More Norwegians convert to Islam

     This really moved me :)

‘Religious experience’ on Utøya
Morten Ibrahim Abrahamsen, now a 23-year-old man from Hamar, converted after surviving the massacre of July 22, 2011 on the island of Utøya that was carried out by another young but right-wing anti-Islamic extremist. Abrahamsen told Aftenposten he had a religious experience while he desperately tried to hide from the lone gunman Anders Behring Breivik, who killed 69 people at the Labour Party’s youth summer camp that Abrahamsen was attending.

“I met a lot of resistance, also publicly, from people who thought I was vulnerable and had all but been forced to convert,” Abrahamsen said, after he’d declared his faith to representatives of the Islamic organization Islam Net in Oslo. It’s been a target of controversy for organizing conferences featuring radical Muslim clerics, for segregating men and women who attend and for spreading the word about Islam from information stands on the street, among other things.

“But now it’s been nearly four years (since the massacre and his conversion) and I’m thriving with my religion,” Abrahamsen told Aftenposten. “I have found the sense of calm I was looking for.” He and several of the others interviewed oppose extremism and claim the Koraninstructs them to follow the laws of the land where they live. They cannot, according to Abrahamsen, demand introduction of sharia law that can impose death sentences for such things as infidelity, homosexuality or abandoning the faith, while he noted that sharia law itself “is often not practiced as it should be, and many people who gain power often make mistakes.”

Full article.

Anders Breivik jailed for 21 years

Comment: still not a terrorist though...

 

Anders Behring Breivik has been convicted of terrorism and premeditated murder for bomb and gun attacks that killed 77 people and sentenced to a special prison term that would allow authorities to keep him locked up for as long as he is considered dangerous.

Breivik, a self-styled anti-Muslim militant, looked pleased as Judge Wenche Elisabeth Arntzen read the ruling, declaring him sane enough to be held criminally responsible for Norway's worst peacetime attacks.

Lawyers for the 33-year-old Norwegian said before the decision that Breivik would appeal any insanity ruling but accept a prison sentence.

Going against the recommendation of prosecutors, who had asked for an insanity ruling, Arntzen imposed a sentence of "preventive detention", a special prison term for criminals considered dangerous to society.

She set the minimum length of imprisonment to 10 years and the maximum at 21 years, the longest allowed under Norwegian law.

However, such sentences can be extended under Norwegian law as long as an inmate is considered dangerous.

Wearing a dark suit and sporting a thin beard, Breivik smirked as he walked in to the courtroom to hear his sentence and raised a clenched-fist salute.

Breivik, 33, confessed to the attacks during the trial, describing in gruesome detail how he detonated a car bomb at the government headquarters in Oslo and then opened fire at the annual summer camp of the governing Labour Party's youth wing.

Eight people were killed and more than 200 injured by the explosion.

Sixty-nine people, mostly teenagers, were killed in the shooting massacre on Utoya island. The youngest victim was 14.

source

Norwegian Muslish Gunman's Islam-Esque Atrocity

Norway Attacks

Pray for the innocents murdered in Norway

Because of that, We decreed upon the Children of Israel that whoever kills a soul unless for a soul or for corruption [done] in the land - it is as if he had slain mankind entirely. And whoever saves one - it is as if he had saved mankind entirely. And our messengers had certainly come to them with clear proofs. Then indeed many of them, [even] after that, throughout the land, were transgressors.

Quran 5:32

Norway now has problems with Muslims

Picture Source: AFP

About 2,500 people marched through downtown Oslo in a protest Friday against a Norwegian newspaper that printed a caricature of the Prophet Muhammad.

The demonstrators chanted "God is great" in Arabic and waved placards calling for a boycott of the Dagbladet daily.

On Feb. 3, the newspaper published a photograph showing a man in front of a computer screen with a depiction of Muhammad as a pig. The picture accompanied an article that said users were posting offensive material about Muslims and Jews on the Facebook page of Norway's security police.

Dagbladet's acting editor-in-chief, Lars Helle, told The Associated Press that he doesn't regret printing the offending image and that he welcomed Friday's protest.

"It was a test for Norwegian society — whether this would be a peaceful protest or not," Helle said.

He said Dagbladet has not received any direct threats since it published the caricature. A hacker attack originating from Turkey brought down the newspaper's Web site for two hours Wednesday evening, but Helle said it's unclear whether that attack was connected to the caricature.

Protesters said they wanted to show Norwegian media how hurtful such images are to Muslims. Islamic law generally opposes any depiction of the prophet, even favorable, for fear it could lead to idolatry.

"We have done nothing to anybody. We want to live here in peace. Norway is our home. Our children live here. Why should they (Norwegian media) hurt us like this?" said Naradim Muhammad, a 43-year-old school teacher who helped organize the demonstration.

The demonstration was peaceful, except for a firecracker that was apparently thrown by a protester onto a restaurant patio. It caused burn damage to a patio sofa, but nobody was injured. After the blast, organizers ordered the crowd to disperse, encouraging them to go home or to a local mosque to pray.

Police spokesman Joern-Kristian Joergensen said the protest concluded without further incident. However, Oslo police, who maintained a low profile during the demonstration to avoid confrontation, would remain on alert throughout the evening, he said.

Angry protests swept across Muslim countries in 2006 after a Danish newspaper printed 12 caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad. That newspaper said it was challenging a perceived self-censorship among artists afraid to offend Islam.

Norwegian Doctors confirm: 'Gaza = Hell' after Israel Genocide

Two Norwegian doctors witnessed first-hand the nightmare scenes inside Gaza

"It was like a scene from Dante's Inferno," recalls Norwegian doctor Mads Gilbert, of the moment casualties started streaming inside Gaza's al-Shifa hospital, after a vegetable market was bombed on 4 January. "I thought: 'This is what hell must look like'. All the screaming, all the pain, all the despair, all the blood, all the torn-off body parts."

Gilbert, 61, and his colleague Erik Fosse, 58, recently returned to Oslo after working in Gaza for the first 10 days of the Israeli offensive. As the only western doctors present in the Palestinian territory, they became faces of the conflict, describing the stark reality they were living in to the international media, most of which was barred from access.

The doctors were sent to Gaza with the Norwegian Aid Committee (NORWAC), a medical aid agency funded by the Norwegian government, which has worked in the past in southern Lebanon with the Martyr Foundation, an organisation affiliated with the radical movement Hizbullah. NORWAC now works with the Islamic Health Society, which is also affiliated with Hizbullah. But Fosse, who heads NORWAC, explains: "If you want to do medical work [in south Lebanon] you cannot ignore Hizbullah or the Hizbullah-affiliated organisations."

Looking gaunt and exhausted, the two medicine professors, who have often worked in conflict zones, said they were surprised that no western journalists were allowed entry into the territory.

While he was operating on patients, Gilbert was working in triage, dealing with patients as they arrived. "On the first day (the hospital) had 80 operations. They had 300 patients coming in, and more came in all the time (the next days)," recalled Fosse. "Patients may have been injured far away – if they had not been killed instantly – or individuals would bring in injured people they had found in destroyed buildings."

On top of the uninterrupted flow of patients, there would also be a high number of casualties arriving at the same time. "After the attack on the mosque, we got 50 patients in one go," said Fosse. "And after the attack on the vegetable market, we were drowning in patients."

Gilbert decided to send a text message to three Norwegian journalists in Israel and a few friends back home. The SMS spread like wildfire in Norway and abroad. It read: "Hell. We wade in death. Blood and amputees. Lots of children. Pregnant women. I have never seen anything so terrible."

50km away from Gaza, Inside al-Arish hospital, a modern slab of stone and glass in the heart of northern Sinai's dusty administrative capital, doctors huddle in an office staring in silence at the latest scenes from Gaza flashing up on al-Jazeera TV.

Ahmed Ellabban, professor of surgery at Suez Canal University, shakes his head as he watches the screen. "There are 4,000 injured people just 50km from here," he says quietly. "We're sitting in a very well-equipped hospital with more than 100 doctors on call, ready to deal with more than 400 emergency cases through the week. But they are not coming. We don't know why. We just wait."

Al-Arish hospital, the receiving point for wounded Palestinians who make it across the Egyptian border, is a surreal backdrop to Gaza's humanitarian crisis. With the number of patients making it through the Rafah crossing each day rarely reaching double figures, the region's most advanced medical centre sits frozen in tense expectation most of the time, its tiled corridors empty, save for the odd cleaner or official doing the rounds. On some days, no one arrives.

But each time a Palestinian ambulance does make it across the no man's land between Gaza and Egypt, the hospital erupts into activity. "Which body part haven't I seen missing?" says one paramedic when asked what type of shrapnel injuries he had witnessed in victims being transported to al-Arish. According to hospital records, one in six of those victims have been children.

Outside the ER, her face illuminated by flickering blue ambulance beacons, Nawal Wasa prays for the life of her daughter Hanin, as doctors fight to save her. "She's only 16 years old," Nawal says fiercely. "She wanted to finish high school and go to university. That's all she ever wanted."

Nawal's horror began the previous week, when she decided to retrieve Hanin from her brother's house in the Gazan neighbourhood of Zeitoun. "I sent Hanin there to protect her. But that morning, I had a sudden fear of her not being near me, and I knew I had to have her in my arms as soon as possible. Destiny got to her before I could."

Israeli jets dropped a single bomb on the house. "He is a teacher; she is a student. We're not Hamas. We don't have anything to do with Hamas," says Nawal. "The rubble tore off my brother's legs and severed Hanin's right foot. By the time I reached the house, people were telling me Hanin was dead."

In fact, she was alive, but an endurance test of staggering proportions was awaiting her. Like all those who eventually pull up in al-Arish hospital's car park, her mother had to navigate a bureaucratic maze of Gazan medical officials, the Palestinian embassy in Cairo, Hamas border guards and Egyptian military brass before the go-ahead was given for Hanin to be driven down through the battered Gaza Strip.

The journey itself was made on roads torn up by Israeli mortar fire, each bump accentuating the pain of her injury. Ambulances often have to strike out into the desert and crawl through the sand, under constant risk of being bombed by F16 jets; two doctors and 12 ambulance drivers have been killed making just such trips in recent days.

"They are murdering the innocent, and those who try and help the innocent. It's criminal behaviour," says Ellabban of the attacks on medics.

As Hanin lies, conscious but silent under a mesh of tubes, the hospital lurches yet again from lethargy to frenzy. Relatives spill out on to the steps of the ER as a stretcher is rushed past.

The child on the stretcher is eight-year-old Zakaria Ahmed, injured two days earlier when mortars pounded the alleyway he was playing in. Shrapnel embedded itself in Zakaria's legs and skull, but, despite his critical condition, he is one of the lucky ones.

"The hospitals at home are overflowing and there's no space for us, so thanks be to God that we reached here," says his father Hamada, a textiles worker in Zeitoun. "Thirty people from my family are already dead. I hope the Israelis one day experience the same nightmares they have brought upon us."

"Of course, Israel will always be our enemy," says Nawal Wasa.

"Look around you - we are all civilians; we are all victims of our own houses crumbling upon us. I hope somebody gives me some explosives so I can give them what they have given me."