they often regard and cast themselves as heroic defenders of both ‘reason’ and ‘the Enlightenment’, they are seldom open to reasonable arguments. There is much evidence to suggest that individuals with far-right and anti-Muslim sympathies dominate the commentary fields in mainstream media online in Norway and other Scandinavian countries too, and that they do so in a manner which crowds out opposing views.

Such tunnel vision, much like that of radical Islamists, suggests a potential for violence among those who assimilate such ideas uncritically. In light of Norway’s 22/7, these tunnel visions, whether they emanate from far-right milieus or radical Islamists, can no longer be ignored. The liberal philosopher Karl R. Popper noted that ‘unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.’⁵³ Such a view points to the necessity of liberal and secular society defending itself against the intolerant and the illiberal, who seek to tear asunder the fabric of trust and reciprocal obligations between citizens formally equal in rights and dignity. ‘Freedom of opinion is a farce, unless factual information is guaranteed, and the facts themselves are not in dispute’, wrote Hannah Arendt in 1966.⁵⁴ For Arendt, there was a basic distinction to be made between errors made in good faith, and deliberate falsehoods or lies. The former are defensible in a politics that wishes to remain within the bounds of moral action, the latter are not defensible. ‘The liar’, Arendt writes, ‘lacking the power to make his falsehood stick, does not insist on the gospel truth of his statement but pretends that this is his “opinion”, to which he claims his constitutional right’.⁵⁵ One might ask why freedom of expression matters so much to those who (either from personal conviction or strategic political interest) resort to the production and dissemination of deliberate falsehoods in politics. ‘The blurring of the dividing line between factual truth and opinion belongs among the many forms that lying can assume, all of which are forms of action’, concludes Arendt. John Stuart Mill once observed that ‘an article in a newspaper is to the public mind no more than a drop of water on a stone; and like that it produces its effect by repetition’.⁵⁶ Lies and fabrications put forward for political reasons in the media require repetition to take effect on the public mind. The Norwegian mainstream media, which sees itself as the pre-eminent defender of freedom of expression, does not see it as its role to ascertain the veracity of arguments put forward. In a recent case before the Press Complaints Commission (PCC, Pressens Faglige Utvalg), to all practical extent controlled by the Norwegian media itself, the PCC maintained that Norwegian editors had no independent responsibility for ensuring that what is published is either factually correct or respectful of a person’s integrity or reputation. Aftenposten had published a letter to the editor which made specific reference to a Norwegian professor of social anthropology, Thomas Hylland Eriksen at the University of Oslo, insinuating that Norwegian anti-racists were in fact ‘responsible’ for 22/7.

As Norway approached the second year’s commemoration for those who lost their lives on 22/7, the Fritt Ord Foundation announced (on 14 June 2013) that it had awarded the extreme rightwing blogger Peder Are ‘Fjordman’ Nøstvold Jensen, Breivik’s main ideological inspiration, 75,000 Norwegian kroner for a book manuscript on 22/7. As the maverick Norwegian communications adviser and editor Elin Ørjasæter tweeted her personal congratulations to Jensen, offering to publish his book without actually having seen anything of it,⁵⁷ Jensen’s apologetic biographer SimenSætre declared himself to be ‘proud’, and the respected editor and Norwegian PEN Chairman William Nygaard opined that he supported the Fritt Ord Foundation’s funding of Nøstvold Jensen because ‘Fjordman himself does not incite violence’.⁵⁸ Liberal elite denials and obfuscation of the ideology which inspired Breivik appear to have come full circle. For though ‘Fjordman’s’ Islamophobic rants prior to 22/7 would fail to meet the so-called ‘Brandenburger’⁵⁹ test of incitement to violence, there can be little doubt that an individual who has advocated the physical removal of Muslims from Europe, and called upon Europeans to ‘arm themselves’ in defence against a purported Islamic invasion and colonisation of Europe does ipso facto advocate violent means of ethnic cleansing. There are academics and media editors aplenty in Norway and elsewhere who will argue that the populist rightwing has only acted as a channel for those legitimately concerned with immigration and integration, and particularly Muslim immigration and Muslim integration, in recent years, rather than an amplifier of those concerns. In this scenario, adherents of the populist Right’s anti-immigration and anti-Muslim agendas only reflect the rational self-interest of non-elite sections of the population who fear that they are being required to carry an excessive social, economic and cultural burden due to the integration of immigrants, particularly of Muslim background. Those who subscribe to this hypothesis often contend that the Norwegian populist Right has channelled these concerns and fears in democratic ways, so impeding the growth of extreme rightwing movements in Norway. Yet the past two years have seen not only an increased awareness of the phenomenon on the part of Norwegian intelligence agencies but also an increase in online threats and harassment from Norwegian rightwing extremists.⁶⁰

The basic problem with such hypotheses is that they are virtually untestable. However, I contend that, to the extent that populist rightwing rhetoric on Islam and Muslims in Norway has borrowed extensively from the ‘Eurabia’-genre, it has functioned as an amplifier, rather than merely a channel for anti-immigration and anti-Muslim sentiment. There are certainly no reasons to suggest that the Progress Party significantly impeded or delayed Breivik’s radicalisation. The pseudo-academic netherworld of the ‘Eurabia’ genre is inhabited by Islamophobes who believe they are at ‘war’ with Muslims in present-day Europe and that their presence must be fought, primarily, but not necessarily exclusively, by democratic means. To think that extreme and populist rightwing rhetoric on Islam and Muslims may be neatly delineated and compartmentalised, is to blind oneself to the discursive realities of the past ten years in Norway as in other western European countries.

Anders Behring Breivik was, until he took their message into hitherto uncharted waters, one person swept up in this discursive reality. Given the ongoing development of a multicultural Europe, we ignore Breivik and his fellow travellers at our peril. But the greatest threats to equality of citizenship and liberal democracy in Norway, Scandinavia and western Europe in our time stem neither from the extreme Right nor from radical Islamists. The greatest material threats to equal rights to citizenship and liberal democracy are those emanating from exclusionary discourses and their mainstreaming and sanitising by the populist Right. As the horror of 22/7 slowly, painfully, but surely, fades, that challenge remains with us for the foreseeable future.

Footnotes

Sindre Bangstad, an affiliate researcher at the Faculty of Theology, University of Oslo, Norway is author, inter alia, of the forthcoming Anders Breivik and the Rise of Islamophobia (Zed Books, 2014). This article is based on a chapter from the book.

References

The Directorate of Integration and Diversity (Integrerings-og mangfoldsdirektoratet, IMDI), Integreringsbarometeret (The integration barometer) (Oslo, IMDI, 2010), p. 27.

Bourdieu

Pierre

, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge and New York, Cambridge University Press, 1978).

Dworkin

Ronald

, ‘The right to ridicule’, New York Review of Books (23 March 2006).

Waldron

Jeremy

, The Harm in Hate Speech (Cambridge, MA, and London, Harvard University Press, 2012), p. 56.

Waldron op. cit., p. 15.

Bruknapp

Gisle

, Hatkriminalitet, unpublished M.A. dissertation in sociology, University of Oslo, 2009.

Bangstad

Sindre

, ‘The morality police are coming! Muslims in Norway’s media discourses’, Anthropology Today (Vol. 27, no. 5, 2011), pp. 3–7.

Koopmans

Ruud

, ‘Explaining the rise of racist and extreme right violence in Western Europe: grievances or opportunities?’, European Journal of Political Research (Vol. 30, 1996), pp. 185–216.

Jupskås

Anders R.

Ekstreme Europa (Oslo, Cappelen Damm, 2012), p. 213.

10.

Ibid., p. 214.

11.

Hustad

Jon

, ‘Ope rettsak og eit ope samfunn’ (‘An open trial and an open society’), Dag og Tid (12 August 2011).

12.

See Knut Olav Åmås in Olav Øvrebø, ‘Alle ideer må diskuteres i det åpne rom’ (All ideas must be discussed in open public spaces), interview with Åmås

Knut Olav

of Aftenposten, Vox Publica (18 August 2011); also Åmås

Knut Olav

, ‘Mens Europa sover’ (‘While Europe sleeps’), Aftenposten (3 May 2006).

13.

Vance

Susannah

, ‘The permissibility of incitement to religious hatred offenses under European convention principles’, Transnational Law & Contemporary Problems (Vol. 14, 2004), pp. 201–54, p. 209.

14.

Barendt

Eric

, ‘Religious hatred laws: protecting groups or beliefs?’, Res Publica (Vol. 17, no. 1, 2011), pp. 41–53.

15.

Wang-Naveen

Mala

. ‘Vår egen talende frykt’ (‘Our own telling fear’), Aftenposten (3 May, 2013).

16.

TNS Gallup, Ytringsfrihetsbarometeret 2013 (The Freedom of Expression Barometer 2013) (Oslo, TNS Gallup/Fritt Ord, 2013), pp. 20, 42, 6.

17.

Nordby

Carl M.

, ‘Rosetoget er gått’ (‘The rose march has passed’), Aftenposten (10 October, 2011).

18.

Buan

Vibeke

Gimse

Håvard

‘PST: flere trusler på nettet etter 22.juli’ (PST: More threats on the internet after July 22), Aftenposten (7 December 2011).

19.

Øvrebø

Olav

, ‘Alle ideer må diskuteres i det åpne rom’, interview with Åmås

Knut Olav

, op. cit.

20.

Jensen

Peder A. N.

, ‘Medienes myter’ (‘The myths of the media’), Op-ed., Aftenposten (25 May 2013).

21.

Waldron

Jeremy

, The Harm in Hate Speech (Cambridge, MA and London, Harvard University Press, 2012), pp. 94, 95.

22.

West

Caroline

, ‘Words that silence? Freedom of expression and racist hate speech’, in Maitra

Ishani

McGowan

Mary K.

(eds), Speech and Harm: controversies over free speech (New York, Oxford University press, 2012), pp. 222–48, p. 235.

23.

Nielsen

Laura B.

, ‘Power in public: reactions, responses, and resistance to offensive public speech’, in Maitra McGowan , ibid., pp. 148–74, p. 149.

24.

Bangstad

Sindre

, The Politics of Mediated Presence: new Muslim voices in Norwegian mediated public spheres, unpublished ms.

25.

ECRI, ‘Report on Norway – fourth monitoring cycle’ (Brussels, Council of Europe, 2009), pp. 12, 13.

26.

Barendt, op. cit.

27.

See Fish

Stanley

, There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech … And It’s a Good Thing Too (New York and Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1994); Levmore

Saul

Nussbaum

Martha C.

, ‘Introduction’, in Levmore Nussbaum (eds), The Offensive Internet: speech, privacy and reputation (Cambridge, MA and London, Harvard University Press, 2010), pp. 1–15, pp. 5, 6; Jacobsen

Arthur

Schlink

Bernhard

, ‘Hate speech and self-restraint’, in Herz

Michael

Molnar

Peter

(eds), The Content and Context of Hate Speech: rethinking regulation and responses (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 217–41; Grimm

Dieter

, ‘Freedom of speech in a globalized world’, in Hare

Ivan

Weinstein

James

(eds), Extreme Speech and Democracy (New York and Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 11–22, p. 22.

28.

Kristjánsson

Mímir

Vegstein

Lars U. S.

, ‘Kjemper videre mot hatet’ (‘Struggles against hate’), Klassekampen (1 December 2011).

29.

Mill

John Stuart

On Liberty, edited by Collini

Stefan

(Cambridge and New York, Cambridge University Press, 1989 [1859]), p. 53.

30.

Levmore Nussbaum , op. cit., p. 8.

31.

Toscano

Alberto

, Fanaticism: on the uses of an idea (London and New York, Verso, 2010), p. 100.

32.

Mill, op. cit., pp. 31, 23.

33.

Sunstein

Cass R.

, Going to Extremes: how like minds unite and divide (Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 2009); Adams

Tim

, ‘Why anger is all the rage’, The Guardian Weekly (2 September 2011).

34.

Sunstein

Cass R.

, Why Societies Need Dissent (Cambridge, MA and London, Harvard University Press, 2003), p. 4.

35.

Gaonkar

Dilip

Taylor

Charles

, ‘Block thinking’, Public Culture (Vol. 18, no. 3, 2006), pp. 453–5, p. 454.

36.

Pariser

Eli

, in The Filter Bubble: what the internet is hiding from you (London and New York, Viking, 2011), p. 5.

37.

Austenå

Ann-Magrit

, Arven etter Sataniske Vers: den politiske kampen om ytringsfrihetog religion (The Legacy of The Satanic Verses: the political conflict over freedom of expression and religion) (Oslo, Cappelen Damm, 2010), p. 70.

38.

Brekke

Toril

Hagtvet

Bernt

Waage

Petter Normann

, Den farlige ytringsfriheten (The Dangerous Freedom of Expression) (Oslo, Cappelen, 1994), pp. 10, 11 14.

39.

See Sindre Bangstad, ‘Eurabia Comes to Norway’, Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations (Vol. 24, no. 3, 2013).

40.

Sejersted

Francis

., Ytringsfrihet bør finde sted: forslag til ny Grunnlov paragraph 100 (Freedom of Expression Must Take Place: proposals for a new constitutional paragraph 100) (Oslo, Department of Justice and Police, 1999), pp. 24, 136; Norges Offentlige Utredninger (NOU, Norwegian official government reports), p. 27.

41.

Ibid., p. 111.

42.

Ibid., p. 124.

43.

Ibid., p. 77.

44.

Ibid., p. 78.

45.

Karlsen

Terje

, ‘Derforøkernetthetsen’ (‘The reason why hatred on the net grows’), Ny Tid (27 August 2010).

46.

Sejersted ., op. cit., p. 77.

47.

Ibid., p. 179.

48.

Ibid., p. 94

49.

Ibid., p. 204.

50.

Holgersen

Gudrun

., Rettslig vern mot etnisk diskriminering (Legal Protections against Ethnic Discrimination), Report to the Ministry for Municipalities and Provinces, NOU (Oslo, Kommune og regionaldepartementet, 2002), pp. 207–8.

51.

Morey

Peter

Yaqin

Amina

, Framing Muslims: stereotyping and representation after 9/11 (Cambridge, MA and London, Harvard University Press, 2012); Lyon

Jonathan

, Islam through Western Eyes: from the Crusades to the War on Terrorism (New York, Columbia University Press, 2012).

52.

‘The advocates of silence’, Citizen Times (11 May 2012).

53.

Popper

Karl R.

, The Open Society and Its Enemies. Vol I: the spell of Plato (London and New York, Routledge, 2003 [1945]), pp 602–3.

54.

Arendt

Hannah

, ‘Truth and politics’, in The Portable Hannah Arendt, edited and introduced by Baehr

Peter

(New York and London, Penguin Press, 2003 [1966]), pp. 545–76, p. 554.

55.

Ibid., p. 563.

56.

As cited in Collini

Stefan

, What Are Universities For? (London, Penguin Books, 2012), p. 118.

57.

Fidjestøl

Alfred

, ‘Forlag til Fjordman’ (Publisher for Fjordman), Morgenbladet (21 June 2013).

58.

Håvard Therkelsen and Sofie Prestegård, ‘Fritt Ord fårkritikk for Fjordman-støtte’, (‘Fritt Ord criticised for support of Fjordman’), Dagsavisen (15 June 2013).

59.

According to the ‘Brandenburger test’, under US Supreme Court practice dating back to Brandenburg v Ohio (1969), in order for a person to be convicted for incitement to a violation of the law under the US First Amendment, the unlawful action must be both ‘imminent’ and ‘likely’. These terms are of course anything but ambiguous, and in Hess v Indiana (1973), the court furthermore held that incitement to an illegal action in some indefinite future time was legally permissible.

60.

Bakke

Trude

Stabell

Eva

, ‘Politikerne mest utsatt for hat fra høyreekstremister’ (Politicians most exposed to hatred from right-wing extremists), Nrk.no (17 June 2013).