PEGIDA NORWAY LEADER REJECTS MUSLIMS’ HELP
Oslo, 5 Jumadil Awwal 1436/24 February 2015 (MINA) – An offer by Muslim youth to clean windows of a bookshop owned by the Norway head of anti-Islam Pegida movement, which were spray-painted with the words “Nazi Swine”, has been rejected, turning down a chance to bridge gaps.
“I do not want symbolic actions, I want a new asylum and integration policy,” Max Hermansen told Norway’s state broadcaster NRK, Local.no reported on Sunday.
Hermansen, who led the country’s first Pegida march in January, discovered the words “Nazi Swine” spray painted on the window of his book shop last Saturday, On Islam quoted by Mi’raj Islamic News Agency (MINA) as reporting.
Though the graffiti was not blamed on Muslims, Thee Yezan, from “Islamophobia Awareness Norway”, made the offer to clean the shop with the help of a group of four young Muslims.
“We are offering to wash away the graffiti from Max Hermansen’s shop, after which we are offering him a cup of Arabic tea and a massage,” Yezan, who is not using his real name, wrote on Facebook.
He asked other followers to forward the request to Hermansen, as he was blocked from the anti-Islamist’s feed. When alerted to the offer, Hermansen rejected it in the strongest terms.
“Muslims want to wash my shop,” he tweeted.
“Do they also want to keep watch during opening hours so other Muslims don’t throw in a Molotov cocktail?”
Yezan insisted his offer had been in good faith to bridge gaps. “We believe that it is sad to see that the shop has been defaced in this way,” he said.
“We want to do this because Hermansen is so negative to Muslims, and we want to say that this has nothing to do with Muslims.”
Yezan told VG the massage was intended to help Hermansen “relax and let his shoulders drop”. Norway is home to a small Jewish minority, one of Europe’s smallest, numbering around 1000.
The Muslim population, which has been growing steadily, is 150,000 to 200,000 out of Norway’s 5.2 million population.
On Saturday, more than 1000 Norwegian Muslims flocked to Oslo’s synagogue, forming a human shield as a symbolic protection for the Jewish community. The shield was formed as part of an event organized by Norway Muslim community to offer support to Jews after Copenhagen and Paris extremist attacks.
Debates over immigration in the country came to the forefront in 2011 when Anders Behring Breivik killed 77 people and accused the government and the then-ruling Labour party of facilitating Muslim immigration and adulterating pure Norwegian blood.
Support for immigration has been rising steadily since those attacks, however, and an opinion poll late last year found that 77 percent of people thought immigrants made an important contribution to Norwegian society. (T/P011/P3)
Mi’raj Islamic News Agency (MINA)
